“Overtones,” Sonic and Politic: Minor Thirds, Tritones, and Nationalism in Octatonicism and Bells
by Tom Gurin
Abstract
This article demonstrates three campanological “overtones”— minor thirds, tritones, and nationalistic appeal—and their connections to octatonicism in Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In Russia, bells as sonic and cultural objects projected an array of real and symbolic overtones that resonated with composers seeking a Russian language for art music. Bell-filled sound environments, not just bell chords such as those in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, were conducive to the development of octatonicism. In the Netherlands, octatonicism—here called the “Pijper scale”—also took root in a campanologically saturated environment with a centuries-old, highly politicized bell culture. Pijper’s pupil, Henk Badings, made note of bells’ overtone structures and composed the first known fully octatonic carillon piece. In the United States, Roy Hamlin Johnson developed an “American” style of (often) octatonic carillon composition around bells’ minor third overtones. However, while developing it, Johnson was steeped in the openly racist music of John Powell and a definition of “American” that implied whiteness. Ultimately, this analysis aims to articulate the full extent of the historical connection between bells and octatonicism while calling attention to “overtones” that have historically been tuned out or, worse, smoothed over.
This article originally appeared in Volume 71 of the Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America.
Literal English translation of lyrics (originally by Vasily Zhukovsky):
God, save the Tsar!
Strong, sovereign,
Reign for glory, for our glory!
Reign to foes’ fear,
Orthodox Tsar.
God, save the Tsar!
The Russian Empirical anthem bonged from the belfry of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, marking midday, from 1858 until 1917. At other hours, Kol’ slaven nash Gospod’ v Sione (“How Glorious our Lord in Zion”) rained over Saint Petersburg.[1] These bells were cast in what is now the Netherlands.[2]
The mystery of octatonicism’s provenance has troubled historians for decades. Contemplating its development and proliferation in Russian music between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Richard Taruskin, along with other historians and theorists, has linked the mode to the tritone and, by extension, the bell chords in Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.[3] That analysis touches on, but does not explore, the deeper connection between bells and octatonicism that is observable in Russia and beyond.
Taruskin and other musicologists have tended to view bell chords’ shared tritone as a jumping- off point for the development of octatonicism while, in the same breath, recognizing the scale’s relationship to the cycle of minor thirds and minor third-related root progressions.[4] I will endeavor to complete this train of thought by articulating the full extent of the historical connection between bells and the octatonic scale. In doing so, I will refer at times to the significant repertoire of octatonic music composed for the carillon. By expanding the scope of the discussion beyond depictions of bells in orchestral compositions to include music written specifically for bell instruments, we gain a more complete vantage point from which to fathom the impact of bell-filled sound environments on the course of octatonicism’s development. In this article, I will use examples from Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States to demonstrate three campanological “overtones”—minor thirds, tritones, and nationalistic appeal—that radiated from belltowers, reverberated throughout musical cultures, and impressed themselves into the ears of composers between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, contributing to the multitude of factors that were conducive to the development of octatonicism.
Russia
From western carillons to Orthodox zvon, bells have struck mighty chords in the Russian psyche for centuries. Indeed, the so-called Tsar Kolokol (“King of Bells”) from 1737 might have struck the mightiest chord of all—had it ever rung. Spanning 22 feet in diameter and weighing a colossal 450,000 pounds, its voice would have been gargantuan if an 11-ton slab had not cracked off and tumbled to the ground after its casting. The broken behemoth has sat watch at the Moscow Kremlin ever since,[5] mute except in the Russian imagination.[6]
Nationalistic cameos in, for example, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1882), surging behind the anachronistic God, Save the Tsar (the anthem was not composed until 1833), erroneously suggest that bells are definitively Russian. On the contrary, although bells have been virtually omnipresent in Russian cities since the fifteenth century, it was Ridolfo Fioravanti who introduced Muscovites to Italian bell founding technology.[7] Bells are cultural barnstormers, playing diversiform roles across innumerable traditions. Still, perhaps because of their stature and relationship to place, towers and their bells have frequently become national symbols, with several countries throughout history mobilizing them as instruments of patriotism and nation-building.[8]
Although bells are not exclusively Russian, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, they pierced the hearts of Russian composers in particular. Rachmaninoff felt that bells “accompanied every Russian from infancy to the grave, and no composer could escape their influence. . . .This love for bells is inherent in every Russian.”[9] While other countries use zvon, Orthodox chiming is a distinct part of Russian people and their history, a cold cry that many Russian composers warmly embraced.[10] Typically performed from within soaring Orthodox belfries, zvon is a repetitively rhythmical and minimally melodic bell art. One writer describes the impact of zvon as “rhythmo-overtonal” (“rytmo-obertonnoi”).[11] Glinka, whom many have considered the father of Russian art music, adored the strident zvon in his childhood village. According to Stravinsky, Glinka’s “music is minor, of course, but he is not; all music in Russia stems from him.”[12] As a youngster, Glinka had “a craving for every kind of bell-sounds; he sought to imitate the clanging that penetrated the walls of the house by playing bell-ringer on two copper vessels.”[13] As a mature composer, he would do the same using an orchestra. Ruslan and Ludmila (1842) may be the earliest known use of “bell chords” (discussed below), followed by an early, 1869 draft of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.[14] However, Modest Mussorgsky’s “Coronation Bells” (Example 2) from Boris Godunov (1874) stand alone as the archetype.
Defined as two dominant-seventh chords separated by one or more minor thirds—a tritone in Boris’s case—bell chords are one of the most evocative and widely referenced historical attempts at musical bell imitation.[15] Scholars have taken note of the shared tritone between Mussorgsky’s alternating A-flat and D dominant-seventh chords, descrying a historical pivot towards octatonicism—the tritone being the centerpiece of the octatonic trend, according to Richard Taruskin. Taruskin writes that “thanks to the Coronation Scene from Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, all the world knows that two dominant-seventh chords with roots a tritone apart have a tritone in common. . . . The progression is often thought of as being peculiarly Russian.” He goes on to note that the “harmonically static tritone is recognized in Russian music theory by Boleslav Yavorsky’s formulation of the ‘diminished mode’ . . . or octatonic scale.”[16] It would be Rimsky-Korsakov and his pupil, Igor Stravinsky, who championed the octatonic, or “Korsakovian,” scale in examples as well-known as Petrushka [17]. (The “Petrushka Chord” is intimately related to the pitch content of the bell chords in Boris Godunov.[18])
Boris Godunov is hardly the only smelting of bells and octatonicism to flow from Saint Petersburg. In fact, it is representative of an alloy of sounds and ideas reverberating for decades throughout the Russian cultural imagination. Several other pieces have married the two to some extent, including Stravinsky’s Svadebka (1923) and The Wedding (Les Noces).[19] Composed nearly half a century after Boris’s premiere, Svadebka’s score calls for a bell to symbolize the Russian Orthodox marriage ritual[20]—another example of bells and octatonicism tolling in tandem. These liaisons are not coincidences.
While octatonicism would eventually be heard as “peculiarly Russian,” bell sounds’ earlier initiation (via Glinka) into their art music culture illustrates music’s relationship to nineteenth-century Russian nationalism. As Marina Frolova-Walker points out, the histories of Russian music and nationalism (i.e. anti-Germanism) are often one and the same; she compares Slavophiles’ musical advances to their linguistic ones.[21] Nineteenth-century attempts at defining a Russian musical culture echo earlier efforts at standardizing the Russian language. “Glinka,” writes Frolova-Walker, “was hailed as music’s Pushkin.”[22] Likewise, the Orthodox zvon ritual in Russia has been described as a “language” of Russian culture, having derived from the eleventh-century Byzantine chant style.[23] For composers seeking a formidably Russian vocabulary for art music, bells, with their vocally and vocalically nationalistic overtones and unique acoustic spectra were the low-hanging fruit. Bells expressed a potent pro-Russianness, forging, as we shall see, a sound environment conducive to the development of the “peculiarly Russian” octatonic scale that would permeate the nation’s broader musical culture.
