ASU’s long-dormant carillon will move to a new home by the end of the month, but in a tight financial climate, it may be much longer until students hear the bells and chimes again on the Tempe campus.

The carillon, a musical instrument that plays melodies and chords on a row of bells through a keyboard, was housed on the second floor of the Memorial Union until the building caught fire on Nov. 1, 2007.

Even though a new space for the historic instrument in Tempe’s Old Main building is nearing completion, faculty members advocating the carillon’s preservation say its displacement has led to other costs that may keep the instrument in storage indefinitely.

Buried and revived

The carillon has a long history of use and disuse, said ASU Carillon Society co-director Judith Smith. It was purchased by the Associated Students of ASU in 1966 as a present to the University and as a memorial to war veterans, she said.

But after a few years of regular use, it was put into storage in Matthews Hall for about 30 years. Smith said she rediscovered the instrument in December 2002 and shortly after, the Carillon Society began raising the approximately $25,000 needed for bell replacement and renovation.

The carillon began chiming across campus again in October 2005, Smith said, playing prerecorded songs on the hour from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, with a 20-minute concert at 5 p.m. featuring the ASU Alma Mater and fight song.

Up in smoke

The carillon’s restoration was complete, Smith said, with a new keyboard and $5,000 budget from Undergraduate Student Government before the 2007 fire on the MU’s second floor.

A firewall came down and saved the instrument, she said, but the carillon was put into storage once again, this time by the Union Stage in the lower level of the MU, where it remains to this day.

A lot of reconfiguring was done after the fire to make space for meeting rooms and ballrooms, said Jann Blesener, director of architecture and planning for the University Architecture Office. The carillon’s home had to be displaced so the MU could better serve its other functions, she said.

“The MU is already very heavily utilized, and we simply could not carve out space to put the carillon back into it,” Blesener said.

Blesener said the architecture office looked across campus for a place to build the carillon’s new home. The Telephone Services room on the lower level of Old Main was chosen as “the only good candidate” for two reasons, she said.

“It seemed an appropriate use for the historic space on campus,” Blesener said, referring to the Old Main building. “And we had space available [there]. Space is in short supply” on the ASU campus, she said.

Music in limbo

The main problem has not been finding a new space for the carillon, but funding the equipment needed to broadcast from a new location, said Carl Cross, a library specialist and co-director of the ASU Carillon Society.

Although the carillon itself will be moved to Old Main, its speakers are permanently hooked up through the MU, he said, where the instrument was originally installed. Cross said that i for the carillon’s music to be heard on campus again, it needs specialized equipment to use the speakers from Old Main.

This means purchasing a transmitter with Ethernet connection that sends remote signals, at a price tag of $5,000, and the carillon cannot be installed until everything used to broadcast its music is in place.

The Carillon Society had just contracted for replacement bells before the fire, Cross said, and is now coming to find out that the responsibility to pay for the carillon’s reinstallation and remote speaker system will weigh solely on them.

“It had taken us many years to raise the funds for those bells, and we did not anticipate having to move [the carillon],” he said.

Cross said he believes getting enough money to reinstall the carillon will be difficult in light of the financial climate and recent ASU budget cuts.

“We have personal donors [who] offered money and then, with the economic setbacks, had to withdraw,” he said. “[Or] they’d say, ‘I can give you this little bit, but not the big amount that I said earlier.”

New location, renewed motivation

The ASU Carillon Society has amped up fundraising efforts, Cross said, collecting donations everywhere from the ASU Foundation’s Web site, a payroll deduction option for ASU faculty and collecting nickels and dimes on campus.

He said the funds would probably have to come from dedicated volunteers and piecemeal donations, because “that’s all we’ve ever been able to do.”

Bill Swayze is a professional musician and senior instructional specialist for the Herberger College Dance who was a volunteer carilloneur for about a year before the MU fire. He said the new space will be a little different, as it is a smaller and will not get the same casual traffic of visitors watching the carillon play.

But Swayze was still optimistic about the new location, and plans to continue volunteering as a carilloneur. The new setup will present no new playing difficulties, he said, and adjusting the volume will actually be easier in Old Main.

Despite the money it will cost to a financially struggling university, Swayze said reinstalling the carillon is a responsibility owed to those who originally donated the bells and keys as an active memorial to ASU alumni who have died in military service.

“You can’t deny the university’s tradition,“ he said. “Just because it’s the New American University doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a history.”

Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.