Word: belle
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From the start, the Harvard career of these bells has been marked by tragedy. President A. Lawrence Lowell hired a Soviet to install and then tune the bells, unaware that they could not be tuned. The poor bell-tuner, thrust into Cambridge without knowing a bit of English, started to file notches into the bell rims, much to Lowell's chagrin. (He promptly had the man fired for defacing them...
...Lowell summoned the help of other, more trustworthy bell experts when it was discovered that one of the bells was not a member of the original set. Because one bell would forever be inharmonious, all efforts for tuning would prove futile. (The Soviet tuner may not have been so bad after...
President Lowell shipped the errant bell across the river to the B-School and contented himself with an incomplete set. Future attempts at tuning never succeeded...
Still, no one can do a proper job if the equipment is so intrinsically flawed. Even the Mozart of bell ringers couldn't make this orchestra sound decent--the instruments are permanently out of tune and the concertmaster is forever absent...
...stop ringing the Lowell House bells would not stifle Russian or Eastern cultural influences on campus. It may even increase student appreciation for the music of foreign cultures. An injustice is being done to what Russian bell carillons should sound like by letting this incomplete, out-of-tune set of bells represent this musical genre. Understanding of this art form could be greatly enhanced if students were allowed to hear it in a form uncorrupted by discordant bells...