The influence of bells is not limited to music, however; numerous cultures have transmuted bells into objects of virility and military stature, both symbolic and real, allowing them to discharge political “overtones” in addition to their sonic ones. Proto-bell founders in Luristan (Iran) in the sixth century BCE took inspiration from the shape of the pomegranate, “a symbol of fertility due to its many seeds.”[24] In medieval Europe, soaring, immodest belfries were signs of cities’ military independence, allowing officials to alarm (literally, “to arm” in French) residents in case of nocturnal invasion.[25] In early modern Europe, conquerors frequently castrated fallen cities by seizing their bells.[26] In several later conflicts, bells and cannons belonged to one and the same paradigm; bronze church bells literally metamorphosed into artillery in Napoleonic and, later, Nazi forges.[27] Even the aforementioned Tsar Kolokol is positioned beside its “companion,” the Tsar Cannon.[28] Bells have expressed national strength and independence both symbolically and literally throughout much of their history in Europe and western Asia, making them the ideal choice for musical expressions of ipseity—in this case, the richly pro-Russian overtones discussed above.
Like their political counterparts, bells’ acoustic overtones are particularly plangent, including their minor third sonorities. This partially explains bell chords’ campanological evocativeness. Whereas Mussorgsky’s bell chords in Boris Godunov are separated by a tritone, Glinka’s in his overture to Ruslan and Ludmila are a minor third apart. Minor thirds are generally present in Russian bells,[29] although they may be slightly higher or lower than the Pythagorean ratio and are almost always shrouded in a shimmer of overtones.[30] It would certainly have been a challenge (though hardly an insurmountable one) for Glinka to discern the minor thirds in the Orthodox bells that bellowed in his home village. Unlike many western bells from the seventeenth century onwards, which are precisely tuned after casting to clarify overtone structures, Russian Orthodox bells are left “as is.”[31] This tradition, which continues into the twenty-first century despite the availability of computerized tuning technology, reflects the rhythmical function of bells in the Orthodox faith. That is, bells serve as percussion instruments rather than melodic ones.[32] Furthermore, Orthodox peals are prized for their microtonal complexity. Tuning their overtones to fit into a relatively simple twelve-tone system would strip away much of the bells’ dazzling voices, which enable them to become “the voice of God.”[33] That each Orthodox bell retains its unique voice surely contributes to their metonymical appeal and utility.
Although the upper overtones of untuned Russian bells vary greatly, in addition to minor thirds, their shared tritones are also prominent and well-noted. Cultural and sound scholar Jason Kaminski writes, “the Russian bell was assigned its own characteristic ‘acoustical signature’ in Russian music in the form of the intervallic colour of the tritone.”[34] Following a discussion of Boris Godunov, Kaminski continues: “the sonority of the diminished triad . . . closely imitates the actual harmonic spectrum of bells which, owing to their curvilinear shape, usually includes a naturally flattened fifth and third in the overtone series.”[35] Russian bells’ contours, independent of tuning, generally result in this basic acoustic pattern. Despite the complexity of Orthodox bells’ upper overtones, we know that Glinka was enormously sensitive to bell sonorities. That the first and second overtones of most untuned bells combine with the strike tone (bells’ most salient pitch and, interestingly, a ghost frequency) to form a rough diminished triad[36] (outlining the first half of an octatonic scale) is unlikely to have escaped his ear. Indeed, Marguerite Bostonia remarks that bells’ “tritonal qualities could be the origin of a Russian compositional preference for tritones.”[37] Whether or not bells were the origin of this phenomenon, they were at least conducive to the trend.
These omnipresent minor third and tritone overtones suggest that bell chords were more than mere stepping stones to octatonicism; bell chords may be evidence of the campanological influences continuously reverberating throughout Russian cities and villages, shaping the ideas of composers in search of a national sound. In other words, bells themselves, not just bell chords, contributed to the development of octatonicism as a Russian musical language. What’s more, the myriad minor thirds ringing around Russian cities and villages may have shored up octatonicism’s prominence over the whole-tone scale in Russia, which some have reasonably attributed to the greater possibility for interaction between octatonic and diatonic passages.[38] Consider that the whole-tone scale begets tritones but no minor thirds.
Moscow was home to over 1,600 Orthodox belfries by the late nineteenth century,[39] but in Saint Petersburg, there was a twist. Although zvon contributed the majority of the clamor, thanks to western-looking Peter the Great, some of the bells that wafted across the Neva River to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory were, in fact, from Western Europe. The three carillons that have lived in the belfry of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral have all been of Dutch origin,[40] meaning that Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Stravinsky were not only listening to the dense Orthodox bells that Glinka idolized as a child. Clearly tuned carillon bells—playing automated tunes such as the Russian Empirical anthem, as previously mentioned—punctuated the hours in Saint Petersburg with the same striking minor third overtones that continue to characterize soundscapes in the Netherlands (as discussed below), among other countries. With the city’s sound environment conductively quaking with minor thirds and tritones, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the octatonic scale manifested itself so strongly in and around the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and Rimsky-Korsakov’s circle that it came to be known as the “Korsakovian” scale.
Taruskin and other historians have narrowly viewed bell chords’ shared tritone as the sole campanological contribution to octatonicism; a discreet pivot towards Stravinsky’s “angle.”[41] The tritone, writes Taruskin, is “the embodiment of anticlassical, symmetrical partition. This special status as midpoint led to its particular cultivation by the late nineteenth-century Russian fantastic harmonists.”[42] “Anticlassical,” in this case, means anti-German, anti-Western, and pro-Russian. Surprisingly unattuned to bells’ extraverbal Russian dialect, Taruskin’s analysis of bell chords’ tritones as the lone link pivoting between bells and octatonicism tunes out a pair of key “overtones.” It is, like the Tsar Kolokol, impressive but incomplete. It is more likely that bells (including both zvon and carillon bells) as sonic and cultural objects projected an array of real and symbolic overtones that gripped the attention of Russian composers, gradually impressing a distinctive accent into their ears that, combined with assorted other influences, found its way onto their pages of music. An examination of concurrences of bells and octatonicism—including in music written for the carillon—in the Netherlands and the United States during this time period will reveal related processes.
