HIDDEN INSTRUMENTS: THE CARILLON

At 2 pm every Friday, Newcastle’s Civic Centre comes alive with the music of bells – from compositions as complex as Handel’s ‘high baroque’ arrangements, to those as simple as Happy Birthday. The bells are connected to a keyboard of sorts, made up of wooden batons that are struck with the player’s fists, and to pedals played with the feet. This is a wonderful instrument called a carillon, the origins of which trace back around five hundred years, to Belgium and the Netherlands. 

If magic had a sound, it would be this. The chimes sound like transformation taking place. This is fitting because the music of the carillon derives from the mechanics of old clock towers that would mark time with little tunes, so that people would know the time if they missed the strikes on the hour. The little tune was known as de voorslag, literally ‘the proposal’, or prelude to the hour strike. In the sixteen hundreds, someone decided to liberate the carillon from its time keeping duties, and it became a musical instrument in its own right.    

A musician who plays the carillon (a vocation requiring both delicacy and strength) is called a carillonneur, or sometimes a carillonist. Jonathan Bradley is the current carillonneur for the Civic Centre, where the world’s heaviest two-octave carillon is housed in a copper bell tower, guarded fiercely by a crown of twenty seahorses cast in immortal bronze. The bells that make up the carillon were gifted to the City Council by James Adamson, in memory of his wife, Edith Annie Adamson, in 1963.

Jon says: ‘whenever I play, it’s in memory of Edith, it’s in memory of my two predecessors, and it’s for the Adamson family. But also, for me, it’s for the citizens of Newcastle, and that’s why I play.’  He describes the carillon’s music as ‘everywhere and nowhere. Evocative. Haunting. Penetrating. Soulful.’ 

A staggeringly delicate sound, for twenty-five bells with a collective weight of twenty-two tonnes.