clöserlook: Ringing the Bells of Death and Famine

Every Sunday afternoon at one o'clock, a solemn, slightly misshapen din lifts and breaks over the somnolent river houses. Abandoned, commanding, booming through the streets, timbred and shaped by the turn of the buildings, the Lowell House bells ring out in their own, odd beauty. Whether woken or wondering, distracted or listening, each of us residing below the Yard has been touched at some point by these instruments. Over time they have become an indelible part of the Harvard landscape.

Aara Edwards '02 is a member of an informal organization known as the Lowell House Society of Russian Bellringers. Every week, she and a core group of about five or six people show up beneath the roosting bells in the tower to rock them out of their slumber, to show newcomers the ropes and to practice the uncertain science of their playing.

As a violist playing with the Bach Society, the Harvard Early Music Society and the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra (where she is also orchestra manager), Aara has a very crowded musical agenda. However, she found some time between rehearsals to chat with us about the history of the bells and her recent experience as their ringer. The Lowell House bells were given to Harvard in 1930 by Richard T. Crane. They had hung in the Danailovsky Monastery in Moscow, but when they were sentenced to the melting-pot, Crane purchased them from the Soviet government and shipped them to America. At that time, the construction of Lowell House was in its finishing stages and plans for a clocktower were altered to accommodate the carillon. When the bells finally arrived, an enigmatic man called Saradjeff arrived with them to oversee their installation and playing. He is vividly described by Mason Hammond in a 1936 document preserved in the Harvard University Library. Saradjeff was supposed to be a genius of ringing--a tortured but prolific composer of carillons with an ear tuned to the exact pitch of bronze. His face had been horribly disfigured during the war. He spoke no English and had a history of epilepsy. Without delay Saradjeff retired to the basement of J and K entries to tune the smaller bells, a cacophonous process involving endless tapping and filing. For weeks he wandered from bell to bell like the crazed ringmaster of a campanological circus.

However, Saradjeff's epilepsy and paranoia gradually caught up with him. After several severe attacks, he was hospitalized. When he began to suspect his doctors of poisoning him and took up drinking ink as an antidote, it was decided that he should return to Russia. The poor man eventually died there in a sanatorium.

Saradjeff's early departure was something of a tragedy for the bell project. He left only partial plans for the bell's hanging, and he was the only man around with any comprehensive knowledge of their playing. The bells are tuned to an eastern scale, supposedly a mixture of Byzantine and Tartar influences, which, to the Western ear gives their carillons a haunting and unfamiliar sound. No one here is quite sure how to play them or what music they were cast for. Aara admits that it is only through a lengthy apprenticeship that one begins to recognize the bells as a playable instrument. Her performances hinge on improvisation and experience. Though she and the other ringers have gradually become adept in the bells' individual utterances, no tune as we know it will ever cross their lips.

But despite the aesthetic mystery of their pealing, the Lowell House bells embody something visceral and powerful that falls altogether outside the realm of music. Standing high above Harvard on an open platform and ringing the "Red Bell of Pestilence and Famine" is, Aara will tell you, an exhilarating experience. The 17 bells range from one to 13 feet in diameter, and when they are rung every beam of the tower trembles. The largest bell, the Mother Earth Bell, weighs 13 tons. It is rung at the beginning and end of each concert and it takes two people standing inside its maw to swing the giant clapper between them. The brute force of that bronze behemoth and its lesser brothers, spilling out into the drowsy air of the Square, is well worth a dissonance or two.