The Netherlands
The circumstances that connected bells and octatonicism in the Netherlands resemble the sonic and cultural factors present in Saint Petersburg. When composer Willem Pijper (1894–1947) “happened upon” the octatonic scale in Utrecht, the Netherlands, he genuinely believed he invented it.[43] In point of fact, to this day, many Dutch proudly refer to the octatonic scale as the “Pijper scale.”[44] Often hailed as the most distinguished Dutch composer of the early twentieth century, Willem Pijper was born and educated in Utrecht.[45] Although many Dutch cities own carillons, in Utrecht, the Dom Tower’s visual and aural dominance over the city is positively awesome. At nearly 370 feet, it is the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. From the fourteenth century, when it was built, until 1580, when it became a Protestant church, the Dom’s immense proportions would have been a reminder of the Catholic Church’s influence. Of its present 64 bells (50 in the carillon and 14 swinging), an astonishing 33 remain from the original 1664 Hemony carillon, while another 5 swinging bells date from 1505. To be sure, this bell-filled building has been the beating heart of Utrecht for centuries.[46]
Pijper’s professional and academic circles around the Utrecht Conservatory brought him into contact with the Dom Tower’s carillonists, which may have influenced his interest in octatonicism. For instance, his music theory and composition professor, Johan Wagenaar, was also an organist and became acquainted with J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr. (no known relation). The latter was an organist and served as the Dom Tower carillonist for nearly half a century. During his anniversary celebration for 40 years as city carillonist in 1934, J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr., was photographed side by side with Johan Wagenaar, the conservatory professor.[47] Starmer cites J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr.,’s father, J.A.H. Wagenaar, Sr., as a pioneer in carillon composition who, in his Introduction and Rondino for carillon, utilized techniques also found in the preludes by Matthias Vanden Gheyn (see discussion of Vanden Gheyn below).[48] Furthermore, the grandson, J.A.H. Wagenaar III, studied alongside Pijper in Johan Wagenaar’s class at the conservatory. He would later succeed his father as Dom Tower carillonist in 1937.[49]
The composer Johan Wagenaar impressed upon Pijper and other pupils an interest in bell sonorities as well as the “excellent theoretical knowledge”[50] necessary to make sense of them acoustically and symbolically. In addition to being a composer and organist, the versatile Wagenaar was also “an important conductor and introduced a number of important works into the Dutch repertoire, among them Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov.”[51] Whether Wagenaar’s familiarity with the Dom Tower carillon led him to Boris Godunov or vice versa, his students touched on the connective tissue between them. Pijper wrote at least one piece for carillon. One of his peers in Wagenaar’s class, Alexander Voormolen, would become known for developing a Dutch neoclassical compositional style that utilizes familiar folk tunes and emulates jingling carillon bells,[52] as in his “’s Nachts in een oude stad” (“Night in an Ancient City”). In this piece, the right hand evokes “Een ver carillon in de mist” (“A distant carillon in the mist”).[53] Interestingly, Wagenaar’s son, Bernard, was also in his father’s composition class with Pijper and Voormolen. Bernard would go on to teach composition himself at the Juilliard School in New York City. He taught Jean Miller, the composer of seven carillon pieces, including Soliloquy (1963), which she wrote in the octatonic mode.[54]
Pijper would have been cognizant of the political overtones surrounding bells during and following World War I. While Pijper was a student at the Utrecht Conservatory, Jef Denyn was in the process of renewing interest in carillons throughout Belgium and the Netherlands and, in addition, sparking a patriotically-fueled debate regarding their respective methods. In October 1916, mere months after Pijper’s graduation, the city appointed a committee to evaluate Denyn’s controversial proposal to adjust the mechanics of the Dutch carillon standard to better suit tremolando playing—a staple of the Mechelen style.[55] This committee included the aforementioned J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr.: the father of Pijper’s classmate, colleague of his professor, and city carillonist of Utrecht. Wagenaar rejected Denyn’s proposal on the grounds that the tremolando technique was at odds with the traditional Dutch style.[56] In the midst of World War I, Wagenaar and others on the committee would have been sensitive to perceived foreign threats to their national cultural canon. They were hesitant to let an outsider into their belfries which, as discussed above, were ripe with military overtones. (Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, Nazis had seized and mobilized nearly every bell in the Netherlands.[57]) Due to his various connections to organists and carillonists, Pijper was likely aware of this patriotically-fueled debate. What’s more, playing logs from the early 1920s reveal that J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr., was fervently showering nationalist music over the city of Utrecht via the Dom Tower carillon. He almost exclusively performed improvisations on melodies from Adriaan Valerius’s Nederlandtsche Gedenckklank—a 1626 collection of songs that primarily deals with the Eighty Years’ War and that became a national song book in the Netherlands.[58] This hype would not have been lost on Pijper, who frequently used music for political ends.
Pijper’s own nationalistic activities in and around the “Netherlands School” are well documented. Both in writing and in his compositions, according to Frank W. Hoogerwerf, Pijper vigorously mirrored Eastern-European attempts at ending the “Austro-German hegemony over musical culture,” castigating his countrymen for being too Romantically oriented.[59] (This is in contrast with his teacher, whose favorite composers included Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.[60]) In 1933, Pijper used “his” octatonic scale to set a traditional Dutch folk song, the Halewijn Lied. Vernacular references in art music are harbingers of musical nationalism, and this is no exception.[61] Incidentally, in this case, Pijper seems to have copied his Russian counterparts, who preferred to call the octatonic scale by its “Korsakovian” alias.[62] As mentioned above, we know that Pijper composed at least one piece for carillon in his early period: a short passepied written in 1916 during World War I.[63] Pijper came of age as a composer during wartime in Europe. Although the Netherlands remained famously neutral during the First World War, young artists “violently chose sides.”[64] Pijper’s Passepied (a French dance form) suggests his Allied allegiance.
Pijper’s Passepied is one of the earliest surviving Dutch carillon compositions,[65] and the composer’s choice to write for the carillon was no coincidence. As the Denyn controversy described above—as well as J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr.,’s playing logs—illustrates, by the beginning of the twentieth century, carillons had become nationalist monuments, reminders of Dutch influence during the seventeenth century.[66] Bells, common denominators between Dutch and Russian cultures as well as sources of national pride, combined with existing anticlassical (i.e., anti-German) motives, contributed to a shared interest in octatonicism, a musical language that was seen by both parties as uniquely “theirs” while German nationalism was expanding from cultural to militaristic power. Clearly, Dutch bells’ nationalistic overtones were apparent to Pijper. What about their sonic counterparts?
Whereas minor thirds are perceptible in traditional Russian bells, in carillons, they are positively inescapable. Carillons’ minor third overtones are so noticeable that they can be difficult for composers to treat due to the strident clashing that occurs when major thirds are present in the music. Much could be and has been said on the gradual development of bell overtones.[67] Unlike Russian orthodox bells, carillon bells since the seventeenth century have been precisely tuned to clarify and distill these sonorities.[68] Carillon composers (such as Matthias Vanden Gheyn) have for centuries turned to diminished harmonies to “solve” bells’ minor third overtones, just as composers attempting to imitate bells have utilized minor thirds to manufacture versions of bells’ overtone spectra. Claude Debussy (who was an enthusiast of Mussorgsky’s music[69]), for example, latched onto the minor third—not the tritone—as the defining feature in his attempts at bell mimicry.[70] Indeed, as noted above, although the bell chords in Boris are a tritone apart, bell chords can be separated by any number of minor thirds.
