Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
When you think “church bell ringer,” you might think of the hunchback Quasimodo of fiction and film. The modern bell ringer doesn’t swing from ropes, but rather plays a keyboard made of wooden keys with his fists, triggering bells that no longer swing, but are stationary, in a set within a bell tower called a carillon. Carillonneur Karel Keldermans of Springfield, Ill.—perhaps the nation’s most acclaimed player and historian of the carillon, as well as the former director of the International Carillon Festival—has been performing free concerts at Concordia Seminary each Tuesday in June for the past 12 years.
• I’m the former director of the International Carillon Festival and recently retired director of the Rees Memorial Carillon in Springfield, Ill.
• Bell towers used to have swinging bells; in a carillon the bells are stationary and the only thing that moves is the striker inside, and that moves about an inch. If a bell were swinging, you couldn’t really control the notes.
• I play it with my fists, but lots of times I’ll use my fingers also, especially if I’m playing a chord. I’ve been playing the carillon for more than 45 years, and millions of dollars have been spent on experiments to make it easier to play, and time after time they come back to the manual-action keyboard, with wooden keys that you play with your fists. The only thing that actually comes in contact with the keys is the side of my little fingers. So, similar to a violinist, I have calluses there.
• Carillons came out of the walled cities of the Middle Ages. They were pretty small cities, and they had a tower with a watchman. His job became a timekeeping function, to ring the bell on the hour, in addition to ringing an alarm bell if the Vikings or Visigoths or whoever were coming to invade. Smaller bells were eventually added around the larger bells, and from that the carillon evolved.
• What’s changed in the last 600 years is we now use stainless steel for the metal in the bells, and the tuning has become much better. The way it’s played—with a keyboard—and the type of keyboard has stayed pretty much the same since the 1400’s.
• I get lots of jokes about Quasimodo ringing the bells, all the time.
• Personally, I like to play original carillon music. But the repertory includes some Lutheran hymns, which I’ll play at Concordia, and carols at Christmas time. Probably 85% of carillon music is actually secular, though. You can play Irish folk tunes, songs from Appalachia, all types of music.
• I’ve played at a couple hundred weddings and quite a few memorial services and anniversaries – but I don’t do birthdays.
• People usually sit outdoors to hear the carillon. You need to be about 150 feet away for the best sound. I feel the same way about listening to an orchestra. If you sit about ¾ of the way back in the space, you can hear a good mix. The same is true of a carillon.
• Playing the world’s heaviest musical instrument is a great feeling. I love making music. It’s something that, to me, is not work. This summer, I’ll be in Europe. In 22 days I’ll be playing 28 concerts.
• What happens in a lot of towers is there a time clock and every 15 or 30 minutes it goes off, and then on the hour it will automatically ring 10 times or so and then ring the number of hours in the time—the mechanical convention has taken over.
• In the U.S., we have slightly less than 200 carillons. In Europe they have a couple hundred-years head start on us, so Holland has 150, Belgium has 90, France has 80, Germany has 50... Eventually it became a status symbol for your city to have one. Everybody had to have one, and the more octaves it had, the more impressive it was.
• I could play pop music on the carillon, like something by the Rolling Stones, but five people are in that group. To reduce all that sound down to one instrument, it probably wouldn’t sound great. You also have to take into account that a single carillon bell has more than one pitch – those are called overtones or harmonics, and there can be six of them. If you’re not careful, you can play three bells and hear 18 harmonics.
