Looking into Clouds
Two Decades of New Music for the Carillon in Berlin-Tiergarten
by Jeffrey Bossin
My interest in contemporary music dates back to the time when I studied music at the University of California at Riverside. There I took courses in composition and performed as a pianist in an ensemble for new music. I also learned to play the carillon under the able tutelage of Lowell Smith, who had studied with Leen ´t Hart in Amersfoort. After spending a year as an exchange student at the Reid School of Music at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and getting my Bachelors Degree in Music in 1972, I moved to Berlin because it was one of the centres of contemporary culture and music in Europe and enrolled at the Technical University of Berlin in 1973 to do a master´s degree in musicology with Prof. Carl Dahlhaus. After completing my studies in 1984 I began work on building the Berlin carillon, inspecting many instruments in Europe and North America, gathering advice from colleagues, drawing up the instrument´s specifications, overseeing its production and installation, and playing the dedication recital on October 27, 1987. The new grand carillon had an F0 bourdon weighing 7.8 metric tons and a completely chromatic sequence of 68 bells weighing 48 tons and was thus not only the then largest and heaviest in Europe but, more importantly, its North American standard keyboard with 68 keys and 30 pedals allowed the carillonneur the broadest range of musical possibilities.[1] The instrument was cast by the Eijsbouts foundry and installed in its own tower in a park setting so that it could be played with a minimum of distubance to the neighbours.[2]
During my many years
as Berlin carillonneur I had the chance to commission several pieces
and work
together with a number of professional composers.[3]
I showed them our instrument, expained its musical possibilities and
demonstrated its playing technique, and provided them scores and
recordings. I
proof-read and edited their first versions, pointing out
unplayable passages, proposing changes to the notation and the
distribution of
the notes between the manuals and pedals, ect. Although one composer
refused to
make any alterations, others were very cooperative, open to
suggestions, and
eager to learn. It was interesting to see how, in spite of all the
explanations
and examples I gave, many still came up with unplayable passages. The
carillon
is a unique and exotic instrument, perhaps best compared to a large
vibraphone.
It is completely unknown to the normal composer who has had no
experience with
it. While some try to understand and develop their piece out of its
sonorities
and playing technique, others simply apply their own highly specialized
method
of composition to the carillon regardless of how suitable it might be.
Some
seem to have an intuitive grasp of the instrument and others need years
of
writing carillon pieces in order to learn to write well for it. Sadly,
since it
brings them neither fame nor fortune, most either ignore it or only
write one
piece out of curiosity before returning to more prestigious projects.
One of my
most interesting experiences has consisted of going over the first
drafts.
While most are written with the help of computer software, some were
still hand-written,
not easy to read, and, in one case, so tiny I literally had to use a
magnifying
glass to decipher it. In such cases I typed the piece into my computer
and sent
it to the composer asking him to verify it. I also constantly ran into
numerous
simple errors made by almost every composer - missing accidental and
natural
signs, rests, and ties, bars with too few beats - one composer even
forgot to
number his pages and faxed them to me in the wrong order. Whether it be
a
written or musical text - the author is not good at recognizing his own
mistakes because his own imagination often overlooks or fills in the
missing
gaps. Most interestingly, most of the composers were good for a
surprise. The
first attempts of those with no experience of the carillon sometimes
proved
very suitable while some of the experienced carillon composers sent me
something quite different from their previous works.
Even
before the carillon was completed I had the opportunity to commission
and
premiere my first new piece of carillon music. The Berliner Festspiele
put
together a music program to entertain the crowd waiting to watch an
hour long
spectacular display of Japanese fireworks in August 1987 on the
airfield of the
Templehof airport and asked me to organize a performance of music for
three
travelling carillons as part of a larger group of activities. I
arranged to
play Islands of Sound
by the American composer Richard Felciano, who was a professor of
composition
at the University of California at Berkeley and asked him to write a
new work
as well. The result was the Berlin Fireworks Music, a fast and lively piece of
minimal
music consisting of a sequence of repeated modules made up of 16th note
motives
making the bells sparkle. After the performance Felciano presented me
with a
version for solo carillon and it quickly become one of the standard
pieces of
my repertoire. A few weeks later I asked Roy Hamlin Johnson, professor
of piano
at the University of Maryland, to write me a piece for my new carillon.
