When the new B.M.C. Durfee High School opens later this year in Fall River, Mass., it will include a nearly 150-year-old part of the school’s history that stretches back to its original building: its bells.
The Fall River Herald-News reports that installing multiple octaves of bells will make Durfee’s chimes a carillon, a rare, massive instrument.
Only about 185 bell towers in North America have enough bells to be considered a carillon, says Ben Sunderlin, owner of B.A. Sunderlin Bellfoundry, a which is restoring and expanding the school's set of bells.
Durfee’s original building was equipped with a 10-bell chime that was cast some time around the 1880s. When the school moved to its current building, the bells were displayed on its lawn. One of the bells, the smallest, was stolen and a community group worked to preserve the remaining bells, build a new bell tower, and add new bells to the set.
In 2018, Sunderlin’s company was called in to make more bells so that when it is installed in the high school building now under construction, the carillon can play two full octaves with 23 notes.
According to Sunderlin, Durfee will be the only public school in the country to have an official carillon.
The biggest of Durfee’s bells weighs about 2,700 pounds and is 52 inches in diameter at the widest part. The smallest is about 92 pounds and 15 inches wide. All in all, the bells clock in at about 11,000 pounds, or five and a half tons, of bronze.
Suffolk Construction is installing the bells this week in the new school. Work will then begin on hooking up the mechanisms to actually play them. The instrument will be able to be played both electronically, with a system of electromagnetic signals that can move the bells’ clappers, and manually, with a device similar to an organ, Sunderlin says.
