|
May-June 2008
|
A Peal before Leaving
Question: “What was I, a young American student of medicine and electrical engineering—and an observant Jew—doing in the frozen bell tower of a Russian Orthodox monastery in Moscow on the eve of the New Year?” Benjamin Isaac Rapoport posed that question in a February talk at morning prayers in Memorial Church. Answer: Rapoport, A.B.-A.M. ’03, who is in his fourth year of the M.D.-Ph.D. program at the Medical School and does research on the design of brain-implantable electronic devices, is also head ringer of the Russian bells at Lowell House. During the winter recess, he and three undergraduate Lowell Klappermeisters went to the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, seat of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, to study the cultural significance of these bells, to learn how best to ring them, and, said Rapoport, to become part of a renaissance of ringing in Russia. 
Photograph by Diana Eck Valery Anisimov, director of the Vera Foundry in Voronezh, Russia, came to Lowell House in February 2007 with a team of artisans to make molds (right) of the surface decorations and inscriptions on the venerable bells. Back at the foundry, workers modeled the new bells in wax, created clay molds, and poured the bronze. Harvard chose this foundry because it was the only one able to make a bell as big as the Bell of Mother Earth, the largest of Lowell’s set of 17. On March 30, 2007, the superior of the Danilov Monastery prayed and the foundry cast the 14-ton replacement Mother Earth. The Danilov Monastery is the once and future home of the Lowell bells. Stalin wanted to melt them down. Industrialist Charles R. Crane, LL.D. ’22, bought them and gave them to Harvard in 1930. They go home this summer (see “Bell Swap,” November-December 2006, page 88). “The more deeply I have become involved in the repatriation project,” said Rapoport, “the stranger and more miraculous it seems to me.…In the 20 years since communism began to loosen its grip, the Russian Orthodox Church has sent a stream of requests asking Harvard to return the bells….Until 2002, all such requests fell on deaf ears. Who would have imagined that Diana Eck, a preeminent American scholar of religion and also an outspoken supporter of gay rights—and herself married to a female minister in this church—who would have imagined that such a figure would mastermind the return of these bells to the great monastery of the Russian Orthodox patriarch, who has publicly denounced gay marriage and whose church does not ordain women? And who would have imagined that the same patriarch would share public stages…before massive television audiences with Diana Eck? Furthermore, who would have imagined that when the patriarch called publicly for a philanthropist to finance the repatriation of the bells, his call would be answered by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian Jew, whose foundation is run by a Russian Muslim?” In Russian ringing traditions, bells sound rhythmic patterns, not melodies. (Although Lowell’s bells can’t ring a chromatic scale, Rapoport has discovered over the years that tunes can be played with them, including “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.) Readers may hear them ring traditionally during a bell festival and symposium on June 1 and 2 (see www.lowell.harvard.edu/Bells/ for details) hosted by Eck, the master of Lowell, and participated in by monks, foundrymen, the Yale Russian Chorus, members of the Crane family, Vekselberg, and project manager Peter Riley, who will explain how, in July, workers will remove a bit of the bell tower, take out the old bells, and hoist in 27 tons of new ones. “Our Russian teachers and colleagues know that their traditions will live” with us, said Rapoport. “On returning from Russia, I sent a recording of our first Lowell House ringings back to Moscow. I received the following response from the monastery: ‘It is very joyful news for me the Lowellians like your new (and at the same time very old) style. Ben, I also was happy to receive and listen to your audio files. My soul sang with the bells!’” ~Primus V  
 
 
|