Johnson
was an experienced and well-known carillon composer and his magnificent
Summer
Fanfares had
inspired me
to model the Berlin carillon on the large American instruments it was
written
for. Johnson generously supplied me with a piece called Tower Music, a short fanfare consisting
of brilliant
cadenza like passages based on the octotonic scale and which use the
entire 5
1/2 octave range of the Berlin carillon. This
composition was followed by the first piece ever written by a
Hungarian composer, i.e. Lásló Dubrovay, professor at the
Budapest
Conservatory. His Music for Carillon consists of several sections
of contrasting tempi, texture,
and character - one of slowly rising ponderous tone clusters, one of
single
tones and motives embedded in groups of fast eighth notes, and one of a
lyrical
melody set over an alberti bass. The rhythms, various styles,
and
harmonies derived from the natural overtone series recall aspects of
Bela
Bartok´s style of composition. That year also provided me with
the chance to
make a small contribution to the production of Robert Wilson´s
stage work The
Forest which
was being
performed in Berlin. Wilson collaborated with David Byrne, the lead
singer of
the internationally known New York pop group The Talking Heads, who had produced several
albums of
their music. Byrne had heard the carillon while cycling through the
Tiergarten
park one day and, enchanted by its sound, immediately decided to
incorporate it
into the music he was writing for Wilson´s theatre piece.
Byrne and his technicians came to the tower and recorded a few
short
passages of chords which were played from tape during the performances
and
integrated into the orchestra music. As a souvenir of our collaboration
I
received a tape of Byrne singing the corresponding passage to the
accompaniement of my carillon playing.
The
following year witnessed the premiere of a work on a much grander
scale: Musik
einer Sommernacht 1989 (Music
for
a Summer´s Night 1989) by
the Polish composer Piotr Moss, professor at the Paris Conservatory.
This large
scale work was written for carillon, large chorus, brass quartett,
mandolines,
saxophone quartett, xylophones, accordeons, and cow bells. It was huge
outdoor
soundscape, blending the carillon with artificial bird sounds, softly
played
mandolines, snatches of accordeon music, outbursts of brass music, the
shrill
free jazz outpourings of a trompeter, and the sound of the sighing and
groaning
of a large chorus. The piece was aleatoric so that, although everyone
performed
simultaneously, the whole was coordinated with the help of stopwatches.
A
further piece of aleatoric music was written in 1991 by the Berlin
composer
Friedemann Graef. His Farbwolkentrio (Colourful Clouds Trio) for
carillon,
saxophone, and a percussion ensemble of a marimbaphone, xylophone,
temple
blocks, gongs, and various drums, was written for a special concert
staged as
part of a carillon competition. The extensive 22-minute work consists
of
various motives, figures, chords and tremolos sometimes organized into
repeated
modules and which the three musicians use in a free dialogue
reminiscent of a
jazz ensemble.
In
1993 the Russian composer Alexander Knaifel who was working in Berlin
on a
stipend of the German Academic Exchange Program DAAD, became interested
in the
Berlin carillon. Knaifel had studied cello with Mstislaw Rostropowitsch
and
composition in Leningrad and was a versatile and experienced composer
of
orchestral music, chamber music, songs, ect.
His Aria for
solo carillon is based on an excerpt of one of his film scores and is a
short,
soft, expressive and lyrical fragment in a neobaroque style of
composition
making prominent use of the diminished seventh chords so well-suited to
the
sound of the carillon. 1995 produced a bumper crop of new music for the
Berlin
carillon - composers from Denmark, Russia, England, Germany, and Italy
wrote no
less than six pieces. The first four were written for a concert given
on the
occasion of Christo and Jeanne-Claude´s Wrapped Reichstag in the
summer of
1995. After many years of discussions and debate the German government
had
finally allowed the couple to encase the huge building in a cloak of
shiny
silver material. The result was a fascinating and bizarre work of art
visible
over a large expanse of the surrounding area. It stood directly
opposite the
carillon tower which provided a magnificent view.
The piece
written
for this concert by the renowned Italian composer Aldo Clementi, who
studied at
the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rom and was professor at the
conservatory in
Pesaro, is titled Turmuhr (Tower
Clock) and is appropriately based on the German chorale Vom Himmel
hoch. It
consists of a complex, chromatic,
and strictly organized four-voiced polytonal texture.
