100 years of bells — and bones
For 100 years it has stood tall and erect, a symbol of the great university, its lofty ambitions and, nowadays, its soaring tuition bills.
The Campanile has lorded it over the UC Berkeley campus ever since Jane Sather coughed up $225,000 to build the thing because, a century ago, campus architecture was thought to be ordinary and in need of a little shaking up.
And for 100 years, it’s been anything but ordinary. Now it costs $3 to ride the elevator to the top of the 307-foot-high tower, instead of 10 cents. But the view from the top has always been worth it.
Visitors fortunate or foolish enough to ascend at noon have been long subjected to the grandest 10 minutes of music making in the West. The mighty carillon rings out loud enough to unstuff sinuses for miles around.
The other day, to get things warmed up for the tower’s big birthday party — a monthlong bash with multiple events — university carillonneur Jeff Davis stepped into his glass booth on the observation deck. He sat down in front of the keyboard, a Rube Goldberg collection of levers, rods and cables that connects his two cupped hands to the 61 giant bells hanging directly over his head.
“Ding, ding, ding,” went the bell, according to Judy Garland. She wasn’t standing underneath the 6-ton bells that do not ding but clang, reverberate, explode, thunder and detonate.
Expensive instrument
The carillon, valued at $4 million, is the most expensive musical instrument the university owns, and that’s counting a Guarnerius violin. Unlike a violin, a carillon gets listened to whether or not the listener wants to listen. That makes playing one a “great responsibility,” said Davis, who was clanging away a 200-year-old melody by Fernando Sor. The intricate tune was full of sharps, flats and sixteenth notes that were a little too allegretto for Davis, who played a G when he should have played an F-sharp. When a carillonneur goofs, it’s hard to keep it quiet. Tens of thousands of people heard it. It’s the definition of being unable to unring a bell.
“If you make a mistake, you just keep going,” Davis said. “And I make my share. What else can you do?”
To play the carillon, the performer cups his hands into loose fists and strikes the wooden levers with the distal edge of his pinkies. Every carillonneur has developed pinky callouses which he wears proudly. Watching a carillon concert looks like watching someone play Whack-a-Mole at the arcade, without the kewpie dolls. The strain on his arms is so great that Davis must wear Ace bandages and consult with doctors. And on a clear sunny day, which most tower visitors hope for, Davis said the carillon is especially tricky to play — the moving parts expand in the heat and the whole thing requires more muscle power. Bad weather is very good for carillonneurs.
For 100 years, the clamorous clanging has not been loud enough to awaken the Campanile’s other primary tenant, a collection of thousands of Pleistocene era bones retrieved from the Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. The bones, offlimits and unseen by Campanile visitors, occupy five spooky levels between the ground floor and the observation deck. They were shoehorned into the Campanile 100 years ago because there wasn’t room in the paleontology building, and there they have remained.
“Space is always an issue for paleontologists,” said Mark Goodwin, an assistant director at the campus paleontology museum, with a sigh. “It is incongruous and odd to see all these bones in a bell tower.”
Bone storage
The bones are stored on hundreds of tottering shelves and cabinets, some of them little more than open trays. Over the years, many bones have become filthy and moldy. That’s a disgrace, Goodwin said, even though the saber-toothed cats and dire wolves, being extinct, are in no position to object.
“The saber-toothed cat is our state fossil,’’ said Goodwin, holding the remains of one of them. “I look at these bones as living animals.”
Fortunately for Goodwin, the saber-toothed cat he was holding stopped living 15,000 years ago, otherwise the saber teeth could have presented a problem.
These days, scientists from around the world visit the Campanile to take scrapings of the animals’ tooth enamel and run it through spectrometers and isotope analyzers to find out what the animals ate and what their environment was like — experiments that could not have been imagined 100 years ago when the bones were dragged from the slimy, tarry muck in what is now Los Angeles.
Tower visitors never see that part. They enter on the ground floor and are whisked nonstop to the observation level inside the 6-foot-by-6foot elevator car that has been operated for 22 years by Lilyanne Clark. During that time, she has made half a million trips up and down the Campanile.
“I never actually see the Campanile from in here, but it’s OK,” she said. “It’s a beautiful building.”
Suicide barriers, locks
The Campanile, 22 feet taller than Hoover Tower at that other university in Palo Alto, has changed with the times. Suicide barriers of thick glass and later of steel bars were added to the observation deck. New locks were installed to prevent pranksters from sneaking in to attach Mickey Mouse gloves on the tower’s clock hands, as one did in 1970, or to attach a giant pumpkin on the topmost spire, as one did on Halloween in 2000.
The Campanile’s big birthday party, which takes place over the next month, includes special carillon concerts, a campus library exhibit, banners all over campus and a dining hall contest in which dorm students will be asked to build the Campanile with their food instead of throwing it. On Tuesday evening, the Campanile will host something called “Natural Frequencies,” in which light beams will be flashed on the west side of the tower based on realtime vibrations from the Hayward Fault.
The building is very much part of the larger campus world — particularly the agonizing battle over funding and tuition hikes. The paleontologists want $500,000 for new storage lockers for the tar pit bones and the carillonneurs want $1 million to modernize the bell-ringing equipment. So far, both requests are pending while the university tries to figure out how to hold the line on the elevator fee of $3 and the annual tuition of $12,972.