From Hartford I journeyed to Umass Amherst, where I met with the facilities manager who has taken on the college carillon as his project. He's fighting the long slow battle to get the instrument used as it ought to be – in this case its a beautiful small installation, really easy to play, but some unfriendly middle-administrative folk are bell-blocking the campus, making sure it doesn't get played more than a few times a year. I played for a bit and tried to hook peoples' attentions – it always helps to have allies in the student body. I offered my help with whatever might be needed in the future, and then moved onwards to Norwood, 2.5 hours away, south of Boston.
Norwood is famous as a beast of an instrument to play – heavy, unwieldy, uneven, etc. As always, you touch a few keys and say, oh that's not so bad. Then you try to play actual music – it blocks you the whole way. Deep key falls. Very heavy action. And what's worse, for the 3rd octave bells (right when you really want to start having good control for a gentle touch), the keys resist heavily at the top and then get lighter as you descend towards the bottom of the stroke, causing you to fall into the key and strike too early and too loud... or just fail to sound the note because you're trying to hard to avoid the former situation.
Exploring the Norwood Belfry with Lee Leach
As frustrating as it is, its also a fascinating and alluring instrument because the bells themselves are so beautiful and versatile... and especially well suited to playing in the haunting and sensitive pianissimo range, which the klavier does everything in its power to keep you from accessing (they also have mega-power when you want it). Huge expressive potential, so hard to make it happen in real time.
I played the Van Noordt (here's how it sounds on a 'normal' instrument http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weilEvtLxC0), just to say I did it. Needless to say it was pretty rough, though my host graciously said that it sounded good. And then more music of all sorts, trying to solve this paradox between bells and klavier.
(WARNING – EXTREME CARILLON WONKISHNESS FOR THE NEXT 3 PARAGRAPHS)
Next it was off to Cohasset, 1 hour away, on the South Shore between Boston and Cape Cod. I made my way through the confusing network of backroads and found the church in time to get about 25 minutes of playing time. Cohasset has been highly praised, and not undeservingly... its a concert pitch grand carillon, very easy, smooth, and even. Its the complete opposite of Norwood in terms of playing action – the klavier does everything it can to make your life easy. The bells sounded pleasant enough too. But... it felt like I wasn't really able to access their full potential. Granted, I was listening through electronics (there's very poor direct sound, so its piped in through speakers, which takes something away from the sound. Still, I felt like a lot of the richness, color, and dynamic / expressive range that I had glimpsed in Norwood was missing. The keystrokes were shorter, giving me less room to differentiate the strike, and the instrument seemed to give up whenever I tried to wander into the realm of soft and haunting or strong and powerful. It just wanted to stay in the middle. It was a very pretty middle, but it lost its charm once I realized there weren't as many other places to go. Norwood made you jump through almost impossible hoops to try to get those sounds, but they were there. Cohasset seemed to give everything it had up front, but also seemed to have less to offer. I suspect the bells themselves have it, but the klavier doesn't really make it accessible.
I had this criticism about the renovation of the carillon at Princeton. It used to be a very nice, smooth, even, heavy-playing instrument with a majestic sound and lots of expressive potential. The bells were left unchanged, but the klavier was lightened. Now its easier to play, and has less resistance but seems to offer less sonic grandeur and a reduced palate of colors and dynamics to work with. It feels like they stuck the instrument in the dryer and it came out a few sizes smaller. I didn't even find that there was room to play faster on the new light instrument, because I was too busy trying to keep the color and dynamic of the notes where I wanted them.
Is there an inherent trade off between the pressure required to strike a note and the amount of expressive control that the player has over the note? There are a lot of factors involved, but my hunch based on experience (and some half-baked theoretical thought experiments) is yes, there seems to be. I would welcome further speculation on this from the carillon community.
Enough dorkistry. Let me regale you with tales of travel adventure. After a whole day of driving, climbing, and playing in the rain, I made it to Cambridge at 9:30 for the dessert reception for Steph and Max's wedding. I found parking (in downtown Cambridge on a Friday night) directly adjacent to the building I was going to, winning Round 1 of the Boston Parking Game.
The reception was fun and wonderful, but all too soon it was over and I headed over to visit my friend Julianne in nearby Somerville. It was an amazing visit, the sort of long late night conversations that tend to decrease in frequency post-college combined with the relational depth that tends to come after having someone in your life for more than just a few years. 11:30 turned into 12:30 into 1:30 into 2:30.
My crash pad for the night was chez Bruce, a classics teacher who had brought his father to my concert in Hartford. I had met him only for a few minutes, and had never been to his house, but I had checked and double and triple checked that he really didn't mind leaving the door open and I should and go as I please, as late as I want.
So I didn't panic when I realized that I was leaving to go to a new host at 2:30am. I didn't even panic when I left Julianne's building and noticed that my car was no longer there.
Definitely not there anymore.
There are two types of car-missing scenarios. There's the “my car is missing! Oh wait, no, I was just confused about where I parked it”. This was the other sort of car-missing scenario. There are two varieties of the other sort. Theft and towing. Dr. Google and Mr. Samsung helped us get to the bottom of that: towed at 1:19am for partially blocking what, pre-towing, looked very much like a normal curb and yet post-towing, looks subtly but undeniably like a driveway. Round 2 of the Parking Game was not going so well.
It was about a bit more than half an hour's walk to the police station. Sommerville was a total ghost town at that hour. It was another 10 minutes walk to the tow lot after that. I was in remarkably good spirits. I got into my car at 4am and managed to navigate back to familiar territory and to my host's house.
The Scenic Neighborhood of Pat's Towing at 4:00am
At 4:17am I walked up to a house I'd never seen before in a neighborhood I'd never visited. I opened the door, let myself in, keychain flashlighted my way to the bathroom, and then set up shop on the living room couch. Marveling at the ways in which the sensations of utterly bizarre and completely normal can co-exist, I set about getting a couple hours of sleep.
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