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Queen of Sheba - by JBulaong 2017 oil on canvas 24" x 32"
#islandsofgold #Ophir #agate #cornellian #bdellium #narra #almugtree #QueenofSheba #endsoftheearth #JBulaong #painting #oiloncanvas
Beauty, wealth and a strong sense of connection characterized this lady. New research: that this stunning lass hailed from the Far East, at the ends of the earth; who gave vast quantities of gold to King Solomon (for God's temple); which was abundant from her country of origin non other than the "Islands of gold."
* Because of its remote and restricted breeding grounds, the Harris's Sparrow was one of the last North American species to have its nest discovered. The first nest was found in 1931 at Churchill, Manitoba, by soon-to-be Cornellian George M. Sutton.
* The Harris's Sparrow is the only bird species that breeds in Canada and nowhere else in the world.
* In winter flocks, Harris's Sparrows maintain linear dominance hierarchies that determine access to food and roost sites. The most dominant birds are the oldest males, and they also have the largest bibs. If first winter birds have their feathers dyed black, creating an artificially large bib, they rise in the dominance hierarchy.
* They nest in an open cup of mosses, small twigs, and lichens, lined with dried grass and often some caribou hair. Placed on ground, sunken into moss and lichens.
Actually a small, bush-like dogwood, with rare yellow flowers, that blooms in early Spring: "Cornus Mas." Thank you to the Central Park Conservancy, for the plant identification.
I hung around for awhile, waiting for the hordes of people to pass so I could get a photo of this blooming tree. Two Japanese men, also taking photos, asked me when everything else would start to bloom, as they were only going to be in New York for two weeks. I told them it all depended on the weather. But they were out of luck this year; we had snow the next day, and the cold weather lingered through April.
Central Park, looking south from just off Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, NYC -- April 1, 2018
It's been almost an era since i've uploaded something here. This is my sleepy dragon :P We (cornellians) meseared his respiration rate & it was incredibly awesome! it was kinda bizarre :o what a creepy dragon! :P anyways missing u all already... i'm having a bio preliminary tomorrow.. -.-
atelier ying, nyc.
Lest we misjudge Frederick the Great, the import of coffee caused a large imbalance of trade for the 18th century Prussian economy.
But the pleasures of drinking bowls of sweet coffee in coffeehouses proved too great a thing and Frederick wisely capitulated, but not before employing "coffee smellers" to patrol Leipzig for any illegal coffee roasting.
I love Bach. This is my 24th Bach related design drawing for this great composer. They are all bucolic in flavor, celebrating the humbler aspects of this man's life, as a contrast to his elevated musical side. The subtler indirect reason is to point out that Bach's music and influence, in many ways, is universal; not relegated just to the world of Sacred classical music, as is exhibited by the following piece of his secular music which informs this design.
Bach's "Kaffeekantate" BWV 211, a kind of operetta, was popularly performed by his Collegium Musicum at the Zimmermanneschles Kaffeehaus in Leipzig.
Bach's camera has the largest viewfinder I have ever envisioned.
It only functions as an internal view device however, and mounts over a plain Brownie Box enclosure but modified to accept bellows and a 10cm f2.9 Anticomar lens from a Plaubel Makina, instead of the usual Brownie Meniscus lens. The uncoated Anticomar may lend subjective effects to please the photographer. The spinning bowl of the viewfinder has filtered natural light, angled mirrors and a set of slide views of Leipzig during Bach's time. Directly below the v.f. is a coffee grinder with two side opening hatches for putting coffee beans in and pouring out grounded coffee. The bottom hatch also detaches conveniently.
Focus is also done by the coffee grinder via its handle (which connects all the way down past the grinding mechanism) and rear ground glass. Each film holder is modified (like the Kodak Autographic) to allow Bach to scribble at least a single musical subject for a Fugue to expand upon later, should he come upon one while working on a street portrait. The smell of freshly ground beans would any subvert any wandering coffee inspector. If Bach had used this camera to take a suite of portraits of Frederick the Great's "coffee smellers" and donated it to the Leipzig Gewandhaus, it probably would have paid for all of its three historic renovations. Perhaps this thought exists only in the scope of this design but in a Cornellian world it would have been possible. Nevertheless, Bach could bring his modern-day "imported" Zimbabwe coffee to any Asian coffee shop and have them steam brew it for a taste from home.
This design is dedicated to Chris Land, who showed me late in life how to play Bach at the keyboard.
Design, text and drawing are copyright 2013 by David Lo.
