Who Can Play the Bells?

The carillon in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel is like a campus rumor you need to hear to believe. The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon is composed of 72 bells, made of over 100 tons of bronze, housed in a 200 foot bell tower attached to the chapel, operated by a wooden keyboard and wire contraption that looks like it was designed to punish the hands. The atmospheric, hallowed, rich sound it makes is not music you merely stumble into. This is music that finds you, crossing the quad at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, suddenly arrested by what sounds like a spiritual awakening, or perhaps an arrangement of Errol Garner’s “Misty.”…

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