The lightest bell ever entered in this register, and the busiest. The Lark was cast in 1927 as the treble of a forty-seven-bell carillon — the topmost voice of an instrument played from a keyboard of wooden batons, where a carillonneur’s fists and feet turn bronze into melody. While Magna may speak a dozen times a year, The Lark has played more notes than every other bell in this book combined.
A carillon treble lives or dies by precision. At thirty-four kilograms her partials are packed close and decay in barely a breath, so any error in the tuning would smear every fast passage played above the great bells. She was cast thick-walled in the true-harmonic manner, cut on the lathe to exactness — hum, prime, tierce, quint, and nominal each brought to its place — and shipped with the foundry’s certificate of measurement, still pasted into the register beside her entry.
Her voice is a point of light: struck, sounded, gone in under two seconds. The carillonneurs call bells like her the small change of the instrument, spent freely in runs and grace notes. The foundry takes the description as a compliment. Small change is what the everyday music is made of.