Like something out of The Lord of the Rings, “Harkness Tower” sounds foreboding enough to match the look of its bearer, a craggy Gothic grimace rising 216 feet over Yale and downtown.
Then you hear its lovely singing voice.
Harkness’s song emanates from 54 bronze bells hung at the top of the tower. The lightest bell, perched somewhere out of sight, weighs 26 pounds. The heaviest, positioned next to three other behemoths, weighs nearly seven tons. Within each bell, a proportionate gumdrop clapper attaches to a bowed metal arm, which distills through a system of pipes into a series of thin mechanical wires. Reaching down through a steel-girder support structure into a grooved metal box the size of a small bedroom, those wires connect to a piano-like array of tapered wooden handles and thick foot pedals, which, when pressed, reach back up to ring the bells.
Together these components make the Yale Memorial Carillon. But the carillon needs more in order to make its music: a person pulling the strings. During a tour I took a decade ago, Yale student and carillonneur Elena Perry did it with hands bunched into loose fists, her fluid wrists and forearms moving up and down the rig a lot like a drummer’s. During a revisit yesterday, I witnessed much the same, albeit with variations in technique, from three of her successors: Reshard Kolabhai, Ian Haile and Cecilia Sun.
Perry served in the same capacity Haile does today: as co-chair of the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs, the proudly student-run group that manages and performs the ringing of the bells. Like all guild members, they had once had to survive the “Heel,” a weeks-long annual training and audition process that winnows a typical crop of 70 or so applicants to an average of just six admissions.
Headquartered out of an office located several levels below the carillon, where one of two practice carillons facilitates off-the-clock polishing, the guild’s 26 active members, drawn from both undergrad and graduate students, take turns playing the bells. When Yale’s in session, they perform most afternoons and evenings from 12:30 to 1 and 5:30 to 6:30. In summer, a smaller crew of carillonneurs keeps the ringing going, usually from 12:30 to 1 and 7 to 8. That schedule includes the guild’s weekly Summer Concert Series, whose 2025 iteration begins this Friday at 7, when the usually cloistered courtyard below Harkness will welcome the public as well as the urge to picnic.
The guild’s repertoire ranges from canon to curiosity to contemporary culture. Last night, for example, Sun performed Notturno by notable turn-of-the-century classical composer Ottorino Respighi, while Haile played Robert Byrnes’s obscure “On the San Antonio River” and Kolabhai performed the Chappell Roan megahit “Pink Pony Club.” The guild steps outside its repertoire, or rather adds to it, by taking song requests from the public. Ellen Dickinson, a Yale and guild alum who’s been advising and teaching carillon performance to guilders ever since, said, “We try to honor every request as long as it’s reasonable,” where “reasonable” means, mostly, that it can be done on the carillon. They’ve gotten “every kind” of ask, she said, like “folk songs of different countries to honor professors’ birthdays or love song requests for a marriage proposal. Lots of cool things come in.” And then come out, via those bells.
If you’re in the vicinity during a performance, their ebullient, transportive, sometimes haunting sounds are tough to miss. What’s easy to miss, and extraordinary besides, is the fact that, with a minimum of 48 hours’ notice, you can request and often receive a backstage pass to the show. Meeting on High Street near the base of Harkness, a guild member takes you up a series of tall spiral staircases starting with a tight, medieval-feeling brick-and-mortar ascent. Eventually you make it to the bedroom-sized box that houses the keys. A door from there brings you to a kind of steampunk belfry, where, beneath the bells, more doors lead to narrow balconies lining the tower’s upper reaches.
Sadly, those balcony doors were locked during my visit yesterday. They were open, however, during my first visit 10 years ago, when, enjoying a long view of the city with the carillon bells ringing out behind me, the tower took on a new air, and not just because it gets pretty blustery that high up.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image 2 features Ian Haile. Image 3 features Cecelia Sun. Image 4 features Reshard Kolabhai. Image 6 features Elena Perry. This updated story was originally published on March 24, 2015.
