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The carillon repertoire or repertory (also called the carillon art) is the set of all pieces of music written for one or more carillons, performed by one or more carillonneurs, with or without other instruments. In another sense of the term, it is all music for the instrument that a carillonneur is prepared to and habitually plays in public performance.

Definition
The carillon repertoire or repertory is the set of all pieces of music available for performance on the carillon. It includes both original compositions and arrangements, for one or more carillonneurs to play on one or more carillons and with or without other instruments.

In another sense of the term, carillon repertoire is all music that a carillonneur is prepared to and habitually plays in public performance. For example, Joannes de Gruytters' carillon book is also called his carillon repertoire.

Precursors
Like the musical instrument itself, music for the carillon originated from two earlier functions of bells: ringing bells to send messages and ringing bells to indicate the time of day.

In the Middle Ages, chiming bells gave the ringer more control compared to swinging bells, and so was used to send messages to those within earshot. For example, bells would be rung to warn of a fire or impending attack, or a watchman would ring a bell periodically throughout the night to signal that he is alert and all is well. At celebratory events, a bellringer could gather ropes together and chime multiple bells in rhythmic patterns. By the end of the 15th century, chimers are recorded to have played music on bells. A 1478 chronicle recounts a man in Dunkirk having made a "great innovation in honor of God" by playing melodies on bells.

In the 14th century, the newly developed striking clocks spread throughout Europe. Lacking faces, they announced the time by striking a bell a number of times corresponding to the current hour. Eventually, they were modified to make a warning signal before the announcement: the forestrike (voorslag). Originally it consisted of striking one or two bells, and the systems slowly grew in complexity. The earliest-known musical forestrike dates to 1479 in Park Abbey, just south of Leuven, where a clock played Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria, a 12th-century Gregorian chant, on four bells. As the number of bells increased, clockmakers installed drums with pins that could preset melodies and be swapped out with other drums for more variation.

As late as 1510, these two bell ringing traditions were combined into one primitive carillon in the Oudenaarde Town Hall. One set of nine bells were connected to both a keyboard and to the clock's forestrike. The Low Countries—present-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and the French Netherlands—were most interested in the potential of using bells to make music.

Earliest music
The oldest manuscript known is a workbook written by Hendrick Claes, a Brussels clockmaker. Dated between 1616 and 1633, it contains 63 pieces of music for a carillon's pinning drum, among other non-musical content. The manuscript does not mention a particular carillon, but it is written for one of at most 19 bells. The music includes Gregorian chants to be played on Christian feast days, non-religious French airs and court dances, and melodies to texts of the Dutch poets Gerbrand Bredero and Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft. The workbook suggests that Claes did not have much musical knowledge and used it to aid in programming various carillons' forestrikes. The second-oldest is a programming book compiled by Théodore de Sany and presented to the City of Brussels in 1648 for the the carillon at St. Nicholas Church. It contains 61 melodies for feast days, deaths within the Duchy of Brabant, and secular purposes, and suggests that De Sany reprogrammed the drum at least once a month.

Diversity
According to Tiffany Ng, a carillonneur and professor at the University of Michigan, the carillon repertoire shows a distinct lack of diversity with respect to race. In a 2018 bibliography, Ng reported from a survey that only nine compositions for carillon were written by African-American composers, with only one having been published; the counts were updated in 2021, reporting 12 total compositions with 4 having been published. The majority of items in the bibliography are arrangements of spirituals written by white composers. The repertoire omits major genres of African-American music, such as blues, jazz, and soul. Of non-spiritual arrangements, the majority credit Scott Joplin and Florence Price as the composer. Luc Rombouts, a Belgian carillonneur and historian, links the lack of musical diversity to a geographical imbalance in the distribution of carillons. Compared to the saxophone, an easily-transportable Belgian invention that has expanded from its original use in bands and orchestras into African-American, Jewish, and other cultural music traditions, the carillon remains an ethnic instrument to the Low Countries, and has only taken root in the white communities of North America.

In 2020, Ng and Emmet Lewis published a second bibliography, this time focusing on the contributions of women, transgender, and non-binary composers to the repertoire. First, they analyzed the carillon concerts at the 2019 congress of The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA) and at the 2017 World Carillon Federation (WCF) congress. The statistics showed that while music written by women is widely available, "the labor to equalize the representation of women composers fell on women carillonists." At the GCNA congress, 67 percent of works by women were performed by women; at the WCF congress, 91 percent of works by women were performed by women. Analyzing the GCNA's composition competition results, Ng and Lewis noted that all first prize awardees have been cisgender men since its establishment in 1988. This remains true They also reported on the GCNA's historical commissions, in which 25 percent of composers were women, with 75 percent of those having received the commission in 2018. The repertoires of several women in the bibliography show that women have often opted out of the traditional method of seeking a publishing house to distribute their music. Ng and Lewis claim that these statistics reflect "the broader male-dominated history of the carillon and its institutions".