This is an analytical paper I wrote about the Baird Carillon and the Kerrytown Chime based on my research.
At the Baird Carillon, a small boy was running happily among the multi-ton bells that were suspended only a few feet off the ground. Accidentally pushing against the hammer of one of the bells in his exuberance, the child was startled to hear the deep note ring out loudly, and hastily ran out from underneath the bell. Equally surprised and unsettled by the sudden explosion of sound, the University employee who was supervising visitors winced and anxiously implored, “We can’t ring the bells! I’ll get angry phone calls.” At the Kerrytown Chime, another bell instrument in a shopping mall only a few blocks from the Burton Tower, a very different series of events took place. The Chime Master thee actively invited both young children and adults to try playing the bells, awarding them with praise and stickers when they pieced together broken melodies.
This story demonstrates a basic difference between the musical cultures of the Baird Carillon and the Kerrytown Chime, both bell instruments in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. At the carillon, visitors are instructed not to ring the bells, in fears that constant, disorganized ringing will disturb listeners in the area outside the tower. Instead, visitors admire the bells passively. The carillon’s twin missions are to produce music for the surrounding community to listen to, and to act as a tool in training students to be carilloneurs. In fulfilling these goals it takes on an elevated stance above the general public, which is able to interact with the music only passively. At the Kerrytown Chime, however, all visitors are encouraged to play the chime, with no regard to noise problems for the surrounding area. The chime is designed to provide the public with a chance to play a bell-instrument, and so it values active participation by the community above all else. In fulfilling its own goal, the chime fosters an informal atmosphere around itself and tries not to be intimidating to visitors.
An an in-depth description of each instrument and its background is important to understanding the difference between the cultures surrounding each one. The Baird Carillon is a monumental cultural and historical artifact. Carillons are a rarity in the United States as it is; there are less than 200 in the whole country. But the one in Burton Tower is exceptional in and of itself as the third largest in the world (tied with Bok Singing Tower in Lake Wales, Florida). Built in 1936 by the prestigious John Taylor Foundry, it has fifty-five bells that weigh a total of forty-three tons. Surrounding the Baird Carillon is America’s most prominent university carillon program. The University of Michigan has a long tradition of scholarship in the field, and the campus boasts a second carillon as well as several small practice carillons. University students or instructors perform on the Baird Carillon every weekday at noon. Other carillon concerts are also organized, in particular a series of summer performances, which has been going on since 1938. During concerts, visitors are often invited up to the bell chamber to take a tour of the bells and enjoy the panoramic views. Although the carillon program interacts much more with the surrounding community than the other parts of the School of Music, the instrument is owned and run entirely by the University.
The Kerrytown Chime, in contrast, is not connected to the University at all. Opened in 1998, it is also a much more recent addition to the Ann Arbor’s musical scene. It is located in a small tower that is part of the Kerrytown Shops complex, a small shopping mall in the city’s Historic District. The mall owns the chime and employs a Chime Master, who opens the chime stand three times a week and supervises visitors, trained or untrained, who want to try playing the chime. The Kerrytown Shops owns the bells and uses them in some ways as a marketing tool. “Serenade your friends on the Kerrytown Chime. Bring your friends down to Kerrytown for lunch!” proclaims a sign at the shopping center, clearly hoping that the activity of playing the chime will draw more business to the complex of shops. Another fact worth mentioning is the role of the O’Neal family in the chime’s origins. The O’Neals, a family of long-time Ann Arbor residents, were the chime projects chief proponents in the early 1990s, helping to find and store bells for the tower. Joe O’Neal’s construction company built the original Kerrytown Shops and installed the chime, and Karen O’Neal was the first to conceptualize the idea of the Kerrytown Chime. They are still heavily involved in maintaing and promoting the chime, giving it a real homegrown appeal.
The Baird Carillon and the Kerrytown Chime provide a means of communication between Ann Arbor institutions and the public in very similar ways. However, the university’s view of carillon performance as an academic discipline and its focus on providing the community with aurally pleasing music influences its selection of performers and repertory, which tends to favor professional carilloneurs with strong technical training and complex musical pieces that are difficult to master. Although this difference allows the carillon to produce more interesting and enjoyable music and draw larger audiences than the chime, it necessarily elevates the chime above the public, creating a kind of separation. This is emphasized by the carillon’s location in a tower on the university campus, separated from the city of Ann Arbor and its citizens. No such division exists at the Kerrytown Chime, where the performer’s position is open to the general public and the repertory is limited to simple, familiar melodies, not to mention its location in the local shopping center.
