The Lowell House Bell Ringers come from Harvard University - PDF document

The Lowell House Bell Ringers come from Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, USA. The story of the Lowell House bells begins at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. The monastery dates to the 13th century, and held a set of eighteen bells cast between 1682 and 1907. These bells included the Bolshoy or Blagovestnik bell, known at Harvard as Mother Earth. It was cast by the Finlandsky Foundry in 1890 and weighs 13 tons. In the 1900’s there was an American scholar and archeologist named Thomas Whittemore, who specialized in Byzantine studies. He held a personal relationship with Mustafa Kamal Ataturk and participated in the restoration of the Hagia Sophia mosaics. As churches and monasteries across Russia closed in the 1920’s, Whittemore heard that the Danilov bells in Moscow were in danger of being destroyed. He contacted his friend Charles Crane, a wealthy businessman who had inherited his fortune as the son of a plumbing magnate. Crane turned from business to diplomacy, philanthropy, and travel. He had traveled across Russia and loved Russian culture. In 1930, he purchased the bells and donated them to Harvard University, where Lowell House was under construction. Designs for a clocktower similar to Independence Hall in Philadelphia were adapted for a bell tower instead. When the bells arrived at Lowell, they were raised up by railroad ties until they reached the height of the tower, and so we say that there was a Crane big enough to buy the bells in Charles Crane, but not a crane big enough to lift the bells. The famous bell ringer from Moscow Konstantin Saradzhev supervised the installation of the Danilov bells at Lowell House. Saradzhev was renowned for his aural acuity, as he was able to perceive the smallest differences in tone and to recognize every bell in Moscow. With this expertise, Saradzhev surveyed the eighteen bells at Lowell House and determined that only seventeen were the Danilov bells. The mismatched bell was moved across the Charles River to Harvard Business School. Saradzhev hoped to play his bell compositions at Harvard, but based on medical reasons and his eccentric character, he clashed with the Harvard administration. He was dismissed from the project and returned to Moscow. At first, after the installation, people resented the cacophony of inexperienced bell ringers at the Lowell bells, but as years passed, Harvard students learned to ring and to love the Russian bells. In 1983, in anticipation of the 1000­year anniversary of Christianity in Russia, the Soviet Union returned the Danilov Monastery to the Russian Orthodox Church. The monastery belfry was fit with a set of 15 bells saved from Soviet destruction, but these bells were damaged and mismatched, so the monks set their minds on obtaining their original set of bells. When President Ronald Reagan visited Moscow in 1988, he was asked about getting the bells back to the monastery. In 2000, the American ambassador to Russia, a Harvard alumnus, was also asked during a visit to the monastery about sending the bells to their home. For various reasons, such as concerns over cost and damage to Lowell House, these efforts failed to bear fruit.

The final push to return the bells came in 2003, when Father Superior Alexei of Danilov Monastery wrote directly to Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin, masters of Lowell House. Diana, a professor of religion, and Dorothy, a minister at Harvard's Memorial Church, were very receptive towards the monastery's request. So in December 2003, in the middle of a Boston blizzard, a monastery delegation, including Father Superior Alexi and Father Roman, came to Lowell House and for the first time in decades they played the bells as they were meant to be played. That visit marked the beginning of a close relationship between Lowell House and the Danilov Monastery. The following year, Lowell House sent a group of student bell ringers to Russia to train with Father Roman and other bell ringers in the Kremlin, the beginning of a tradition for Lowell bell ringers to train in Russia. Most importantly, after a study found it was feasible to remove the bells from Lowell House, an agreement was reached that Lowell House would return the original bells to the monastery, who would in return pay for a replacement set of bells to be cast and given to Lowell House. The expensive bell exchange was paid for by the generosity of Link of Times Foundation, an organization founded by Viktor Vekselberg dedicated to recovering lost Russian cultural artifacts. With funding secured, the exchange proceeded quickly. In 2006, a Harvard delegation visited five Russian bell foundries to learn about the process of forging a bell, and ultimately decided the Vera Foundry in Voronezh to create the replacement set. In 2007, a group of Russian bell masters came to Lowell House to analyze and profile the original bells to aid in the casting of the new set, which was completed in spring 2007. Shortly after, the replacement set arrived in Lowell, and on July 8, 2008, the exchange of the bells was finally complete. Harvard President Drew Faust officially transferred ownership of the original bells to the Danilov Monastery while the Link of Times Foundation signed ownership of the new bells to Lowell House. So today at Harvard, we bell ringers (or “Klappermeisters” as some call us) are in the very unique position of having a bell tower with a full set of Russian bells that, first, have been engineered to fit a Western scale and, second, ring peals and melodies according to the whims of the ringers. We ring every Sunday from 13:00 to 13:30. We also ring the bells at important moments of university life; for instance graduation day and housing day (when we welcome our new students). We play them in our annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. Finally we have a few less serious traditions, such as ringing 13 strikes at midnight on Halloween.

Originally in the 1930s, the bells were played at arbitrary times, and the students, unaccustomed to these bells, would protest by banging pans, heaving alarm clocks out of windows, and even organizing a simultaneous toilet flushing. Since then, many students have grown fond of the bells, and several formed the Klappermeisters tradition, of which we are the descendants. In these earlier days, the ringers did not exactly know how to ring the bells. They tried ringing melodies but only very few would work, such as the Harry Potter theme song. Today our ringing has been enriched and is usually of three different types: Western melodies, Russian peals, or bell jams. Since 2008, we now have a two octave western scale on the bells. We can ring famous melodies and even complicated harmonies. We play our favorite pop tunes, school anthems and classical music. Some of our current favorites are Bach prelude number 1 in C major, the th beginning of Beethoven’s 5 , the song Hallelujah and the Scottish tune Loch Lomond. The bell exchange also meant that we came into contact with the Russian zvon tradition. As Diana Eck said: when Father Roman came to perform on the bells “He brought a sound from those bells that we had never heard before.” Over the years we have learned from him and Russian bell ringers, and now play Russian peals every week. For instance, we always start with our own “Descending Peal” and end with our version of “Beautiful Rostov.” Finally every week we ring bell jams: these are mostly improvisation, and allow visitors to the tower to try the bells for the first time. We welcome any visitor to come watch or try the bells. After the final ring, together we feel the vibrations of “Mother Earth” (as we call the Bolshoy bell) and share the bell’s history. This sharing of the tradition is part of what makes it so special for us. Since the bell exchange, both Harvard and the Danilov Monastery have kept the cultural exchange alive. Every year we alternate sending or receiving a delegation of ringers to ring the other set. We ourselves have just concluded a trip to Russia to learn about the bell tradition from Father Roman. We hope this tradition continues for many years to come; next year will mark the tenth year jubilee of the bell exchange, so a celebration is in order!