Each voice is set in a different key, the four make up two pairs
whose
keys are a tritone apart. The soprano and alto voices are in A major
and E-flat
major respectively and the tenor and bass voices in C major and G-flat
major.
Though of themselves tonal, their simulataneous performance destroys
any sense
of tonality. The alto voice mirrors the intervals of the soprano voice
and the
tenor voice those of the bass voice. In the first line the chorale
melody is in
the soprano, in the second line it´s in the alto, in the third in
the tenor,
and in fourth in the bass line. The chorale melody is meant to be
played
loudest of all the voices and each of the four lines is to be played
three
times, getting softer and slower each time. Per Nørgård, the
leading composer of
Denmark, wrote the two pieces entitled Luftschloesser (Castles in the Air) for the
concert.
Nørgård studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and at the
Royal Danish
Conservatory in Copenhagen where he held a professorship. He was an
experienced
composer of international standing and wrote operas, ballets,
orchestral and
chamber music, ect. according to a carefully worked out system of
atonal
composition which he also applied to his two carillon pieces. In these
he used
special groups of notes which he called "tone lakes". Verwandeln (Transform) is reminiscent of
a
passacaglia. It is a ponderous work based on a repeated sequence of
notes and
which builds to a big dynamic climax. The composer stipulates that it
can be
repeated any number of times. Entfalten (Unfold) is made of a
pointillistic
texture in which the notes of the tone lake are distributed over the
entire 5
1/2 octave range of the carillon in order to allow them to ring as long
as
possible. The Berlin free-lance composer Lutz Glandien who had studied
with the
noted composer Georg Katzer at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns
Eisler and the
Akademie der Kuenste in East Berlin wrote a rhythmically complex work
appropriately titled Mensch, Christo und Jeanne-Claude! (Man, Christo
and Jeanne-Claude!). It is made of sections of stylised figures and
motives
that imitate bell ringing and become ever louder as they gradually
descend from
the highest to the lowest range of the carillon. The English composer Anthony
Skilbeck
also provided a piece for the Reichstag concert. Skilbeck had become
acquainted
with the Berlin carillon while on a visit to the city and was
fascinated by its
sonorities and musical potential. He works as a professional musician
and music
teacher and was awarded his Ph.D in composition from the University of
Sheffield. As a professional organist he has a good intuitive grasp of
the
carillon and is one of the few who has gone on to write a continuous
series of
carillon pieces over a long period of time. He quickly developed his
own unique
style of composition for the carillon and one which has proven itself
well
suited to the instrument´s sound and playing technique. The form
is episodic
and consists of sections of changing, sometimes unusual metres. The
texture
consists of chromatic polyphony which, though not centered around any
particular tonality, achieves a sensitive balance between consonant and
dissonant passages. Although the whole tone scale and the intervals of
the
perfect and augmented fourth and major and minor second and seventh
feature
prominently, more traditional intervals and harmonies are also used.
Skilbeck
employs a broad range of dynamics and his style is lyrical, melodic,
and
expressive with occasional strong outbursts. His first piece, Intercalations, consists of quotations from
the works
of Skilbeck´s fellow English composer Henry Purcell, who
celebrated the 300th
anniversary of his death in 1995, set between sections of
Skilbeck´s own
composition, and also uses the motive B-A-C-H (H being the German
equivalent of
b-natural) in reference to the premiere in Germany.[4]
Intercalations
had been completed at the end of 1994
and the prospect of the impending concert the following June inspired
him to
write another two works in the spring of 1995, the set called Two
Pieces
after Caspar David Friedrich: Der einsame Baum (The Lone Tree) and Waldinneres beim
Monschein (The
Depths
of the Forest by Moonlight).[5] Friedrich was an early 19th
century
German Romantic painter famous for his mystical and symbolic depictions
of
pastoral landscapes - ruined monasteries, crosses perched atop lonely
mountain
peaks, ships trapped in ice floes. Skilbeck´s pieces are
correspondingly
atmospheric. The first is made up of two episodes in which the gentle,
lyrical,
melodic and contrapunctal texture builds to an agitated outburst of
ninths or
sevenths ending in a closing downward cadenza figure, the second
features a
delicate texture of 16th note figures and scales depicting the moonlit
landscape. In 1995 Johannes Wallmann, another free-lance composer based
in
Berlin like Glandien, contributed another new piece to the carillon
repertoire.