Matthias Vanden Gheyn’s (1721–1785) preludes make clear the connection between minor thirds and carillon music. Vanden Gheyn was a Flemish musician and bell founder whose collection of eleven preludes constitutes the first music written especially for carillons.[71] Xavier van Elwyck discovered the previously lost scores in 1862, but the preludes did not become part of the standard carillon repertoire until the twentieth century.[72] Fully-diminished-seventh chords appear regularly throughout these preludes (Example 3). Composed entirely of minor thirds, fully-diminished-seventh (0369) harmonies allow cross-bell overtones to melt together, forming an arrestingly uniform sound texture. As we shall see, later composers used the octatonic mode in their carillon compositions for similar reasons. Arthur Berger explains that the “combination of any two [fully-diminished-seventh chords] yields the [octatonic] scale’s total pitch content, and only three such combinations are, of course, possible. Also, between any two collections of scale content, there will be one of these chords in common.”[73] Whether nineteenth- and twentieth-century listeners retrospectively heard anachronistic traces of octatonicism in Vanden Gheyn’s doubly-diminished harmonies is beyond the scope of this article. What is clear, however, is that Matthias Vanden Gheyn was acutely aware of the minor dilemma described above; his diminished bent was a solution. Vanden Gheyn’s diminished-seventh arpeggios beautifully illustrate the clarity and conspicuousness of bells’ unique minor third overtones in well-tuned carillons ringing throughout the Low Countries.[74]
The history of Dutch octatonicism continues with Pijper’s own Stravinsky of sorts, his pupil Henk Badings (1907–1987). One of the most influential Dutch composers of the twentieth century, Badings studied privately with Pijper between 1931 and 1934. That year, he accepted teaching positions at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Muzieklyceum Amsterdam, where he was appointed director in 1938. In 1941, occupying German troops forced the resignation of the director of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, vaulting Badings into the position.[75] (Badings had reluctantly cooperated with the occupying forces by joining the imposed Culture Council.[76])
As he traveled throughout the Netherlands, Badings would have become intimately acquainted with the sounds of various carillons. The Nieuwe Kerk in Delft (where he studied Geology) housed a centuries-old 40-bell carillon at the time; Amsterdam alone has five historical instruments.[77] He once remarked on the “mixture and the great variety of non-harmonic tones” present in bell timbres,[78] illustrating an awareness of bells’ unnatural overtone structures.
In 1950, Badings would leave his mark on the carillon world by composing the first known example of fully octatonic writing for the instrument,[79] never deviating from the [0, 2] octatonic collection (Example 5). Composed as the first movement of his Suite no. 2 for carillon, the neoclassical Toccata Octofonica received the Jef Denyn prize in composition from the Royal Carillon School in Mechelen, Belgium. Jacques Maassen, former director of the Netherlands Carillon School, writes that Badings’s use of octatonicism is so extraordinarily effective “because the minor third occupies such an important place in both the sound of a bell and this scale.”[80] If orchestral representations of bells offer a rough outline of the campanological impact on octatonicism’s evolution, then Toccata Octofonica is a “smoking gun,” as it were. Although it comes nearly 20 years after Pijper’s first octatonic composition, the piece offers clear evidence of the minor third as a mechanism through which bell-filled environments were conducive to composers’ and composition schools’ convergence on octatonicism during this time period.
Whereas Pijper “developed” the octatonic scale in the shadows of bell towers—listening to the carillon compositions of J.A.H. Wagenaar, Sr., and the nationalistic improvisations of J.A.H. Wagenaar, Jr.,—Badings employed the logical opposite. Tuning in to the inherent connections between bell overtones and octatonicism, Badings reflected the octatonic scale with its diminished vertebrae directly onto the carillon. Whether these campanological connections were consciously passed down from Johan Wagenaar to Pijper to Badings remains unclear. However, this genealogy of tutelage demonstrates the political and acoustic campanological overtones that influenced octatonicism in early- to mid-twentieth-century Dutch compositions.
In the Netherlands, as in Russia, octatonicism sprouted in the shadow of bell towers, taking root in soils well-fertilized by centuries-old bell cultures and a common desire to distance themselves from largely Germanic classical music traditions. As a rough measure of bells’ cultural saturation, the Netherlands currently has more carillons than any other country in the world, with nearly 200 (approximately 8,000 bells).[81] For comparison, Moscow is also renowned for its ear-splitting peals, with some accounts estimating 5,000 individual bells (primarily used for zvon) in “The Third Rome” alone.[82] Many factors contributed to Russia and the Netherlands’ mutual interest in octatonicism.[83] (It is also worth pondering bells’ influence in nineteenth-century French soundscapes and political climates.[84]) However, it is difficult to overlook the shared sonic and, to an extent, cultural backdrop between the two countries.
The United States
Across the Atlantic, during the mid-twentieth century, the octatonic scale was also working its way into American carillon music via minor thirds and nationalism. These acoustic and political overtones shaped the octatonic mode’s usage and perception in American carillon music, interacting with the broader culture of American art music through the composer John Powell, among others. John Pozdro, a professor of composition at the University of Kansas, was the first North American to use the octatonic scale in a composition for the carillon. His 1953 piece Landscape remained unpublished until 1976.[85] In 1956, however, another professor at the University of Kansas, Roy Hamlin Johnson, composed Summer Fanfares. Unlike Pozdro’s Landscape, Summer Fanfares was immediately published in 1956 and instantly made waves. Carillonist and campanologist John Gouwens writes that,
In many ways, “Summer Fanfares” was a great landmark in carillon music. When Ronald Barnes performed it at the 1956 congress of the GCNA [at the University of Kansas], it created a sensation. Here, at last, was a tremendously effective piece (which would never be as effective on any other instrument), true “concert” music for the carillon by an American![86]
For how many countries can octatonicism be a point of musical nationalism? Pozdro writes that Summer Fanfares “was way beyond all expectations. I was not surprised at Roy’s amazing feel for the genius of the instrument. . . . I consider [Johnson and his colleagues] . . . as master composers for the instrument.”[87] Even Dutch-American composer Johan Franco writes that it “kind of bowled everybody [at the GCNA Congress] over, but me in particular. I would say I’m very impressed by it, and that’s his masterpiece.”[88] Lara Walter West states that “when Roy Hamlin Johnson composed ‘Summer Fanfares’ in 1956, it was one of the first pieces to consider the acoustical . . . characteristics of the carillon medium.”[89] Ronald Barnes himself wrote that the piece is
without precedent. There is no doubt about its being the first genuinely idiomatic carillon composition . . . Roy Hamlin Johnson’s works for carillon have not only enormously enriched the American carillon repertory, but have also set standards of excellence for anyone who would write for this instrument.[90]
Summer Fanfares undoubtedly remains one of the most influential American carillon compositions to date.
Born in 1929 in West Virginia, Roy Hamlin Johnson was exposed to the octatonic scale in his academic studies and quickly perceived its acoustic connection to bells. He studied piano and composition with Walter Bricht in Charleston before earning bachelor of music, master of music, and doctor of musical arts degrees from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. While at Eastman, he took a class with composer Wayne Barlow, who encouraged both him and Pozdro to experiment with unconventional scales. After earning his doctor of musical arts degree, Johnson accepted a position on the piano faculty at the University of Kansas, where he frequently ate lunch with university carillonist Ronald Barnes and often listened to his recitals.[91] In a 2005 interview with John Gouwens, Johnson explicitly stated that he was drawn to the octatonic scale because of its alignment with bells’ minor third overtones:
I noticed that when he [Barnes] would get to a diminished seventh chord, or a cadenza based on it, the instrument just seemed to come to life. . . . I wondered, “Could anybody build a piece on the diminished seventh chord?” That’s only four notes to an octave. . . . It occurred to me that the [octatonic] scale has a minor third above and below each note. That should sort out some of the problem.[92]
Johnson, like Badings, was clearly attentive to the minor third overtones in carillon bells.
Although he was attentive to bells’ acoustic overtones, Johnson was willing to ignore racial, political overtones in the music of John Powell. Powell (1882–1963) was an American composer, pianist, and political activist who believed in racial and musical purification.[93] He was an anti-black eugenicist and the chief architect of the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act, which made official the so-called “one drop rule” of African ancestry while emboldening Nazis to continue their eugenicist research and policies, according to Douglas Shadle.[94] J. Lester Feder articulates that Powell was preoccupied with scientific racism in that his “musical and political activities were both dedicated to the fabrication of racial difference as an absolute property of the human body that justifies and demands white supremacy.”[95] Powell derided Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” (1893), which contains melodies from African American spirituals. He asserted that Anglo-Saxon culture would guide America to a “Golden Age of National Art.”[96] Johnson performed several piano concerts dedicated to Powell’s music during the bicentennial of the American Revolution.[97] In 1976, Johnson published his own edition of Powell’s Sonata Teutonica (composed in Vienna, 1905–13). According to Karen Adam, Johnson and the John Powell Foundation “took full advantage of the opportunity” to rebrand Sonata Teutonica as a source of “national pride and accomplishment” during the bicentennial.[98] For example, in his preface to his edition, Johnson lauds Powell as “a highly regarded pianist, and an internationally recognized composer of works based on folk music of the South” while glossing over the composer’s white-nationalist intentions.[99] This conspicuous non-discussion of Powell’s exclusionary definition of America, particularly when capitalizing on the American bicentennial for promotional purposes, is disingenuous.
