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RING THOSE BELLS
Park's carillon tower comes to life again after 20-year layoff
By JUSTIN MARTIN
The sound of bells coming from Brownell Memorial Park, just off La. 70 at the northern end of Lake Palourde, is nothing new. They ring every half-hour and fill the swampy park with sounds reminiscent of Sunday church meetings. The ringing from the top of a white tower, the park’s dominating centerpiece, can be heard as far as Lakeside Subdivision, all the way on the other side of the lake, on a clear day.
The tower contains Louisiana’s only carillon, an instrument consisting of bells, a keyboard arranged somewhat like that of an organ, and the connecting wires used to attach the keys and pedals to the bells.
The bells are stationary and ring out when struck by a clapper connected to the keys.
The carillon at Brownell Memorial Park consists of 61 bells. They range in weight from 18 pounds to 4,730 pounds and represent five octaves, connected to the keyboard in a separate room just below.
The marsh birds and critters that inhabit the park, along with a few dozen locals in attendance Sunday, heard fresh sounds coming from the carillon tower for the first time in more than 20 years. The automatic playing system was given the afternoon off as the park’s first resident carillonneur took a seat behind the massive wooden instrument 100 feet in the air.
The skillful artist, Ruth Jeffery, performed a few selections from Bach, several folk tunes and other pieces at the first of what will be a monthly performance at the park. Live performances were a staple at the park after the tower was constructed in the 1960s, until Ronald Coleman became too ill to perform his duties as resident carillonneur.
Jeffery, who discovered the carillon at Brownell Memorial Park last year while searching for a home in the Baton Rouge area, said she has spent the last several months cleaning and fixing the bells for her debut performance.
"I have become a jack of all trades for this tower, playing, cleaning and fixing," Jeffery said while working at the top of the tower Sunday morning preparing for her recital. "When I first came here, I was dressed in jeans and was all dirty and sweaty. People probably thought I was the cleaning woman, not the person you think would be playing the bells."
Getting the carillon back up to par was no easy task. A storm that had damaged the tower several years ago and allowed water into the lower room only added to the problems caused by years of disuse. Water damage and mold on the wooden parts had to be corrected, but the bells themselves had very little damage; only a thorough cleaning was needed.
"When I first started coming here, I didn’t realize that the bells were encrusted with mud dauber nests," Jeffery said. "It is just the perfect place for them to hide because nobody was playing the bells. I got up there and cleaned them out, and now every time I play I run all the way up the bells and all the way back down just to get them out for a little while."
Having less than two years under her belt as a carillonneur, Jeffery refers to herself as a beginner. Sunday was her first-ever public performance. She only learned of the instrument, which has been in existence since the time of early American colonization, by a chance encounter in 2005 with the only traveling carillonin North America.
Frank DellaPenna, a graduate of the French Carillon School of Tourcoing, France, showed up at Jeffery’s husband’s mechanic shop in Houston in October 2005 in need of repairs to his carillon’s travel trailer. DellaPenna invited the Jefferys to hear him play at a nearby Renaissance Festival.
"It was love at first sight," Jeffery said about the trip to see DellaPenna perform. "Frankly, if I had gone to hear just anybody play, I don’t know if I would have fallen in love."
"It was the way he played. Hearing somebody who knows how to play it is just beautiful. He does what he does to let people know carillons exist and try to get them to fall in love with them. Well, it worked with me."
DellaPenna connected Jeffery with a carillon teacher in Houston and she jumped into lessons headfirst. With her only previous musical training as an aspiring bagpipe player as a child, Jeffery could not even read music, but that was no hill for a stepper like Jeffery. As she says, "You don’t choose the carillon, the carillon chooses you."
Just as she began to feel comfortable inside of a carillon tower, her husband, Brian, started to talk about transferring out of Houston. "He had a job offer in Baton Rouge, among other places, and he was ready to move. While we were finding out where he was getting job offers from, I told him I really didn’t want to go where I can’t play."
She researched carillons on the Internet and located the one at Brownell Memorial Park and decided that the hour drive from Baton Rouge was an obstacle she could overcome, as long as she could continue to play.
She contacted the park’s curator, Mike Vanover, and asked about practicing at the park. After a move to Baton Rouge and constant visits — at least twice a week — to the tower, Vanover gave Jeffery her own set of keys and offered her the volunteer position of resident carillonneur.
She took the job.
"We were absolutely delighted to have her perform," Renee Vanover, Mike Vanover’s wife and co-curator of the park, said. "The tower is such a great treasure, it was such a shame to see it go unused for so long. This is all her brainchild. We are just happy to facilitate it."
With her performing debut behind her, Jeffery is looking forward to continuing both her residency at Brownell Memorial Park and her carillon education. Both, she said, will be part of her life for a long time to come. Similar to the Hunchback of Notre Dame, ringing of the bells is her calling, and she is addicted to their sound and their feeling.
"I feel like I can do a reasonable job playing and give the bells justice with the simple stuff I can do," she said just before Sunday’s performance. "Maybe when people come to listen, they will be a little forgiving of the errors and mistakes, and bear with me as I learn and get better.