Wallmann, originally a bassoonist who directed his own chamber
ensemble, who
went on to study composition at the Weimar Conservatory in East
Germany. He had
rung bells as a boy and in 1995 composed and produced the Glockenrequiem
Dresden, a
work which
commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Allied bombing and
destruction of
the city. It used 129 Dresdner church bells to create different ringing
patterns which moved across the city in waves. Wallmann had come to a
Berlin
carillon concert at Easter 1995 and become an enthusiastic supporter of
the
instrument. He adapted an excerpt of one of his previous pieces and
transformed
it into the carillon piece Linien,
zu Klang geschwungen.
Its pointillistic texture is made up of single lines and figures moving
upwards
and downwards and is based on fourths and fifths and inversions and
mirrors of
the phrases and motives. My colleague and friend
Sergey Tosin provided me with a
welcome surprise when he sent me a new piece of music written specially
for the
Berlin carillon. Tosin is a Russian bellringer, musicologist, composer,
and
teacher at the music academy in the Siberian capital Novosibirsk. I
became
acquainted with him when we both attended the bell ringing festival in
Rostov-Veliky in 1989 at which the Russian Association of
Campanological Arts
was established. I met Tosin during a number of subsequent trips to
Russia where
he learned about our carillon from the lectures I held and from my own
accounts
of it. The result was his piece titled simply Composition für
Carillon. It
is an atonal piece, reflecting the
fact that Russian chimes and bell music are constructed of arbitrarily
chosen
sequences of tones rather than being based on any traditional scales or
tonalities. It
begins with the exposition of the twelve-tone row used to compose the
work
in the form of a type of traditional sacred Russian bell piece called a
perezvon, one of the oldest forms of Russian bell music in which each
of the
bells of a chime are struck individually starting with the highest and
preceding to the lowest and ending with a cluster in which all are
sounded
together. As the Composition
was written in memory of the victims of all wars, the perezvon
presented here
takes the form of a funeral chime. It is followed by a long,
free-composed and
middle section of virtuosic 16th note figures based on the twelve-tone
row and
interspersed with clusters. It ends with an entire series of clusters
announcing the beginning of the final section, another type of
traditional
sacred Russian bell piece known as a blagovest or "glorious chiming".
It is based on another type of traditional chime known as a trezvon and
made of
repeated variations of rhythmic and motivic patterns in strict time.
The
following year, 1996, was full of surprises. The Berlin carillon
repertoire was
enlarged by two short transcriptions: the Slowakian composer Daniel
Matej, then
in Berlin on a DAAD stipend, made an carillon arrangement of the piano
piece Spindulum
which he had
written as
a gentle lullabye for his daughter and Anthony Skilbeck transcribed his
piece
for celtic harp and organ titled .....but the willow drank too much for the carillon. Both of
these
expressive and interesting pieces are easy to play and thus also
suitable for
students learning to play the carillon. Skilbeck also wrote a work
titled Verses consisting of five sections
bearing that
name. The piece is well-adapted to carillon playing technique: the wide
leaps
of sevenths and ninths, 16th note cadenza like figures built on fourths
and
eighth note figures are constructed to allow the carillonneur the use
of
alternate hands.
[1] A grand carillon is an instrument with at least 53 bells, a bourdon bell with a strike tone of A0 or lower, and a pedalboard extending from G at least to a1.
[2] My book Die Carillons von Berlin und Potsdam, Berlin 1991, provides a detailled account of the building of the carillon.
[3] I have also written a number of choralecompositions for the carillon but have decided in this article to concentrate on the original compositions of the other composers.
[4] For more information on Anthoy Skilbeck´s music see: http://www.skilbeckmusic.co.uk
[5] Two Pieces after Caspar David Friedrich are published by American Carillon Music Editions.
[6] The concert
was repeated
in 2003 and recorded on a CD titled Music for Big Ears and is
available from
Staalplaat. http://www.staalplaat.com
© Jeffrey Bossin