Before the differences between the instruments are articulated, it is important to explore their common ground. First, on a technical level, both the chime and the carillon are composed of sets of bells that are rung by hammers, which attach to a keyboard-like array of levers by a fully mechanical system of cables and pulleys. From this perspective, the only difference between the two instruments is the fact that the carillon has a wider range, especially in the lower ranges, than the chime. Both instruments are located in towers and are controlled by sets of levers that look almost identical. On a more abstract level, the instruments connect community institutions in Ann Arbor to the wider public. The carillon links the University of Michigan to the surrounding community. Steven Ball, the head of carillon at the university, puts on regular carillon concerts that cater not only to college students but to the non-academic population of Ann Arbor. The practice of inviting visitors up to the bell chamber tends to attract families with small children more often than twenty-year-old undergraduates, for example. When Mr. Ball plays a carillon concert, he is always sure to leave some time in which to play popular music or take requests from visitors. Without the carillon, such visitors might never have anything do with the university or venture onto its campus. The chime is also able to draw the public to participate in a community institution: the Kerrytown Shops. Although the Shops are in and of themselves much more tied to the individual community members than the University, depending on them for business, the chime adds to this connection. By drawing individuals to Kerrytown at lunchtime and encouraging them to visit the shopping center, the instrument helps to make the Kerrytown Shops an intrinsic part of the everyday lives of many community members.
The carillon’s role in engaging the community has been clearly laid out. It is far from being an elitist instrument. However, some divisions do remain between the instrument and the community. First, there is the question of who will play it. The pool of performers for the Baird Carillon is remarkably small. Only carillon instructors at the University of Michigan, their students, and special guest performers who are professionally-trained carilloneurs are allowed to play the carillon. Mr. Steven Ball, current head graduate-student instructor of carillon at the university, handpicks the guest performers based on their ability to create exceptional music on the carillon. As a result of these policies, the chance to play a song on the carillon is limited to a select few. On tours of the bell chamber, visitors are invited to try ringing a bell or two, but even this practice must be limited in order to minimize complaints about noise. When a particularly unruly group of children on a tour rang many of the bells loudly, Mr. Ball was forced to ask them not to play any more of the bells. Hence, ordinary audience members can participate in the carillon’s music only as passive listeners. Since they do not have formal training in carillon performance, they are unable to produce technically accurate and aurally pleasant pieces on the carillon. The arrhythmic and discordant progressions of notes that they might be able to produce are deemed noise by the community of carilloneurs, and as a result the pool of the performers is limited to trained professionals.
The division is accentuated by the repertory of the carillon. The music played on the carillon, which is selected by the performers, is invariably of a certain high level of technical difficulty and complexity, with a melody line and accompaniment. Mr. Ball told me that any piece of music played on the carillon must match the instrument’s integrity, suggesting that playing overly simple pieces would be an insult to the carillon’s capability. Mr. Ball does encourage the playing of popular music as long as it meets the aforementioned level of technical complexity. However, he describes a carillon concert as a meal, where popular music is the dessert, suggesting that classical music (presumably the entrée of the meal) is at least as important as popular styles, if not more so. Carillon concerts at the University of Michigan do indeed tend to emphasize classical music more than popular music. Classical music is often regarded as an elitist genre, since it is embraced almost exclusively by a certain select community of intellectual, middle-class individuals. Historically, Western classical music has been “sacralized” while other genres of music, especially popular music, have been marginalized and disregarded by academics. Hence, the choice to emphasize classical pieces, many of which are unfamiliar to the general public, increases the separation between the carillon and the wider community. However, the carillon program at the university, like the large majority of all college programs in music performance, emphasize classical music above all other genres, so it is understandable that carillon concerts should feature classical music so prominently.
Mr. Ball, who is aware of the indifference held towards classical music by large sectors of the public audience, makes a conscious effort to engage the greater community in his concert by mixing the standard group of classical pieces with more popular ones.. This practice is reminiscent of the movement of musical progressivism, which Derek Vaillant describes in his book Sounds of Reform with specific reference to turn-of-the-century Chicago. Musical progressives attempted to promote “civilized” behavior in the city’s working-class communities through musical interaction. Vaillant characterizes the “more successful” progressives as follows:
Activists often borrowed from local immigrant, ethnic, and plebeian music practices, taking ideas and retooling them into what they hoped would be appealing instruments of citywide reform.
This sounds very much like a description of Steven Ball’s strategy in selecting repertory for his concerts. By playing “Star Wars,” he engages the greater community by adopting a “plebeian” music. By following it up with a modern, sometimes discordant classical piece, he seeks to educate his audience and interest them in the classical style. Although Mr. Ball is certainly not attempting to “civilize” his audience or to reform their lifestyles in any way, there is an element of musical progressivism in his approach. This practice necessarily elevates the carillon and its performer above the surrounding community and encourages passivity in the audience, as the carilloneur and by extension his or her instrument becomes a pseudo-teacher, imparting knowledge and ideas to the audience. Hence, the division between the carillon, with its immediate circle of performers, and the wider public is further emphasized in the instrument’s repertory.
