My university has a carillon (bell tower) on campus which happens to be in a lovely park right behind the building where my office is. Yesterday I had the chance to have a little tour of the tower. One of our grad students is minoring in music theory (her major is different but she does some things that are in ethnomusicology so it makes sense).
Anyway, this semester she’s been taking carillon lessons and recently had her final jury exam (it’s set up just like my piano class, with a final jury performance at the end of the semester)
So yesterday she had reserved the carillon for practice yesterday and invited me to join her. The playing chamber is about 50 feet off the ground, there are 65 bells (iirc). It was so cool! I had some scores on my phone so we picked a few pieces and I played the right hand part while she played the left hand part. It was amazing! Also, difficult because it’s hard to stay oriented on the keyboard, I kept playing one note too high (e.g., I played A when it should have been G) because I misinterpreted where C was. I think I could get used to playing the keyboard itself pretty quickly though. But not the foot pedals!
After that, she played part of her jury piece for me. It was beautiful, and so cool to experience!!