Colorized photo of the Erie Rail Station as it appeared circa 1875. Note the statue in front of the crowd. According to former County Historian Tom Byrne, the “Chief” was one of a half-dozen statues with which Dr. Edwin Eldridge decorated his park around 1870. He was given to Eldridge by “Gentleman” Jim Fisk, of the Erie Railroad, who was a business associate. Dr. Eldridge’s will provided that if the city did not take over his park upon his death, the Chief statue would be moved to the Erie Depot on Railroad Avenue. Eldridge died in 1876, and with no action by the city until 1890, the statue was relocated. The statue represents a Native American Chief and his dog. Beginning in the 1940’s, “vandals” began to assault "Chief Clerk". His tomahawk was taken numerous times, his arm was fractured, and in December of 1951, according to the Star-Gazette, “the coup de grace was administered by three Cornellians, police said. The statue was pretty well shattered even though a fence had been erected around it. The Erie sadly pronounced the old boy beyond repair and the statue was scrapped”
Tombstone of historian Goldwin Smith and his wife. St. James Cemetery, Toronto, Canada. Spring afternoon, 2021. Pentax K1 II.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwin_Smith
Goldwin Smith (13 August 1823 – 7 June 1910) was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States.
Life and career
Early life and education
Smith was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford. He threw his energy into the cause of university reform with another fellow of University College, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. On the Royal Commission of 1850 to inquire into the reform of the university, of which Stanley was secretary, Smith served as assistant-secretary; and he was then secretary to the commissioners appointed by the act of 1854. His position as an authority on educational reform was further recognised by a seat on the Popular Education Commission of 1858. In 1868, when the question of reform at Oxford was again growing acute, he published a pamphlet, entitled The Reorganization of the University of Oxford.
In 1865, he led the University of Oxford opposition to a proposal to develop Cripley Meadow north of Oxford railway station for use as a major site of Great Western Railway (GWR) workshops. His father had been a director of GWR. Instead the workshops were located in Swindon. He was public with his pro-Northern sympathies during the American Civil War, notably in a speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester in April 1863 and his Letter to a Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association the following year.
Besides the Universities Tests Act 1871, which abolished religious tests, many of the reforms suggested, such as the revival of the faculties, the reorganisation of the professoriate, the abolition of celibacy as a condition of the tenure of fellowships, and the combination of the colleges for lecturing purposes, were incorporated in the act of 1877, or subsequently adopted by the university. Smith gave the counsel of perfection that "pass" examinations ought to cease; but he recognised that this change "must wait on the reorganization of the educational institutions immediately below the university, at which a passman ought to finish his career." His aspiration that colonists and Americans should be attracted to Oxford was later realised by the will of Cecil Rhodes. On what is perhaps the vital problem of modern education, the question of ancient versus modern languages, he pronounced that the latter "are indispensable accomplishments, but they do not form a high mental training" – an opinion entitled to peculiar respect as coming from a president of the Modern Language Association.
Oxford years
He held the regius professorship of Modern History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866, that "ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the 'best instrument for cultivating the historical sense." As a historian, indeed, he left no abiding work; the multiplicity of his interests prevented him from concentrating on any one subject. His chief historical writings – The United Kingdom: a Political History (1899), and The United States: an Outline of Political History (1893) — though based on thorough familiarity with their subject, make no claim to original research, but are remarkable examples of terse and brilliant narrative.
He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1865.
The outbreak of the American Civil War proved a turning point in his life. Unlike most of the ruling classes in England, he championed the cause of the North, and his pamphlets, especially one entitled Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery? (1863), played a prominent part in converting English opinion. Visiting America on a lecture tour in 1864, he received an enthusiastic welcome, and was entertained at a public banquet in New York. Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution. But it was not until a dramatic change in Smith's personal circumstances that led to his departure from England in 1868, that he took up the post. He had resigned his chair at Oxford in 1866 in order to attend to his father, who had suffered permanent injury in a railway accident. In the autumn of 1867, when Smith was briefly absent, his father took his own life. Possibly blaming himself for the tragedy, and now without an Oxford appointment, he decided to move to North America.
Cornell years
Smith's time at Cornell was brief, but his impact there was significant. He held the professorship of English and Constitutional History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1868 to 1872. The addition of Smith to Cornell's faculty gave the newly opened university "instant credibility." Smith was something of an academic celebrity, and his lectures were sometimes printed in New York newspapers.
During Smith's time at Cornell he accepted no salary and provided much financial support to the institution. In 1869 he had his personal library shipped from England and donated to the university. He lived at Cascadilla Hall among the students, and was much beloved by them.
In 1871 Smith moved to Toronto to live with relatives, but retained an honorary professorship at Cornell and returned to campus frequently to lecture. When he did, he insisted on staying with the students at Cascadilla Hall rather than in a hotel. Smith bequeathed the bulk of his estate to the University in his will.
Smith's abrupt departure from Cornell was credited to several factors, including the Ithaca weather, Cornell's geographic isolation, Smith's health, and political tensions between Britain and America.[13] But the decisive factor in Smith's departure was the university's decision to admit women. Goldwin Smith told White that admitting women would cause Cornell to "sink at once from the rank of a University to that of an Oberlin or a high school" and that all "hopes of future greatness" would be lost by admitting women.
Goldwin Smith Hall
On June 19, 1906 Goldwin Smith Hall was dedicated, at the time Cornell's largest building and its first building dedicated to the humanities, as well as the first home to the College of Arts and Sciences. Smith personally laid the cornerstone for the building in October 1904 and attended the 1906 dedication. The Cornell Alumni News observed on the occasion, "To attempt to express even in a measure the reverence and affection which all Cornellians feel for Goldwin Smith would be attempting a hopeless task. His presence here is appreciated as the presence of no other person could be."
