Almost nobody knows who’s ringing them, but everybody on the St. George campus can hear the lofty chimes of the bells in Soldiers’ Tower. To get to them, you climb 100 steps up two separate spiral staircases before ascending yet another brief flight of stairs and finally opening a trap door. The bells are massive, they’re loud, and they comprise one of only ten carillons-chromatically tuned, stationary bells housed in a tower-left in Canada.
The bells are cloistered in Soldiers’ Tower at Hart House. Those who play the carillon sit at an organ-like console and control the sounds produced by the more than four tonnes of cast bronze housed in a room directly above them. The bells can be heard loudly and clearly from any number of spots in and around Hart House and UC, but are actually somewhat muffled for the player, or carillonneur.
“It’s like trying to listen to a piano recital from the bathroom of the opera house,” said Roy Lee, Coordinator of the U of T Guild of Carillonneurs.
Lee has been playing the carillon at U of T for eight years, after first learning the skill at Yale University when he was an undergraduate. There, the guild of carillonneurs was well established, and being involved with it was as much a social experience as it was musical one. In the past three years, he’s begun to develop a carillon program here at U of T. So far, he’s taught ten to 12 students, all undergraduates, the basics of carillon playing, but he is pushing to involve more people by mounting an ad campaign that features an intriguing photo of the bells themselves. The guild has a crude website now, but Lee aims to have an expanded version up and running in the next few months that will include an online tour of the tower.
Fifty-one bells, ranging from about 20 pounds to four tonnes in weight, make up the Soldiers’ Tower carillon. Within each bell is a bar, connected to a wire that runs parallel to the ground before turning sharply to descend through the floor. These wires run down to connect to wooden batons, arranged like the keys of a piano at the playing console. The batons are struck; the wires pull; and the bars within the bells (not the bells themselves) move to produce sound. There is also a practice carillon in the tower, the batons of which strike xylophone-like bits of metal, but Lee acknowledges that there is still some adjustment necessary when making the switch to the real thing; the few of his students who have played short exercises on the carillon proper have subsequently felt the need for more practice.
The carillon is played as part of campus Remembrance Day services, convocation, and reunions, as well as at a summer concert series organized by the carillonneurs. While Lee was a student here, he played the carillon on weekends and sometimes during his lunch hours, careful about the goings-on at Hart House and UC.
“It can get disruptive if you play for too long, so we try to warn people,” he notes. Now that he’s not on campus as often, his carillon playing is usually heard only once a month.