"What we are trying to do is get it out in the public eye, and let people know that it is here. This is a great thing, but it needs help. It’s like a little diamond in the wilderness and nobody seems to know about it."
Jeffery will be presenting a recital on the first Sunday of each month, rain or shine. The public is invited to the free performances, and refreshments will be served.
Reprinted courtesy of Justin Martin and the Morgan City Daily-Review
An article about me and the Brownell carillon also appeared in Baton Rouge's The Advocate, but I was unable to get permission to use that article on this site.
Cast in Bronze seeds carillon consciousness across the land
By Geoff Gehman
Every year Handwerkplatz becomes an outdoor concert hall for a musician in a black costume and a golden phoenix mask. Sitting in a cabin, he presses baton-like keys with fists and feet, creating shimmering seas of sound from 35 bronze bells weighing from 24 to 600 pounds. After playing classical works, popular hybrids, and his own astral pieces, he poses for photos with kids who think he's a keyboard superhero and adults who think he's a reincarnation of the ghost from ''Don Giovanni.''
Inside the costume is Frank DellaPenna, aka Cast in Bronze, who is playing the world's only portable carillon at Musikfest for the 10th year. The 56-year-old Pennsylvanian has a set-in-stone mission to turn an instrument hidden for 11 centuries in bell towers into a very visible vehicle for meditative entertainment. On his quest he's performed at Renaissance fairs and Walt Disney World, for Alice Cooper, and the Pope.
Like many ambitious artists, DellaPenna is empowered by failure. Before he released five CDs, before he scored a two-hour musical called ''The Bells,'' he was a frustrated church-bell salesman and roofing contractor. His guardian angels include a tough-loving wife, a wealthy stranger, and a visionary teacher who died on DellaPenna's birthday.
''There have been so many times when I've been so down,'' says DellaPenna, who lives in Saint Peters, Chester County. ''I'm driven by the challenge of taking this really obscure instrument that people have never seen, or forgotten, and not only making it popular, but making it important. I'm driven by everybody who told me the carillon is too big, too loud, too weird -- that being a traveling carillonneur would never work in a million years.''
DellaPenna can blame his career on the late Frank Law, the carillonneur at the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge. In the late 1960s, DellaPenna, a native of Phoenixville, Montgomery County, went to Law for piano lessons. He ended up becoming a prize student of a bell keyboard invented in the 12th century to announce deaths and boost civic pride. He fell under the spell of rippling textures, haunting tones, the wrestler's stamina and balletic agility required to make tons of beautiful bronze ring beautifully.
''Frank told me he'd only teach me piano if I learned carillon,'' says DellaPenna. ''From the beginning, I just loved the size and the power. It's not like playing anything else. It's a real rush.''
DellaPenna continued his education in France, a carillon center along with Belgium and the Netherlands. He received two degrees from a school in Tourcoing, becoming the first American designated a master carillonneur. He returned with his wife, Anne, to the States in 1976, a terrific year for bicentennialists, a terrible year for carillonneurs. Shut out of keyboard jobs, he became a salesman for a Maryland company that installed church bells. At least he limbered up feet and fists by playing the firm's unique portable carillon, a 20-foot-long model with 35 bells.
Forbidden to take the carillon on tour, unable to play for a living, DellaPenna left the bell company to become a roofing contractor. In 1985 he and Anne moved to Pennsylvania so their children, Christine and Marc, could grow up near their grandparents. It was in Saint Peters in the late '80s that DellaPenna learned his old company in Maryland had sold the portable carillon he had played to a resident of Mechanicsburg, Cumberland County. DellaPenna went there to record on the instrument, which was in a garage instead of the house's customized bell tower.
Seeing a royal keyboard abused like a serf deepened DellaPenna's funk. ''I got so frustrated with this crazy idea of being a traveling carillonneur that I refused to play the carillon for a few years,'' he says. ''Yet, even when I refused to play it, it would say: 'Oh no no no -- we're not done with you yet.'''
In 1985 the siren rang again. That year DellaPenna ended his carillon exile by playing a memorial service in Valley Forge for his former teacher, Law, who died on DellaPenna's birthday. After the service, he agreed to temporarily replace Law as the Washington Chapel's carillonneur. A few weeks became 12 years.
In 1777-1778 Valley Forge was the site of a pivotal battle of the Revolutionary War. In 1991 it was the site of a DellaPenna revolution. One morning he was rehearsing for a service in the bell tower of the Washington Chapel when he noticed a stranger who had entered through the bell-tower gate, which DellaPenna had forgotten to lock. Always interested in new fans, he invited his visitor to a post-service performance. Impressed by the instrument's sound and DellaPenna's playing, the visitor told the carillonneur he definitely needed a bigger audience.
Two weeks later the visitor telephoned DellaPenna to say he had found a portable carillon he was considering buying. It was the very same instrument DellaPenna had played in Maryland and Pennsylvania; in fact, the visitor was calling from its home in Mechanicsburg. DellaPenna's new friend told the carillonneur he would purchase it for him to play on tour -- ''if you think you know what to do with this thing.''
