An Evening at the Chapel
As the first notes of “Westminster Chimes” play, the evening routine unfolds throughout campus. Exiting the library, a student with his thumbs hooked underneath the strap of his backpack takes a gentle look up. A gardener on Maple Street pulls a bag of leaves to the side of the road. Over by Leckonby, whistles from the track coaches harmonize with the notes rung by the daily bells. Safety and Security officers make their regular rounds.
Every Tuesday at the same time, you will find Amanda Gagne ’25 in Room 401 of the chapel, walking up winding staircases surrounded by chipped concrete. On her way up, she passes by flashes of colored lights peeking through the stained-glass windows, invisible to viewers from the ground below. Up 60-some steps into the tower of the chapel, she rings the Bacheller Memorial Chime. For Amanda, this is a campus job. She has been a bell ringer for the past two years.
“I’ll bring up bellringing, and people will say, “it’s not automated?” Amanda’s eyes dart down to her watch, waiting for 5:00 p.m. to hit. ”They’d be more consistent if they were automated.” She laughs and looks down at her wrist again, not wanting to miss the weekday tradition. Around her are the names of over five dozen bell ringers who have graduated, carved into the mismatched stone, brick, white paint and mortar walls.
Amanda stands in the center of the room. In front of her is a playing stand that looks more like a 4-foot-tall bedframe than an instrument. The wooden frame of the stand consists of 10 armchair-like levels that connect to the bells with a cable that Amanda can play with a hearty 10 to 15-pound push. The stand looks out of place, an ancient artifact compared to the metal chairs and white foldable table that furnish the room.
“I’ve never actually seen the bells,” Amanda looks up toward the white plaster ceiling of the room. The Bacheller Memorial Chime— located a room above where she plays— is just out of reach, connected only by cables.
The Chime consists of 10 bronze bells donated by Irving Bacheller in 1926. The largest one— famously inscribed to his wife, Ann Bacheller— is the only free-swinging bell. Instead of being connected to a system of cables and hinges that play with a lever push, the bell connects to the ground by a red-speckled rope coiled around the back post of the playing stand.
“One of these days, we are going to ring that,” Amanda says hopefully. She has never seen the free-swinging bell rung. ”I want to ring it when I graduate, but the two ringers who are now training— they are both juniors—don’t want to deal with it if there are any issues.” Amanda and the other bell ringers worry that the bell may break when rung again after years of inactivity.
Before Amanda starts her campus-wide performance, a loud vent turns on in the bell ringer’s room. As Amanda cascades through her first song, she adds to the noise, with each petal making a thick thump alongside the chime as the level returns to place. Despite having a prime seat for listening to the bells, the sound of the vent overwhelms the ringing. The muddled sounds from the bell ringer’s room cannot be more different from the clear, distinct sound of the 5 p.m. chimes the rest of campus hears.
The bell ringers carry on almost a century of St. Lawrence tradition. But a lot has changed. Bell ringers added music to the chime library. The mechanisms for playing the bells were updated from just wooden rods and straps. A fire in the chapel led to significant renovations of the bell tower in 2013. St. Lawrence community still clings to the tradition, no matter how out of touch it may be from its inception.
Besides the beginning and ending songs, it is up to Amanda to decide what songs she wants to play. Every few minutes, the bells will go silent as Amanda flips through the songbooks, looking through pages of music. The music she plays from is collected in a series of three-ring binders, neatly arranged in plastic sleeves on the foldable table. Amanda points out a faint ”not great” written on a sheet of music. ”I wrote that there because I did not like the arrangement,” she giggles.
Amanda settles on ”Ode to Joy”. This song requires Amanda to progressively play more and more notes at once. After the first chorus, the vent finally turns off. She starts playing two notes at once, with her palms quickly moving between the wooden pedals. The bells ring in unison, almost shaking the tower.
“It’s kind of like muscle memory for me at this point,” Amanda shares when the song ends. Even so, Amanda welcomes a challenge. She taps one of the levers, sharing that it broke earlier in the school year while she was ringing. ”When this key was out of commission for a couple of days, it was exciting to get to modify some of the songs— it was nice to change it up for a bit.” Amanda, a musician herself, was inspired by the mishap and plans to do an SYE on bellringing arrangements.
It takes skill to play some of the pieces. Each note requires Amanda to shuffle around the instrument, weaving her arms together and even lifting her foot to get to the right key. Even traditional songs seem impossible to play. ”With the way the alma mater is arranged, for some reason, it has like four keys,” she says. Amanda shuffles around the wooden box, showing the various contortions she needs to put her body in to play the St. Lawrence signature song. ”None of us have figured out why that’s the case,” she says.
Amanda usually plays alone, besides when she helps train a new bell ringer. ”It’s nice when there is another person here: one person plays the higher keys, and one person plays the lower keys.” She checks her watch one final time. As it turns to 5:25 p.m., Amanda gets ready to play one last time for the evening. She sets a red binder on the ornate music stand and turns towards me. ”How do you feel about your musical ability for two notes?” she asks.
As tradition states, Amanda plays three songs to conclude the evening ritual. She starts with ”Chapel Bells,” pausing briefly to let the reverberating sound of the chimes finish ringing in the room. Amanda quickly jumps to the next song, ”A Tribute.” She flips a page in the red binder and guides my hands to two pedals, which feel smooth under my palms. Amanda starts the finale of ”Alma Mater.” Toward the end, she gives me a nod. I play the notes, shallow and off-beat. Amanda recovers from my folly, playing the remainder of the song confidently. At 5:30 p.m., the chapel is met with silence.
Amanda shuts a creaking door behind her and heads down the winding stairs. When she steps onto the campus ground, which she just towered over moments before, it’s noticeably darker than when she entered the chapel.