Johnson’s notes to his edition, as well as to his subsequent recording, of Sonata Teutonica smooth over the racist political overtones that Powell’s music gives off. When editing the sonata, Johnson linked a symbol and slogan found in Powell’s program notes to the Deutsche Wiener Turnerschaft (DWT), a strongly nationalistic organization based in Vienna,[100] where Powell had lived for five years between 1902 and 1907.[101] Though the DWT was officially an athletic club, Mary Helen Chapman explains that “many of these clubs were at the time arenas for political organization and propaganda. . . . It is during this very period that Powell completed his Sonata Teutonica.”[102] Johnson noted that the DWT was linked to Aryan supremacy, though his comments go no further.[103] In reality, Powell’s involvement with the DWT (which, in Powell’s own words, was for “German Aryans only!”) inspired him to co-found the overtly white-supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America in 1922.[104] Founding the Anglo-Saxon Clubs “translated the racial nationalism Powell became acquainted with in Europe into the context of the American South.”[105] Through Powell, the DWT influenced the intensification of Jim Crow laws in Virginia. As president and spokesperson of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and bolstered by his reputation as a composer and pianist, Powell became the force behind the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act.[106] This law remained in place until the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia. In 1977, 13 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a decade after Loving v. Virginia, Johnson recorded Sonata Teutonica and released it through Composers Recordings, Inc. For Feder, Johnson’s “dishonest equivocations” in the liner notes smooth over Powell’s white-supremacist politics, simply stating that Powell was “deeply concerned about the problem of race relations.”[107] Johnson was aware of the racist political overtones in Powell’s music and chose to amplify them. While creating an American style of carillon composition, Johnson also defended and promoted a zealous nationalist who strove to define “American” as “Anglo-Saxon” through musical propaganda.[108]
With his 1918 composition Rhapsodie Nègre, Powell sharpened his musical propaganda through, among other tools, the use of octatonicism. Generations of composers in the United States sought to define a national musical style while questioning, writes Douglas Shadle, “what role European styles should play in the development of a national musical culture.”[109] Powell, for his part, strove to create a national style that extolled Anglo-Saxon folk music and parodied African-American music. Johnson describes Rhapsodie Nègre as one of Powell’s most important pieces[110] (it was performed 50 times between 1918 and 1929[111]). It is widely denounced for “denying and denigrating African-American heritage while endorsing the Anglo-Saxon cultural standard.”[112] Powell himself explains that the “pessimistic mood of my Negro Rhapsody is no more than recognition of the gloomy outlook for the Negro’s racial development in a white country.”[113] Powell’s octatonicism in Rhapsodie Nègre is noteworthy for its structural importance to the piece,[114] and because he uses it to portray the subhuman. Feder writes,
Although their [Stravinsky’s and Powell’s] compositions worked in opposite musical directions and their social objectives were diametrically opposed—for Stravinsky, subhumanity was something to work towards, for Powell, something to expunge—for both composers the octave divided symmetrically by the tritone and minor third served as the tonal geography of the subhuman world. . . . What Taruskin (1997)[115] calls the “Romano-German[ic] ideal of humanity” appears to have been so fundamental to the values embedded in the Germanic musical canon that Powell heard minor-third cycles as antagonistic to humanity and used it to dehumanize African Americans.[116]
Whereas Russian and Dutch composers during this period heard octatonicism as anti-classical and anti-German, Powell used octatonicism to describe, and thereby claim, the subhumanity of non-whiteness. In this piece, he uses the octatonic scale to portray African Americans as subhuman, attacking blackness with white nationalism. As we shall see, Johnson edited one of Powell’s later pieces that also employs the octatonic scale; that edition was premiered in 1982. Johnson was steeped in Powell’s music, including his eugenically-tinged octatonicism, while creating an “American” octatonic carillon style.
Due to Powell’s clear and well-documented musical propagandizing, audiences had long turned their backs on his legacy when Roy Hamlin Johnson, according to Feder, attempted to “resurrect” his piano works and to “establish a place for the Sonata Teutonica in the modern piano repertoire.”[117] Powell was a composer of racist music whose “sociopolitical agenda,” writes Adam, was “enmeshed in his compositions.”[118] In 1968, Mary Helen Chapman interpreted Powell’s Sonata Teutonica as a message of Aryan solidarity.[119] In fact, “Sonata Teutonica’s political overtones, especially in the wake of World War I, were so powerful that Powell’s publisher in the United States, G. Schirmer, Inc., declined to publish the work.”[120] Following 63 years of non-publication, and eight years after Chapman’s analysis, Johnson was remarkably undeterred by these propagandist overtones. Beyond Sonata Teutonica, Johnson produced several subsequent editions and recordings of Powell’s compositions throughout the 1970s and early 1980s,[121] further evidence of his dedication to promoting Powell’s music.
Johnson’s promotion of Powell’s work demands attention. Johnson is at the top of Feder’s list of music scholars who covered up Powell’s white supremacy for his equivocations in the notes to his recording of Sonata Teutonica despite the “explicit connections” between Powell’s compositions and racist politics. Separating Powell’s music from his advocacy of white supremacy, writes Feder, “requires a willful act of deafness, not only to his compositions but to the words in which he described them.”[122] Johnson composed the later parts of his Carillon Book for the Liturgical Year—cited as a landmark in the development of his compositional language introduced in Summer Fanfares[123]—in 1986, after immersing himself in and promoting Powell’s music. The “American” carillon style that Johnson created must be understood in the context of his career as a pianist, supporting Powell’s racist definition of “American.”
What’s more, Powell’s connection to American carillon culture predates Johnson’s. In 1949, Powell made an extended visit to the Singing Tower in Luray, Virginia, to learn about carillon composition from composer LaSalle Spier and Charles T. Chapman, the carillonist in Luray for nearly half a century, from 1937–84. In 1951, Chapman recorded Powell’s version of “Larry O’Gaff” on the Singing Tower during a carillon concert organized in honor of the composer, which he attended.[124] Powell waxed rhapsodic about the carillon, writing that “under the magic of his [Chapman’s] hands, the mammoth machine becomes flexible and subtly sensitive.[125] Powell did not continue writing for the carillon. However, he developed a friendship with LaSalle Spier.[126] Spier was a prolific carillon composer, perhaps most notable for his 1958 Concerto Pastorale for Carillon and Orchestra—the first known use of this instrumentation.[127] Powell’s influence on Spier was significant. Writing to Chapman about their day with Powell at the Singing Tower, Spier says, “It was thrilling, and I’ll never forget it.”[128] Powell’s influence can also be seen in Spier’s notes to his carillon composition, Seven Sleepers. Spier explains that the melody comes from “the Ballad Tunes of Virginia, and was used by John Powell, Virginia’s famous composer, for the slow movement of his symphony for full orchestra.”[129] Here, Spier refers to Powell’s Symphony in A (1947).
