Jazz breaking news: Jazz Musicians Improvise As Glockenspiel Chimes Ring Out In Leicester Square
Monday, November 28, 2011
Jazz musicians improvised to the sounds of the newly reopened Glockenspiel in Leicester Square earlier this afternoon as students from the jazz department of the Royal Academy of Music in collaboration with the Bern Conservatory in Switzerland took part in the reopening ceremony for the reinstalled Glockenspiel at Swiss Court.
Three Academy students, along with students from Bern, were commissioned to write both new music and arrangements of folk songs for the Glockenspiel (pictured, left). Composer and keyboardist Django Bates, a visiting professor at the Academy, and since September also professor of jazz at Bern University of the Arts, also wrote new music for the occasion along with Bern’s Frank Sicora and Bates was among the invited guests at the ceremony.
Triggered by a MIDI interface from the keyboards, an alphornist, singer and small band performed the commissioned music composed for the brightly decorated Glockenspiel on a small stage near the Glock which became a landmark at Swiss Court from the mid-1980s.
A condition of the planning approval granted for the redevelopment of the centre was that the Glockenspiel should return to the Square. The original Glockenspiel of 27 bells, an astronomical clock featuring the scene of a procession of 23 farmers herding their cows to an alpine pasture, was given to the City of Westminster on its 400th anniversary in 1985 by Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
The rebuilt Glockenspiel housed in a 10m high structure portrays a procession of 11 moving figures against a traditional Swiss alpine backdrop, along with the coat of arms of the 26 Swiss cantons with the original bells used again within the manufactured structure completed by a UK firm, Smith of Derby. As part of the ceremony six alphorn players were placed on various roofs around Leicester Square, some of them hidden for effect.
Before speeches by former president of Switzerland Adolf Ogi, Swiss ambassador Anton Thalmann, Lord Mayor of Westminster councillor Susie Burbridge, and Urs Eberhard head of Switzerland tourism in the UK, a parade of colourful bellringers in costume processed into Swiss Court and the glockenspiel started up shortly after 1pm. Former president Ogi spoke of his time as a student in London during the 1960s: “It was fun then as a student but there was no glockenspiel!” The Lord Mayor of Westminster addressing the crowd said: “Leicester Square has not been the same without the Glockenspiel.”
– Stephen Graham