About me playing the Carillon

I started to play the Carillon since my Junior year. To be honest, at first I chose to play the instrument because it can be used in my cluster (now my minor) towards graduation. But overtime fun started to catch up and I kept playing through the rest of my two years at UR (despite the fact that campus is no longer accessible and I no longer need credits to graduate).

In the first semester, as a final project, I arranged Flower Dance by DJ. Okawari. I always loved this piece and wanted to play it on some instrument one day and Carillon gave me the opportunity. It's interesting how "normal" sounds on the piano or violin can become "terrible" on the Carillon . Such as intended dissonances, which gets amplified so much on a Carillon due to overtones that it's hard to resolve the effect of the contrasting sounds. The arrangement was pretty successful and one year later a classmate also played (a transposed version of) this piece.

Having access to an instrument with great publicity, I arranged and played pieces for Earth Hour during my second semester. At that time I was the vice president of the UR Astronomy club and Earth Hour was an event we call for attention to energy conserving and light pollution of the sky. The piece I played was named Asteroids by Gary White. And it was the first piece I played having paddles. The initial learning was rough: finding and playing the paddles along with hands always eludes me. Luckily I got 2 month's practice time before I played in the concert. The concert went successful along with our exhibition in Wilson Commons: we get students and even local communities coming to our events and enjoy a darkened river campus and Carillon music.

I played most pieces in my third semester. Since it was my senior year, I wanted to graduate with some music that belongs only to Rochester, so I played The Genesee, our school song. Having been warned this piece is arranged as a duet, I took extra caution approaching it. The exercise wasn't as difficult as I though, but it turns out very hard to keep the melody-accompany balance. Although it sounds fine on the tower, recordings on the ground show that my original approach sounds like a blurb without any noticeable melody. So the next time I played it on the tower I pushed back accompaniment that it became unnoticeable on the tower, but the melody was clearly audible on the ground.

Perhaps the most well-known piece I played in the past 2 years was This is Halloween. It was a challenging piece given the tempo but it was also the easiest since the tones are readily known. I liked the piece so much that I "called dibs" as soon as the semester started. It was a great experience playing this piece on Halloween and having see people's surprise face when they knew I was behind all the music.

Another piece I played and enjoyed was Bach's Cello suite No.1. The music was surprisingly melodic on the carillon given it was originally a cello piece. With the handling and peddling technique Doris and I found during practice, the piece was also extraordinarily natural to play. I was very satisfied with the music I played before I started my winter break.

My fourth semester was the climax of me playing the carillon (before the coronavirus outbreak). I learned and played Brouillard by Stefano Colletti. This was the longest piece I played and was the funnest. The first part of the music was a flow, stream of music that one can just sit back, relax in there and enjoy; The second part is the impressionist part, where the right hand stretch out to play the continuous four-note background while the left hand play somewhat dissonant chords. Such strategy creates an impression of lost in fog and trying to find out where the path is. Control is very important here also, since the impressionist feeling can only come out if one imagine what losing in fog would feel like and stream it down to one's hands (and feet). Seemingly hard at first, I found myself having more fun playing than I expected. I was very lucky to have a recording of myself playing this piece and a concert right before the pandemic outbreak.

I'm planning to continue playing the carillon whenever I have an opportunity to do so. Unfortuniately my graduate school choices don't seem to have a viable carillon on campus, but I can certainly look for more opportunities.