The Symphony in A received noteworthy attention not just from Spier, but also from Johnson. The piece is the culmination of Powell’s “lifelong project” toward advancing Anglo-Saxon supremacy: an attempt “to make whiteness audible” that “displays Powell’s retention of fascist body culture assimilated while in Vienna.”[130] Johnson lists the Symphony in A as “most important among his [Powell’s] works,” along with only Rhapsodie Nègre.[131] Furthermore, like Rhapsodie Nègre, Powell’s Symphony in A makes use of the octatonic scale. In contrast to Rhapsodie Nègre, however, these octatonic passages are not about blackness. Feder writes that this “appearance of octatonicism and the subhuman musical world it creates either admits the presence of subhumanity in the heart of whiteness or contradicts the whiteness’ self-generation.”[132] Johnson, as with Sonata Teutonica, created his own edition of the Symphony in A. In his program notes for the edition’s 1982 premiere, he again leaves out any mention of the known white-supremacist intentions behind the music.[133] Powell’s music has been performed and recorded on a carillon, and there is evidence that his music directly influenced other carillon compositions, such as those by LaSalle Spier. This, combined with Johnson’s editions of Powell’s music—including Sonata Teutonica and the Symphony in A—and pattern of “willful deafness” to Powell’s white nationalism and eugenically-tinged octatonicism, heightens the need to understand Johnson’s “American” carillon style in the context of his promotion of Powell’s work.
Johnson developed an “American” carillon style around bells’ minor third overtones. Clearly a student of Stravinsky’s music, he punctuates each section of Summer Fanfares with a blaring “Petrushka chord.” Named after Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet, the Petrushka chord contains two major triads spaced a tritone apart. For maximum impact, Johnson even places the chord—in this case comprised of superimposed B-flat and E major triads, both of which are included in the piece’s [1,2] octatonic scale—in the carillon’s booming bass register, marked sffz (Example 5). Similarly to Toccata Octofonica, Summer Fanfares illustrates how composers during this time period connected the sonic dots between bells, minor thirds, fully-diminished-seventh arpeggios, and, ultimately, the octatonic scale.
Octatonicism flourished in American carillon music in the wake of Summer Fanfares, its influence extending even into the twenty-first century. For instance, John Courter’s Suite no. 1 (2001) for carillon opens with a movement titled Fantasia Octatonica. This piece is composed entirely in the [0, 2] octatonic mode. Like Johnson, Courter utilizes recursive chord patterns to lend structure and cohesion to his piece. Unlike Johnson, Courter dynamically horizontalizes his harmonies (Examples 6 & 7).
Whereas Summer Fanfares emphasizes the Petrushka chord, bell chords such as those used by Modest Mussorgsky make up the nucleus of Fantasia Octatonica. Indeed, the A-flat and D dominant-seventh chords are the same harmonies that Mussorgsky employed in Boris Godunov in 1874. Notice their shared, shared tritone (C – G-flat/F-sharp in Example 2).
What effect do bell chords, with their shared tritones in this case, have when played on bells themselves? On natural harmonic instruments, these sounds mimic the overtones of large peals through minor thirds and tritones. Heard holistically, the chords beget a pitch collection that is nearly identical to the [0, 2] octatonic scale (which adds an F); that is, the aggregate of two distinct fully-diminished-seventh chords. The bell chords in Fantasia Octatonica create an effect similar to that of the diminished-seventh arpeggios in Vanden Gheyn’s tenth Preludio: they help bells’ overtones blend. For the same reason that minor third relations evoke bell overtones when played on natural harmonic instruments, when bells are related to one another by minor thirds, their overtones overlap. Aurally, this sounds like a smoothing out of the clashing beats and rumpled color that we usually associate with complex bell sonorities.
Summer Fanfares was the beginning of a distinctly American style of carillon composition; however, while developing it, Johnson was steeped in a definition of “American” that implied whiteness. As a pianist, he was determined to resurrect the racist music of John Powell, who transported proto-Nazi ideologies to the United States and applied them in the context of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Powell’s musical and political definition of American nationalism was white nationalism, and Roy Hamlin Johnson was a steadfast supporter of his music. Many North American carillons were conceived as “peace carillons” following World War I and World War II, purportedly symbolizing democracy. In fact, the instrument with which Ronald Barnes premiered Summer Fanfares was itself dedicated in 1951—just five years earlier—as the “University of Kansas World War II Memorial Carillon.”[134] Alain Corbin writes of a special quality that allows “the harmony of the bells . . . to guarantee that of the community.”[135] In the context of World Wars and John Powell’s racist, proto-Nazi sentiments in compositions like Sonata Teutonica, does the American carillon tradition that Johnson initiated support the peaceful purpose of the bells?
Rather than guaranteeing harmony, the necessarily destructive process of tuning bells, which involves scraping out shards of bronze to doctor partial frequencies and removing undesired colors from their sonic spectra,[136] finds a distorted analogue in Powell’s manufactured definition of “America” as a white country. When studying Roy Hamlin Johnson’s octatonic carillon music, which clarifies bells’ already prominent minor third overtones and smooths over clashing overtones (as discussed above), we must also understand the eugenicist politics of John Powell and the political overtones that Johnson willingly tuned out or, worse, smoothed over.
Conclusion
The relationship between bells and octatonicism extends beyond tritones and bell chords. As these examples demonstrate, three campanological overtones—two sonic and one political—were conducive to the development of octatonicism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries by radiating and reverberating throughout surrounding sound environments and musical cultures. In Russia during this period, bell chords merely represented an early manifestation of widespread campanological forces on composers who were already primed and searching for a national, anticlassical voice. In Saint Petersburg, the sounds of western carillon bells and zvon mingled; their authoritative overtones served nationalist interests while their acoustic sonorities reverberated around the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, facilitating a new harmonic language based on minor thirds and tritones. The Netherlands claimed octatonicism as their own when Willem Pijper, leader of the Dutch nationalist cultural movement and composer of one of the oldest extant Dutch carillon pieces, “conceived” of the mode while setting a traditional Netherlandish folk song. Pijper, whose name is synonymous with Dutch octatonicism, was surrounded by the Dom Tower carillon’s sonic presence and nationalistic potency. Pijper’s pupil, Henk Badings, also had a strong interest in bells’ minor third overtones. He would go on to compose the first octatonic music for the carillon which, by the twentieth century, had become a symbol of bygone Dutch power. Soon after, American carillons encountered octatonicism in Summer Fanfares by Roy Hamlin Johnson, whose noted affection for the white-nationalist music of John Powell recalls proto-Nazi overtones.
Bells and bell music are in constant engagement with various forms of art, both influencing and being influenced by them. In examining octatonicism through the imitations of bell sonorities in orchestral and piano music, as well as through the history of carillons and carillon music, we gain new perspectives on how three “overtones”—the minor third, the tritone, and nationalistic appeal—radiated from belltowers, reverberated throughout musical cultures, and forged sound environments that were conducive to composers’ interests in octatonicism in Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States during this period. The contexts discussed are far from identical, and the relationships that result from the interactions of these overtones differ accordingly, as summarized above. Adding to the variety, the tritone overtone applies primarily to Russian zvon, in which tritones are preserved as salient pitches on top of the minor thirds also found in many western bells.
Historians and theorists have tended to view the tritone (via bell chords) as the primary connection between bells and octatonicism. As this article has shown, the full extent of the connection is more substantial. It is hoped that additional research will draw attention to the growing discourse between bells and other realms of music and art, advancing a similar discourse among scholars of their respective and collective histories.
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Acknowledgements
My resounding gratitude goes to Tiffany Ng for her generous guidance and years of extraordinary mentorship.
