It used to be you could set your watch by them. Every day at noon and five, the carillon bells atop Hoover Tower would sound. But the automatic player was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and for the last decade the chiming has been heard mainly on special occasions. Now the player -- and the bells -- will be repaired so that the sound of music might be heard regularly once more.
The 35-bell instrument -- given to the Hoover Institution more than 50 years ago by the Belgian-American Education Foundation in gratitude for Herbert Hoover's World War I-era famine relief work -- is out of tune, says Timothy Zerlang, DMA '89, the University carillonneur. The bells were scheduled to be removed by crane from the 14th floor of the 285-foot tower in October and shipped to the Royal Eijsbouts foundry in Ostend, Belgium. There, workers will test the bells and either tune or recast them, says Craig Snarr, Hoover's facilities manager. The work is part of a $400,000 carillon rehab project that includes building a room where people will be able to watch the carillonneur play, adding a dozen new bells and repairing the automatic player.
Once the player -- the only one in use in North America -- is fixed, the carillon may sound more often than it has. In the 10 years since the giant contraption broke, Zerlang or another musician has had to ring the bells by hand. Zerlang hopes this work will ring in a new era.
