The Bells of Summer

Summer Sundays, 5 pm
June 23 – August 11, 2024

Rockefeller Chapel hosts its 58th Bells of Summer Concert Season! Bring your summer picnic and blanket or picnic chairs to the east lawn, and enjoy the beautiful sound of the bells, played by virtuoso carillonists from the greater Chicago area and beyond.

See our Facebook page for updated schedule of performers.

The Bells of Summer (a poem for Wylie Crawford, University Carillonneur 1984–2015)

The Bells of Summer are summer itself:
all urgent tasks aside;
moments stayed by sounds sustained
and sent back;
air cleansed of noise by gentle motions
in cups of bronze,
the lightness of being conveyed
in rhythms of measured stress, without strain;
the wily musician of struck bells,
master and foreman of their perfection,
modestly out of sight through forty-one summers,
comes into sight, and to our right praise.