My thanks to Kimberly Schafer for her critical feedback and commitment to excellence in the Bulletin.
Tom Gurin, a graduate of Yale University, is a composer and carillonist from the Philadelphia area. He became Duke University Chapel carillonneur after receiving a diploma with great distinction from the Royal Carillon School in Belgium. He was previously a co-chair of the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs. Additionally, he has performed dozens of guest concerts throughout North America and Europe, as well as the dedicatory recital of the new carillon at North Carolina State University in 2021.
Tom composes music for a range of settings, including concerts, films, art installations, and carillons. His music has been premiered at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, Mannes School of Music in New York City as part of the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival, the Yale School of Art, the Antwerp Royal Conservatory, highSCORE New Music Festival in Pavia, Italy, and more. His carillon compositions and arrangements have been published by the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America and Campanae Lovanienses (Belgium), with recent recognition through the Johan Franco Composition Contest and the International Matthias Vanden Gheyn Composition Contest, respectively.
Gurin is currently in residence at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris as the 2021–2022 recipient of a Fulbright-Harriet Hale Woolley Award in the Arts. He was previously a United States Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.
Endnotes
[1] Edward V. Williams, The Bells of Russia: History and Technology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 87.
[2] Luc Rombouts, Singing Bronze: A History of Carillon Music, trans. Communicationwise (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 107.
[3] Richard Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s Angle,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38, no. 1 (1985): 110.
[4] Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei,” 110–113.
[5] Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 101.
[6] Although researchers have digitally reproduced its timbre: John Granzow, Tiffany Ng, Chris Chafe, and Romain Michon, “Mending Bells and Closing Belfries with Faust,” in Proceedings of the 1st International Faust Conference, Mainz, Germany, July 17–18 (2018), https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02158980.
[7] Williams, The Bells of Russia, xv.
[8] In addition to Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States, see Rombouts’ discussion of bells’ role in Belgian nation-building: Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 158–64, 208.
[9] Sergei Bertensson, Jay Leida, and Sofia Satina, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 2001), 184, quoted in Lincoln Ballard and Matthew Bengtson, The Alexander Scriabin Companion (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 168–69.
[10] Marina Frolova Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 181–217.
[11] V.N. Il’in, “Esteticheskii I Liturgicheskii Smysl Kolokol’nogo Zvona” in Pravoslavnyi Kolokol’nyi Zvon: Teoriia i Praktika (2002), 65–72, quoted in translation in Jason Kaminski, “Kolokol: Spectres of the Russian Bell” (PhD dissertation, University of Technology, Sydney, 2007), 241.
[12] Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), 48, quoted in Mark DeVoto, “Boris’s Bells, By Way of Schubert and Others,” Current Musicology 83 (2007): 142.
[13] Montagu Montagu-Nathan, Glinka (New York: Duffield and Company, 1917), 14.
[14] DeVoto, “Boris’s Bells,” 142–47.
[15] Ibid., 131.
[16] Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei,” 110–111.
[17] Arthur Berger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” Perspectives of New Music 2, no. 1 (1963): 11–42.
[18] Devoto, “Boris’s Bells,” 147.
[19] The piece’s octatonic sections are discussed in Berger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky.”
[20] Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: History and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 445.
[21] Marina Frolova-Walker, “Against Germanic Reasoning: The Search for a Russian Style of Musical Argumentation,” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800-1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 104–22, esp. 106.
[22] Frolova-Walker, “Against Germanic Reasoning,” 106.
[23] T.A. Agapkina, “Mat Presviataia Bogoroditsa Kolokol Sviatoi: Kaki Zvony Razdavalis’ nad Rossiei” in Rodina (Homeland) 1 (1997): 94–97, quoted in translation in Kaminski, “Kolokol,” 8, 22.
[24] Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 15.
[25] Ibid., 46.
[26] Alain Corbin, Die Sprache der Glocken: Ländliche Gefühlskultur und Symbolische Ordnung im Franckreich des 19. Jahrunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 28, in Bernhard Siegert, “Mineral Sound or Missing Fundamental: Cultural History as Signal Analysis,” Osiris 28, no. 1 (January 2013): 106, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/671365.
[27] Stephen J. Thorne, “The Seizing of Europe’s Bells,” Legion Magazine, 21 November 2018, https://legionmagazine.com/en/2018/11/the-seizing-of-europes-bells/.
[28] Williams, The Bells of Russia, 47.
[29] Kaminski, “Kolokol,” 172; Mark Galperin, “The Sound of a Liturgical Bell,” accessed 20 July 2020, http://www.russianbells.com/choosing/sound.html.
[30] Irina Aldoshina, “The Investigation of Acoustical Characteristic of Russian Bells” (New York: Audio Engineering Society, 2000), quoted in Kaminski, “Kolokol,” 232.
[31] “Introduction to Russian Bell Acoustics,” Blagovest Bells, accessed 20 July 2020, http://www.russianbells.com/acoustics/acoustics-intro.html.
[32] “Bells in the Russian Tradition: Christianity’s ‘Talking Drums,’” Blagovest Bells, accessed 16 March 2021, http://www.russianbells.com/ringing/zvontypes.html.
[33] Agapkina, “Mat Presviataia Bogoroditsa Kolokol Sviatoi,” 94-97, quoted in translation in Kaminski, “Kolokol,”10.
[34] Kaminski, “Kolokol,” 171.
[35] Ibid., 172–73.
[36] Marguerite Bostonia, “Bells as Inspiration for Tintinnabulation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt, ed. Andrew Shenton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 137.
[37] Ibid., 136.
[38] Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 272-73.
[39] Ballard, The Alexander Scriabin Companion, 168.
[40] Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 107.
[41] Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei,” 72–142.
[42] Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 283.
[43] Nicolas Slonimsky, Writings on Music, Volume 2: Russian and Soviet Music and Composers (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51.
[44] Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei,” 73.
[45] “Willem Pijper,” Mahler Foundation, accessed 8 July 2020, https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/personen-2/willem-pijper-1894-1947.
[46] “History,” Dom Tower, accessed 15 June 2020, https://www.domtoren.nl/en/the-dom-tower/history.
[47] City Archives of Utrecht, “Afbeelding van de huldiging van J.A.H. Wagenaar ter gelegenheid van zijn 40-jarig jubileum als beiaardier van de Domtoren in de Michaelskapel van de Domtoren (Domplein) te Utrecht,” photograph, Fotografische documenten 1B, accessed 11 March 2021,
https://www.utrechtaltijd.nl/collecties/detail/?collection=utralt_utrechts-archief_AB43DE5F-77BF-59CD-86E1-7A878467FFF0.
[48] W.W. Starmer, “Carillons,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 31 (1904–05), 51–53.
[49] “De Stadsbeiardier,” Utrechtse Klokkenspel Vereniging, accessed 11 March 2021, https://www.klokkenspelvereniging.nl/de-stadsbeiaardier/.
[50] Augustinus P. Dierick, “Willem Pijper: An Aperçu,” Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 12.
[51] Ibid.
[52] “Biografie Alexander Voormolen,” Muziek Encyclopedie, accessed 11 March 2021, https://www.muziekencyclopedie.nl/action/entry/Alexander+Voormolen.
[53] Alexander Voormolen, “La nuit dans une vielle ville,” in Tableaux des Pays Bas 1, no. 1 (Paris: Rouart, Lerolle & Cie., 1921), in Leo Samama and Hylke van Lingen, Nederlandse muziek in de 20ste eeuw: voorspel tot een nieuwe dag (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 51.
[54] Tiffany Ng and Emmet Lewis, “International Bibliography of Carillon Music by Women, Transgender, and Nonbinary Composers” (University of Michigan, 2020), 28–29, http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/153530.
