Yale Congress
The 64th Congress of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America will take place at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, from Tuesday, June 20 through Friday, June 23. A pre-congress trip to Trinity College, Hartford, and Simsbury Methodist Church in Simsbury will take place on Monday, June 19. A post-congress trip to the Riverside Church in New York City will follow the congress on Saturday, June 24.
Members of the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs will play a welcoming recital. Other congress recitalists will be Jeremy Chesman, Ellen Dickinson, Margo Halsted, Roy Lee, Eddy Mariën, Milford Myhre, Sara Elias, Tiffany Ng, Christine Power, and Lara Walter. A silent auction and music sale will benefit the Ronald Barnes Scholarship Fund.
Harkness Tower, Yale’s most recognized landmark, elicits a range of responses. Rejecting its collegiate gothic splendor, Frank Lloyd Wright quipped that the only place to live in New Haven was in the tower itself, where one need not look at it. In 2004, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of The New Yorker, rhapsodized in Yale in New Haven: Architecture & Urbanism, “The way in which Harkness Tower makes a transition from a solid base to an increasingly light, airy top, almost dematerializing as it rises, is remarkable, and has no precise precedent.”
Architects may dispute as they please, but Harkness Tower offers to carillonneurs the Yale Memorial Carillon, cast by John Taylor Bell Founders in 1921 and 1964. These 54 bells comprise the eighth largest carillon by total weight in North America and one of the finest. The keyboard ranges from G in the bass octave to C in the treble octave. The carillon transposes down one semitone, with the 6.7-ton bourdon sounding an F-sharp. In June 2005, John Taylor Bell Founders completed a refurbishment of the carillon.
Send items for Carillon News to Dr. Brian Swager, c/o The Diapason, 380 E. Northwest Hwy., Suite 200, Des Plaines, IL 60016-2282. For information on the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, write to: GCNA, 37 Noel Dr., Williamsville, NY 14221.
