Good luck finding the beat in these time-oriented selections across the ages of carillon music – 1510 being the birth year of the carillon. In Arthur Meulemans’ Toccata, downbeat versus upbeat clarity is constantly obscured. In Aqua, breath-based time, a series of short gestures separated by a duration determined entirely by listening and breathing. Matthias Vanden Gheyn, the first composer from whom exists written music for a carillonist to perform, wrote a series of preludes that make very idiomatic use of the different registers of the carillon. The result: near perpetual motion in the treble bells. Next, flexible time (rubato): Jef Denyn’s Preludium in D, a highly romantic work by the founder of the Royal Carillon School in Belgium, the world’s first school for carillon. The four movements of Werner Van Cleemput’s 3 Sonneries & 1 Bis each use a different rhythmic or temporal syntax. The first movement makes delightfully clunky use of gestures and accents that obscure the underlying meter, the second movement is freer and airier, the third movement fits very clearly and vigorously into its time signature, and the finale is a constant accelerando. The final piece, Absorptions, is seven systems, seven little worlds into which the performer is to settle and explore before moving on. Each world has a direction, specific enough for coherence, vague enough to allow the performer room to explore, for example: ‘wobbly walking’, ‘a chord, very occasionally’, and ‘turbulent tremolo’. Meditative time.

Free and open to the public; presented in conjunction with the 2025 U-M Organ Conference: "Ludus Chronalis: Time, Cadence, and Temporality in Keyboard Music and Sacred Spaces."

ABOUT THE GUEST ARTIST

ALEX JOHNSON is the seventh University Carillonist of the University of Chicago. In this role, he regularly plays the seventy-two bell, one-hundred ton Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon for Sunday services, weddings, convocations, and other major university events. He also instructs and advises the twenty members of the UChicago Guild of Carillonists, a student organization which provides the campus most of its carillon music during the week. Alex serves the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America as chair of the Arrangements & Transcriptions Subcommittee of Music Publications and as a juror for the Johan Franco Composition Committee. Alex has performed across North America, Europe, and Australia, and he is an avid composer, improviser, and supporter of new music.

Previously, Alex taught high school math in Austin, Texas, where he played and taught the carillon informally at the University of Texas. Alex graduated summa cum laude from the Royal Carillon School ‘Jef Denyn’ in Belgium, and before that he studied in residency as the Carillon Fellow at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida. Alex began his carillon studies at the University of Rochester, from where he obtained a degree in Physics. During his college years, he studied gamelan and mbira music at Eastman School of Music, and he spent a semester abroad studying and playing the carillon in Australia at the University of Sydney. In 2019, Alex won 1st Prize Overall, Best Performance of a Work by a Belgian Composer, and the Improvisation Competition at the 8th iteration of the most prestigious carillon competition, the International Queen Fabiola Carillon Competition, held in Mechelen, Belgium. Besides carillon, Alex enjoys cooking and spending time with nature, which, as a Hyde Park local, means spending lots of time at the Point.