[55] Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 180.
[56] Ibid., 203.
[57] Thorne, “The Seizing of Europe’s Bells.”
[58] Jacques Maassen, “Music and Playing: Dutch carillon composers, compositions & editions,” in 45 Years of Dutch Carillons, 1945-1990 (Asten, the Netherlands: Nederlandse Klokkenspel-Vereniging, 1992), 99.
[59] Frank W. Hoogerwerf, “Willem Pijper as Dutch Nationalist,” The Musical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (July 1976): 358–73.
[60] Dierick, “Willem Pijper,” 12.
[61] Hoogerwerf, “Willem Pijper as Dutch Nationalist,” 358–59.
[62] Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei,” 72–142.
[63] “Passepied voor Beiaard,” Donemus Publishing, accessed 12 August 2020, https://webshop.donemus.com/action/front/sheetmusic/3315/Passepied.
[64] Alexander L. Ringer, “Willem Pijper and the ‘Netherlands School’ of the 20th Century,” The Musical Quarterly 41, no. 4 (October 1955): 432.
[65] Maassen, “Music and Playing,” 120.
[66] Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 201–2.
[67] For example André Lehr, “Contemporary Dutch Bell-Founding Art,” in Acoustics of Bells, ed. T.D. Rossing (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1984).
[68] Despite not having access to modern spectral analyses, the Vanden Gheyns and Hemonys were attentive to the minor thirds in their bells: Starmer, “Carillons,” 44–45.
[69] DeVoto, “Boris’s Bells,” 147.
[70] André Lehr, “From Theory to Practice,” Music Perception 4, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 267–80.
[71] Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 115.
[72] Ibid., 113-14.
[73] Berger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” 20.
[74] On the Hemonys’ tuning practices: “François Hemony and his younger brother tuned the partial notes of their bells according to the minor third chord that Jacob van Eyck had determined as the ideal for consonant bells.” Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 91.Complicating this somewhat, by the first half of the twentieth century, some carillons in the Netherlands had become noticeably out of tune due to scars on the bells from corrosion: Rombouts, Singing Bronze, 294–95.
[75] “Biografie Henk Badings,” Muziek Encyclopedie, accessed 12 August 2020, https://www.muziekencyclopedie.nl/action/entry/Henk+Badings.
[76]National Archive of the Netherlands, “Dubbele maten,” accessed 16 March 2021, https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/beleven/verhalenarchief/dubbele-maten.
[77] “Traditional Carillons in Netherlands: index by city name,” Tower Bells, Carl Scott Zimmerman, accessed 5 August 2020, http://towerbells.org/data/IXNLTRcs.html.
[78] Henry Groen, “Componistenportret: Henk Badings,” Klok en Klepel 36 (1986): 3–7.
[79] John Gouwens, “Interview with John Pozdro,” Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America53 (2004): 28.
[80] Maassen, “Music and Playing,” 111.
[81] “Carillons,” World Carillon Federation, accessed 15 July 2020, http://www.carillon.org/eng/dynamic_frame_eng.htm.
[82] Bostonia, “Bells as Inspiration for Tintinnabulation”, 134.
[83] Consider that the Dutch Ministry for Culture, Recreation, and Social Work (CRM) commissioned Rien Ritter (carillonist of Delft following World War II) to compose Sheherazade: Cappricio en Fuga op een gegeven van Rimsky-Korssakof for carillon in 1972.
[84] Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
[85] Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, Music for Carillon 10 (1976).
[86] John Gouwens, Information on Composers and Compositions Published by the Guild (Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, 2004), 37.
[87] John Gouwens, “Interview with John Pozdro,” Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America 53 (2004): 28.
[88] “Composer Johan Franco: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie,” Bruce Duffie, 7 accessed July 2020, http://www.bruceduffie.com/franco3.html. Franco would later compose “Ode to Saint Rombouts,” combining octatonicism with other scales in different registers, especially the G mixolydian mode.
[89] Lara Walter West, “An Analysis of Roy Hamlin Johnson’s ‘Summer Fanfares,’” Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America 53 (2004): 39.
[90] Ronald Barnes, “The North American Carillon Movement: The Instrument, Its Players and its Music,” Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America 36 (1987): 30–31.
[91] John Gouwens, “Interview with Roy Hamlin Johnson,” Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America 53 (2004): 33.
[92] Gouwens, “Interview with Roy Hamlin Johnson,” 34.
[93] J. Lester Feder, “Unequal Temperament: The Somatic Acoustics of Racial Difference in the Symphonic Music of John Powell,” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 1 (Spring, 2008): 18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25433793.
[94] Douglas Shadle, Antonin Dvořák’s New World Symphony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 156.
[95] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 18.
[96] Powell, quoted in Shadle, Antonin Dvořák’s New World Symphony, 156.
[97] Obituary of Roy Hamlin Johnson, Dignity Memorial, accessed 24 June 2021, https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/fayetteville-wv/roy-johnson-8998105.
[98] Karen Adam, “’The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It:’ The Changing Reputation and Legacy of John Powell (1882-1963)” (MA thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2012), 63.
[99] Roy Hamlin Johnson, ed., “Preface” in Sonata Teutonica, op. 24, by John Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), v, in Adam, “’The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,’” 81.
[100] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,” 31.
[101] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 18.
[102] Mary Helen Chapman, “The Piano Works of John Powell” (Master’s thesis, Indiana University, 1969), 17, https://www.proquest.com/docview/193856780/fulltextPDF.
[103] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,” 31, 81.
[104] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 19.
[105] Ibid., 19.
[106] Ibid., 21.
[107] Ibid., 51.
[108] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,” 1-3.
[109] Douglas Shadle, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8.
[110] Roy Hamlin Johnson, liner notes to Sonate Psychologique (CRI SD 505, 1983).
[111] Chapman, “The Piano Works of John Powell,” 17.
[112] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,’’ 34.
[113] “John Powell, Noted Pianist-Composer, Gives Views on Negro Music, Its Use and Abuse,” Musical Courier, 3 May 1930, 8, in Adam, “’The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,’” 35.
[114] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 34.
[115] Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 360–467.
[116] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 35–36.
[117] Ibid., 51–52.
[118] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,” 66.
[119] Chapman, “The Piano Works of John Powell,” 17.
[120] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,” 33.
[121] Ibid., 2.
[122] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 51-52.
[123] Mitchell Stecker, “’Das Glockenbüchlein’: An Exploration of Roy Hamlin Johnson’s Carillon Book for the Liturgical Year, its genesis, music, and relation to J.S. Bach’s Orgelbüchlein,” Lecture, Springfield, IL, 7 June 2018.
[124] Elizabeth Vitu, “LaSalle Spier,” Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America 59 (2010): 37.
[125] Charles Chapman personal archives, quoted in Vitu, “LaSalle Spier,” 37.
[126] Vitu, “LaSalle Spier,” 37.
[127] During the radio broadcast of the piece’s premiere, Spier discussed his treatment of bells’ minor third overtones: Vitu, “LaSalle Spier,” 38.
[128] Ibid., 38.
[129] Ibid., 40.
[130] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 20, 40–49.
[131] Johnson, liner notes to Sonate Psychologique.
[132] Feder, “Unequal Temperament,” 48.
[133] Adam, “The Nonmusical Message Will Endure With It,” 64.
[134] “Carillon,” University of Kansas School of Music, accessed 3 August 2020, http://music.ku.edu/organ/carillon.
[135] Corbin, Village Bells, 79.
[136] Tiffany Ng, “The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology and Modernism” (PhD. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2015), 142.