The first owner of the Whitechapel Foundry, where it had been for some years preserved, but is now broken up. (See page [40]).
The principle of the carillon is similar to that of a barrel-organ or musical-box, implying a barrel or drum, set with pegs, and set in motion by being connected with the mechanism of the clock. The pegs, as they turn, raise levers which pull wires in connection with the hammers which strike on the bells. With the ordinary eight bells of an English belfry it is obvious that only a limited choice of tunes within the compass of an octave is possible, and that they can only be played in one key on single notes. The Belgian carillons have sometimes forty or fifty bells in communication with a key-board like that of an organ, and tunes can therefore be played on them in harmony. There are a few carillons of this type in England, the best known being at Boston, in Lincolnshire, and at Cattistock, in Dorset, but usually the ordinary bells are employed, as at Worcester Cathedral and in many towns.
At the Reformation chimes largely died out, but with the Restoration they revived, and we hear of them at Cambridge, Grantham, and elsewhere. Another kind of chime which may here be mentioned is that employed for striking the quarters for the clock. Here, of course, no mechanism is required beyond the connecting-wire which raises the hammer and drops it on the bell. Of such chimes the best known are the Cambridge Quarters, put up in Great S. Mary’s Church in 1793. They were composed by Dr. Jowett, the Regius Professor of Laws, assisted by the composer Crotch, who was then only eighteen. The latter is said to have adapted a movement in the opening symphony of Handel’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” for the purpose.
The practice sometimes adopted nowadays of playing hymn tunes on bells by means of ropes tied to the clappers is a miserable substitute for the mechanical contrivance. It not only causes agonies to the musical ear by the unavoidable occurrence of false notes, but is only too likely to lead to the destruction of the bells altogether, as the result of the “clocking,” of which I shall have more to say later.
Campaniles
We have seen that it is the normal rule in England for bells to be placed in towers forming part of the structure of churches; or rather it should be said that towers for containing the bells were regarded as an essential feature in the construction of a church from the Saxon period onwards. Over the greater part of the Continent the same also holds good; but in Italy we find detached bell-towers, or campaniles, to be of frequent occurrence. The most familiar examples in that country are the campanile of S. Mark’s at Venice, and that built by Giotto at Florence. There are many others in Northern Italy, especially at Bologna, and at Ravenna, where the churches are of great antiquity.[3]
A ring of eight bells.