The carillon’s performance space leads to further elevation of the carillon over the greater public. First of all, the Burton Tower is located on the campus of the University of Michigan. The university is its own community, focused on the pursuit of knowledge rather than commercial success or the other ideals of the wider, non-academic community. This environment is everywhere around the carillon; even the first eight floors of the Burton Tower itself are devoted to classrooms and offices for professors and the University Musical Society. This lends an academic atmosphere to the tower, an atmosphere that can be intimidating to those who are not affiliated with the university. On top of this, the Burton Tower is simply a very imposing building. Its solid, square architectural design and its 212-foot height cause it to tower over the visitor. These facts elevate the carillon above the general public, In the bell chamber itself, there is a quite literal division between the audience and the performer. The carilloneur sits in a soundproof cabin in the bell chamber to play the carillon keyboard. Visitors can look into the cabin through a double-glass window, but they cannot interact with the carilloneur. This adds to the figurative elevation of the instrument and its performers above the general audience.
This is not to say that the Baird carillon is an elitist instrument that bars the community from participating in its music. The mere fact that its concerts are free and can be heard from blocks away means that it is necessarily a community-oriented instrument. The carillon sub-department at the university certainly takes more pains to accodomate and engage than other parts of the School of Music, with the weekly tours of the bell chamber and the series of summer concerts. Furthermore, the carillons at the University of Michigan are particularly community-friendly. The carillon at Kentucky University is not open for public tours, for instance. Steven Ball is a driving force behind the Baird Carillon’s excellent relations with the surrounding carillons. He has revitalized the series of summer concerts and plans to extend it next year. When he performs on the carillon, he leaves the door of the cabin propped open and often exchanges words with the visitors, sometimes even taking requests for specific songs. Christopher Small, in his book Musicking, argues that no musical performance ever places the audience in a fully passive position; they will always have some influence on the music being performed. This rejection of the conception of music as “a one-way system of communication” is certainly valid in the case of the Baird carillon. Even though the listeners cannot actually create music themselves, they have opportunities to be close to the performers and to communicate with them, influencing the music as they do so.
However, none of these facts can refute the carillon’s elevation. I do not mean to portray this separation as a blight on the carillon; it is simply an important aspect of the carillon’s interplay with the community. In fact, this division allows the carillon to take on a high-profile role in Ann Arbor’s musical community. Visitors flock from all around Ann Arbor to hear the impressive music performed on the carillon. The fact that the pool of performers is limited to the professionally trained ensures that only high-quality music is produced. Similarly, the size of the instrument and its prominent location in the imposing Burton Tower create a heightened sense of the carillon’s importance and enhance the experience of attending a carillon concert. In particular, the elevation of the carillon above the general public attracts people who are knowledgeable in some way about bell instruments or classical music. Although the division may alienate certain sectors of Ann Arbor’s community, it increases its appeal to these other groups. The separation between the carillon and the community may eliminate opportunities for the general public to participate actively in the creation of the carillon’s music, but all these positive effects are gained.
The Kerrytown Chime is completely different in this respect. It is not elevated above the surrounding community in any sense except physically, and even then it is only on top of a two-story building, nowhere near the 212 feet of the Baird Carillon. Looking first at the chime’s pool of performers, this fact is immediately evident. No professional training or musical experience whatsoever is needed to play the chime. On the contrary, anyone who visits the second floor of the Kerrytown Shops on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday at noon can become a performer simply by asking for a turn to play. Ms. Heather O’Neal, the Chime Master at Kerrytown, says that even she has no formal training in playing the chime or the carillon. She has learned to play other musical instruments, but some of the people who come by the chime have never created music on an instrument at any time in their lives. Professionally trained carilloneurs or chime-players only come by rarely. Ms. O’Neal affirms that her favorite part of her job as Chime Master is teaching these people how to play a song on the bells of the chime. Clearly, the Kerrytown Chime embraces anyone and everyone into its pool of performers, eliminating any kind of elevation.
The repertory of the chime continues this tradition of ultra-populist music. The levers of the chime stand at Kerrytown are numbered one through seventeen, and the Chime Master maintains a file of cards with songs written out on them as a series of numbers. The performer simply pushes the corresponding lever for each number, and the bells ring to form a melody. The song-cards, however, contain no rhythm markings. Hence, in order to construct a coherent piece of music, the performer must know the song he or she is playing before he or she begins to play it, so that he or she can give the notes their correct rhythmic values. As a result, all the songs performed at the Kerrytown Chime are familiar to the general public, and those that are most familiar are performed most often. Any song that is too obscure or too complex for the average amateur chime-player will hardly ever be played. As a result, one will never hear Mussourgsky’s Pictures at Exhibition (the featured work at a recent carillon concert) at the chime. In contrast to Steven Ball’s progressivist attitude in introducing the public to new music, the music at the chime is as familiar as possible, eliminating any hint of a teacher-student relationship.