That December DellaPenna played the carillon in his new patron's warehouse. After wandering around for a half hour, listening from a variety of angles, the carillon owner -- who wishes to remain anonymous -- reached into a pocket and gave DellaPenna a key to the warehouse. His message chimed like a bell: ''Go ahead and make people like this thing.''
And so began DellaPenna's career as the world's only traveling carillonneur, two decades late. He's certainly made up for lost time. He's played his four-ton-plus keyboard in weddings and parades, on a Christmas Eve broadcast of the ''Today'' show, and during an American mass for Pope John Paul II (the performance included DellaPenna's ''Serendipity''). He's released five CDs and a DVD of his own inter-galactic works (''Dance of the Fireflies''), classics (Ravel's ''Ma Mere l'Oye''), and classic medleys (numbers from Andrew Lloyd Webber's ''Phantom of the Opera'' and Mike Oldfield's ''Tubular Bells''). Playing live with string players and singers, he's turned the carillon's indoor deficits -- its loudness, its hugeness, its giant wackiness -- into outdoor assets.
In 2001 DellaPenna's career slammed into a brick wall. Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Walt Disney World fired him from a 14-month gig. Suddenly jobless, he felt like quitting. Then his wife read him the riot act.
''She told me there were no jobs back in Pennsylvania,'' says DellaPenna. ''She said: 'I won't have you fail in front of our children. I went to France with you, I've followed you for all these years, and now you're going to give up?'''
DellaPenna not only took his spouse's advice, he took his act to a new dimension. He began wearing a mask and became a character, ideas his Disney colleagues had dismissed as distracting. The golden phoenix turned out to be a golden charm. Colorful and theatrical, a mythic prop for a mystical keyboard, it helped get DellaPenna into Renaissance festivals, an appropriate market for an instrument popular in the Renaissance. It certainly appealed to shock rocker Alice Cooper, who learned of the masked carillonneur from a fellow golfer. In 2004 DellaPenna opened Cooper's ''Christmas Pudding'' benefit concert for troubled youngsters in Phoenix, his first indoor gig.
DellaPenna wears the mask for practical and fanciful reasons. The golden phoenix, he points out, symbolizes the rebirth of the carillon as a popular portable instrument, and the resurrection of his career from the ashes. Thanks to the disguise, he's as anonymous as his bell-tower peers. Unlike them, he's cloaked in a kind of immortality.
''Someday, when I'm too old to do this, someone else will get in the costume and carry on the timeless spirit,'' he says. ''I know that may sound really weird to you. But many times people get lost after the first song and tell me afterward: 'I forgot you were human.'
''You know, I used to take off the mask after concerts until I found that the kids would just say, 'Ah, he's just this old guy,''' adds DellaPenna, whose daughter is his publicist and marketing director. ''Now that I always keep the mask on, they like the adventure, the mystery. They buy posters. They have pictures taken with me. They hug me. They call out: 'We love you, Bell Man!'''DellaPenna's fans come in many sizes and shapes. Parents tell him his concerts inspire their children to continue their piano lessons. CD buyers tell him his lulling recordings ease their migraines. He even has his own disciple, a woman who wanted to study with DellaPenna on tour and settled for lessons with a carillonneur in Houston. She now plays weekly concerts on a carillon in Morgan City, La., that had been mothballed for 20 years.
Every few weeks DellaPenna writes the owner of his carillon, updating events and plans. Every now and then the patron sneaks into a performance and leaves without a word. ''He doesn't want me to introduce him to anybody; he doesn't want to interfere,'' says DellaPenna, who has seen the patron at Handwerkplatz. ''I've never really understood why he stays out of the way because I'd like to thank him publicly. I think he likes what I do on his carillon or else he would have taken it back by now.''
The carillon owner has told DellaPenna that ''nobody in their right mind would do what you've done.'' The carillonneur's latest nutty project is a two-hour musical he scored and is shopping. ''The Bells'' follows a young woman who attempts to rescue a thousand-year-old carillon stolen from the village of Douai, France, and who ends up having an odyssey. The fictional tale chimes off true accounts of instruments saved from Turks and Nazis who planned to break French and Dutch spirits by converting bronze bells into war weapons.
DellaPenna has grander dreams. He wants America's silent carillons to ring regularly. He wants to perform in France, to invest in a country that invested in him. Wouldn't it be great, he asks, if the bells in ''The Bells'' rang from the bell tower in Douai, where he and his wife lived when he was a student? Wouldn't it be greater if 600 or so bell towers around Europe staged the show simultaneously?
''As you get older, the hardest part is knowing you love an instrument hardly anyone knows exists in your own country,'' says DellaPenna. ''I mean, you can't go to any town in France and not hear bells ringing. They're basically owned by the government and the government wants to make sure they're heard. In this country, it's just the opposite. As much as I like what I'm doing, there's a part of me that says you're not doing enough.''
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