The people of Cobh are a lucky lot: every day they get to listen to a sound that is unique not only to their town but to these islands. And the man who makes it happen is Adrian Gerbruers who regularly climbs 200 steps to a tiny room at top of the belfry of St Colman's Cathedral to play the 49 bronze bells which make up the carillon, because Adrian is the cathedral's official carilloneur, a job he inherited from his Flemish father who was the town's first permanent carilloneur.
The eyrie in which Adrian plays is a small room, carpeted and cosy, part of the recently completed 10-year programme of restoration which saw a major overhaul of the 47 original bells, the hanging of two new bells cast in the Netherlands, the installation of a more modern mechanism which makes playing easier ("Before you had to sweat a brick playing the heavier bells" says Adrian) and the addition of two computerised, sound-proofed consoles where students from the School of Music at UCC may practise.
Restoration has been completed as planned in time for the millennium at a cost of £450,000 of which £150.000 came in the form of an EU grant, won for Cobh by the support of Micheal D. Higgins when he was Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gealteacht.
Most bells are rung by pulling on a rope to swing them but the bells of a carillon remain still and are sounded by a clapper that is moved mechanically against them. The clappers are shifted by a system of thick wooden rods roughly corresponding to the keys of a piano and which are connected to the bells by a series of wire cables. If this conjures up a vision of something constructed by a sophisticated Heath-Robinson then you've got it. Throw in a few technical words like baton, partials and turnbuckle and you're transported to another world altogether. And when I tell you that Adrian Gerbruers was once winched up in a basket to the top of a futuristic church tower in Orange County, USA, to play the carillon for the locals there, you might not be surprised if the Hunchback of Notre Dame himself had a walk-on part in all this.
It was in 1916 that a British Man-of-War sailed into Cobh harbour carrying the original 47 bells which had been cast in the Taylor Foundry in Loughborough - bell makers also to London's St Paul's Cathedral. The bells were hung in what was then Queenstown Cathedral and, since then, have played their part in the sea-going life of the town, welcoming people to Cobh with a jaunty tune or bidding them a sad farewell with Auld Lang Syne. When Laurel and Hardy sailed in, Adrian's father, who had once played the piano for the silent movies, welcomed them by playing their signature tune, a gesture which delighted them: they thought they had largely been forgotten in Europe. John McCormack was similarly welcomed - in return for which he gave a rendering of Panis Angelicus in the cathedral.
The sound of a bell, of course, is part of everyone's life - whether it's the chimes of the Angelus or Big Ben on the radio, the tolling of a funeral bell, the ominous sounding of the Lloyds bell, the uncouth call of the alarm clock or the insistence of a cell phone. Bells were first cast by the Chinese 4,000 years ago and they were so loud and powerful the people feared for their own safety. Some of that fear and superstition carried over into Europe which is why bells were regularly housed at a distance from the churches they served. "And even if they were incorporated into the church building," explains Adrian, "you still couldn't get into the belfry directly from the church."
The Cobh carillon has its origins in the 16th-century practice of ringing a bell to warn people about floods and fire, or about the approach of attackers: two rings for a fire, say, and three for a flood. The problem arose when someone missed the first ring and rushed out with a bucket of water to put out a fire and found themselves dealing with a flood. The next step was to use different sounding bells for different purposes. The word carillon comes from quadrillon but the whole thing has since gone way beyond the four bell mark and entered the realms of composition and performance, which is why Cobh has a full four octaves of bells. The heaviest is the Sanctus Colmanus, weighing in at 3.6 tonnes while the smallest is St. John, which weighs a stone.
Watching Adrian Gerbruers play a sprightly gigue on the carillon is a wondrous thing. For one thing, it's a very energetic performance with hands and feet going like the clappers. (Get it?) The bells are played by crooking both little fingers and using them to strike the wooden rods, known as batons. Sometimes, thumb and little finger of both hands are used to hit four notes at the same time. And that's not all: the feet have a whole series of pedals to hit as well, so that at any one time you can have up to six bells ringing out together - and that's a lot of bell. And here, I must put in a word for the tolerance of the people of Cobh. When offered the chance to play, I grabbed it and picked out Silent Night as carefully as I could, though still managing to hit a bum note. How often has the suffering population of Cobh had to endure such a musical travesty? "Maybe they'll think it was you," I said hopefully, but Adrian shook his head. "Not at all. They'll just shrug and say - `there's that one from The Irish Times having a go at it'."
Adrian Gerbruers is in great demand as a carilloneur and plays regularly all over the world. Recently, while making a pitch to have Cobh chosen as the venue for the World Congress of Carilloneurs, he inadvertently found himself elected President of the Federation of Carilloneurs. Which is why he is now looking for sponsorship for the Congress which takes place in the year 2002.
But before that is this year, when the bells will ring out both for Christmas and the New Year - he plays Auld Lang Syne on the stroke of midnight - in a rehearsal for the big one next year.
Ring out, wild bells and show the world what Cobh and Adrian Gerbruers can do.