The chime’s performance space is the final piece of evidence of the chime’s fully populist orientation. The bells are in a small glass-sided tower that sits on top of the second story of the Kerrytown Shops, a small shopping center in Ann Arbor’s Historic District. The chime stand is contained in a small alcove on the second floor of the mall, right next to the Princess Boutique. No special performer’s cabin exists. Instead, performers stand in the hall, forced to interact with the customers of the shops, if only to get out of their way as they walk past. The shops are all independently owned and operated; no large corporate chain stores have branches in the Kerrytown Shops. The Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market meets twice a week in the parking lot of the shopping center. Clearly, the Kerrytown Shops are a key center of the non-academic community in Arbor. Hence, the chime’s presence there shows that it is a community instrument. Even the fact that the chime is in a place of commerce is significant. After all, the American consumerist society finds one of its most important congregating places in the local shopping mall. The fact that the chime is located at such a place demonstrates its overarching focus on engaging as much of the community around it as fully as possible.
This description of the chime is perhaps a bit one-sided. It is not just an “instrument of the people.” For one thing, the Kerrytown Shops use it as a marketing tool to draw customers into the shopping center. Also, the chime does not draw many college students despite its location in a college town. If it were completely free of divisions from the surrounding community, it would be attractive to all groups in the city of Ann Arbor. Of course, this extreme is impossible to reach. However, the chime comes closer to achieving this than any other public musical instrument in Ann Arbor, certainly much closer than the Baird Carillon. This ultra-populist slant has some negative effects for the chime, however. First of all, the fact that so many of the chime’s performers have no musical experience means that the music produced on it is not as coherent or as aurally pleasing as that of the carillon. Furthermore, the melodies played on the chime are extremely simple, devoid of all accompaniment. This makes them even less interesting to the listener. As a result, there are no chime concerts. The sole attraction of the chime is really the chance to play it, and this keeps it a small operation. Whereas one carillon performance can attract hundreds of people to come and hear it, individuals who play on the chime must wait for others to take their turns first, and hence it does not make sense for a large crowd to make a trip to the chime. The lack of large masses of people at the chime makes it a relatively low-profile part of Ann Arbor’s musical community.
Clearly, there are important differences between the Baird Carillon and its contributions to Ann Arbor’s musical community and the Kerrytown Chime and its associated contributions. While the Baird Carillon offers a chance for large audiences to listen to good music in large carillon concerts free of charge, the Kerrytown Chime provides a stimulating and enriching opportunity for individuals to create music on a bell instrument, regardless of musical training or ability. There is little potential for these roles to change, but there is room for both instruments to expand the scale of their operations. Steven Ball’s many new ideas for the Baird Carillon, including lighting the tower’s façade at night and projecting a silent movie on the side of Burton Tower with carillon accompaniment, should draw ever-increasing numbers of curious visitors to the carillon.
The Kerrytown Chime could benefit from greater publicity, which would inform new groups of the unique opportunity available to them. Another possibility for growth would be to find a few professional chime-players who would be willing to come and play a short recital on the chime before opening the performer’s position to the public. The trained chime-players would inspire younger generations and possibly draw audiences. Ann Arbor’s significant community of carilloneurs would provide an excellent pool of potential trained chime-players. There is ample room for future research on both instruments, too. A future researcher could track Steven Ball’s contributions and changes as head graduate student instructor of carillon, and even compare it to the actions of his predecessors. In the case of the chime, a researcher might investigate the effect of the chime on the shops, possibly investigating business records and interviewing shop owners. It is certainly clear that both instruments have room to grow and develop in future years.
The Baird Carillon is a majestic instrument. When one attends a noontime recital, one is immediately struck by the tremendous size and volume of the bells, the commanding panoramic views from the top of the Burton Tower, and the energetic and skillful technique of the carilloneur at work on the other side of the soundproof, double-glass window. The Kerrytown Chime, in contrast, is a friendly and accessible instrument. A noontime recital at Kerrytown will probably be marked by a gaggle of small children clustered around the chime stand on the second floor of the shopping mall as the Chime Master patiently helps one of them play a broken rendition of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” on the bells. No matter how arrhythmic the performance, no matter how many wrong notes are played, the child will always be rewarded with praise and an “I Played the Bells at Kerrytown” sticker. The professionally trained performers, the musically complex repertory, and the imposing and academically oriented performance space of the carillon make it well suited to public concerts for large numbers of people. The open performer’s place, the simple and familiar repertory, and the comfortable and informal setting of the Kerrytown Chime make it the perfect place for a small group of adventurous individuals, with or without musical training, to try playing a favorite song on a new instrument. There is room for each instrument and its distinct role in Ann Arbor’s vibrant musical community.
"World List of Carillons - America" <http://www.carillon.org/eng/fs_carillon.htm>