Carillon News
Iowa State University
The 2015 Iowa State University Carillon Festival was held in conjunction with a Midwest Regional Carillon Conference. The September festival was sponsored by the Stanton Memorial Carillon Foundation. The opening concert was performed in Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall as well as in two remote locations. For three ensemble works, the musicians were connected via LOLA, a low latency audio-visual streaming system, and performed together by watching each other on LED monitors.
ISU University Carillonneur
Tin-Shi Tam performed Mirror Image by Chris Hanning on the carillon at ISU with the New World Symphony Percussion Ensemble in Miami Beach, Florida. She also performed Nola by Felix Arndt and Hunting St. Hubert by Ondřej Šárek on the carillon with an ISU student brass quintet in Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall. Other selections included Ad Wammes’s GlasWerk for carillon and soundtrack, Peter Paul Olejar’s Threnos and Alex Weiser’s For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Attendees were able to hear the final round of the ISU Carillon Composition Competition. This year’s winning composition is Sisyphus Stone by Kendal Lafayette Fortson of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Composers Ad Wammes, Peter Paul Olejar, and three past winners of the ISU Carillon Composition Competition, Philip Rice, Kyle Shaw, and Alex Weiser, then joined a composers forum via videoconferencing in Tye Recital Hall. This discussion emphasized the various thoughts that a composer has when writing music for the carillon. A few questions were asked by the audience, such as should the composer write for the players to interpret the music or should the players play it as they have it written? The composers all had different opinions.
Guest carillonneurs George Gregory and Julianne Vanden Wyngaard held a seminar called “Your Space or Mine?” in which they addressed aspects of performing duets. These included how to choose a partner, how to play next to someone else, and how to mark the music. They gave advice for players of all skill levels. Gregory and Vanden Wyngaard performed a duet concert, and the festival conference concluded with a dinner party.
Percival Price Symposium
The seventh annual Percival Price Symposium, a one-day conference acknowledging the legacy of the first Dominion Carillonneur, was held in October 2015 at the Peace Tower Carillon in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Featured guest artist was Richard P. Strauss, past carillonneur of Washington National Cathedral and of the City Hall in Albany, New York. A leading carillon technician and designer, Strauss presented lecture, “The Astonishing Development, Arrival, Influence, and Legacy of the English Grand Carillon in North America.”
