1 in 8700: George Matthew Jr.

For most of us the Mead Chapel bells are background noise to our daily activities, so when we hear them ringing our impulse is not to stop and listen.  Accordingly, one might take for granted the immense skill of George Matthew Jr., the College’s carillon player.

The carillon, which is often mistaken for bells, is the largest type of percussion instrument in the world. The Middlebury College carillon sits at the top of a narrow 75-foot staircase in the steeple of Mead Chapel.

Each key is a rounded wooden lever that, when struck, pulls a wire that causes a clapper to strike a bell.

The resulting sound echoes across campus and beyond.  For this reason, Matthew Jr. regards himself “as not only the college carillonneur, but the town carillonneur...it’s a town instrument.”

Matthew has been the carillonneur at Middlebury College for twenty-eight years, and also plays the carillon for Norwich Univeristy.  He has been playing for 52 years, and has composed and made arrangements of over one hundred compositions for the massive instrument.

A graduate of Columbia University, the University of Bridgeport and Wesleyan University in different degrees, Matthew Jr. worked in chemical research for fifteen years after graduation.

This was before, “music kind of took over,” he recalled. “I decided, ‘I won’t fight this any longer,’ and I went into music full time.”  He was 35 years old when he gave up his career in science and went back to school to earn a Masters in music.

Matthew’s passion for the carillon began at the age of four when his grandfather took him to the 1939 World’s Fair.  Sitting atop his shoulders, Matthew Jr. remembers watching “what looked like to me an incredibly old man with a long white beard who was pounding away…and it made the most glorious racket. I thought ‘I want to do that some day.’”

His passion for the carillon continued during his education at Columbia. Riverside Church, just down the street from the University, housed the largest carillon in the world at the time.

The great Dutch carillonneur, Lefevre, was playing at Columbia at the time, so Matthew Jr. arranged his class schedule around hearing him play. Lefevre told a disappointed Matthew Jr. that he didn’t give lessons.

Undeterred, Matthews Jr. considers himself a ‘student’ of Lefevre. “I listened to him so much and studied his style ... I always tell people that I studied with Lefevre but he didn’t know it.”

Matthew Jr.’s relationship with Middlebury College began when the college’s choir director needed a carillon demonstration, and asked Matthew Jr. to perform.  After the performance, Matthew Jr. met with the President of the Board of Trustees of the College, who agreed to finance Matthew Jr.’s dream: a four-octave carillon. He soon moved to Middlebury.

Watching him play in the intimate and drafty room at the top of the chapel steeple, it’s easy to forget the publicity his songs get. This is the paradox of the carillon: it is played in solitude but, as Matthew Jr. reminded me, “you never know when you’re playing, are there two people listening or two-hundred?  You don’t know.”

The force required to play the instrument mandates that Matthew Jr. hit the wooden keys with his entire hand. He leans in slightly to compensate, and the clunking noises of the keys are as much a part of the music as the bells above.

Matthew Jr. was the first American to play carillon in Russia, and has toured numerous times throughout Europe and the United States. Still, he isn’t upset when I tell him that many students think the music they hear is automated or recorded.

“If you hear the bells a real live person is playing...it’s either me or one of my students,” he states.

For Matthews Jr., the carillon is “part of the acoustic environment of Middlebury.” He always leaves the door unlocked while he plays as an invitation to student visitors. Matthew performs tunes ranging from Samuel Barber and Menotti to ragtime music every week, always ending with Middlebury’s alma mater.

Although Matthew is 78, he is not quite ready to retire from his post as carillonneur for both Middlebury College and Norwich University.

“I’ve tried (to retire) several times and I’ve come back several times ... I’ve been playing this fifty-two years,” said Matthew, “… and I just love to play the carillon.”