Toronto
In Toronto, Smith he edited the Canadian Monthly, and subsequently founded the Week and the Bystander, and where he spent the rest of his life living in The Grange manor.
In 1893, Smith was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. In his later years he expressed his views in a weekly journal, The Farmer's Sun, and published in 1904 My Memory of Gladstone, while occasional letters to the Spectator showed that he had lost neither his interest in English politics and social questions nor his remarkable gifts of style. He died at his residence in Toronto, The Grange.
Political views
He continued to take an active interest in English politics. As a Liberal, he opposed Benjamin Disraeli, and was a strong supporter of Irish Disestablishment, but refused to follow Gladstone in accepting Home Rule. He expressly stated that "if he ever had a political leader, his leader was John Bright, not Mr Gladstone." Causes that he powerfully attacked were Prohibition, female suffrage and state socialism, as he discussed in his Essays on Questions of the Day (revised edition, 1894). He also published sympathetic monographs on William Cowper and Jane Austen, and attempted verse in Bay Leaves and Specimens of Greek Tragedy. In his Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897), he abandoned the faith in Christianity that he had expressed in his lecture of 1861, Historical Progress, in which he forecast the speedy reunion of Christendom on the "basis of free conviction," and wrote in a spirit "not of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports despair of spiritual truth, but of free and hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is necessary to clear by removing the wreck of that upon which we can found our faith no more."
Anglo-Saxonism
Smith was considered a devout Anglo-Saxonist, deeply involved with political and racial aspects of English nationhood and British colonialism. He believed the Anglo-Saxon "race" excluded Irish people but could extend to Welsh and Lowland Scots within the context of the United Kingdom's greater empire. Speaking in 1886, he referred to his "standing by the side of John Bright against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the West, as I now stand against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the East." These words form the key to his views of the future of the British Empire and he was a leading light of the anti-imperialist "Little Englander" movement.
Smith thought that Canada was destined by geography to enter the United States. In his view, separated as it is by north–south barriers, into zones communicating naturally with adjoining portions of the United States, it was an artificial and badly-governed nation. It would break away from the British Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons of the North American continent would become one nation. These views are most fully stated in his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). Donald Creighton writes that Smith was most ably rebutted by George Monro Grant in the Canadian Magazine.
British imperialism
Smith identified as an anti-imperialist, describing himself as "anti-Imperialistic to the core," yet he was deeply penetrated with a sense of the greatness of the British race. Of the British empire in India he said that "it is the noblest the world has seen... Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there." His fear was that England would become a nation of factory-workers, thinking more of their trade-union than of their country. He was also opposed to Britain granting more representative government to India, expressing fear that this would lead to a "murderous anarchy."
His opinion of British activity in the Transvaal was well voiced in the Canadian press and in his book In The Court of History: An Apology of Canadians Opposed to the Boer War (1902). This work is a fascinating articulation of pacifist opposition to the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. It is important because it is amongst the few expressions of opposition toward from the perspective of an Anglo-colonial settler. His anti-imperialism was intensified and made manifest in his Commonwealth or Empire? (1902), a warning to the United States against the assumption of imperial responsibilities.
Antisemitism
Smith had virulently anti-Jewish views. Labelled as "the most vicious anti-Semite in the English-speaking world", he referred to Jews as "parasites" who absorb "the wealth of the community without adding to it". Research by Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick has studied Smith's writings, which claimed that Jews were responsible for a form of "repulsion" they provoked in others, due to his assertion of their "peculiar character and habits", including a "preoccupation with money-making", which made them "enemies of civilization". He also denigrated brit milah, or circumcision, as a "barborous rite", and proposed assimilating Jews or deporting them to Palestine as a solution to the "Jewish problem".
Smith wrote, "The Jewish objective has always been the same, since Roman times. We regard our race as superior to all humanity, and we do not seek our ultimate union with other races, but our final triumph over them." He had a strong influence on William Lyon Mackenzie King and Henri Bourassa.
He proposed elsewhere that Jews and Arabs were of the same race. He also believed that Islamic oppression of non-Muslims was for economic factors.
In December 2020, the Cornell University Board of Trust voted to remove Smith's name from the honorific titles of twelve professors at Cornell. The Board took this action in recognition of Smith's published misogynistic, racist, and anti-Semitic views. The Board declined to rename Goldwin Smith Hall.
Legacy
Goldwin Smith is credited with the quote "Above all nations is humanity," an inscription that was engraved in a stone bench he offered to Cornell in May 1871. The bench sits in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, named in his honour. This quote is the motto of the University of Hawaii and other institutions around the world (for example, the Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign).
Another stone bench inscribed with the motto, sits on the campus of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. It sits with a clear view down onto the city.
After his death, a plaque in his memory was erected outside his birthplace in the town centre of Reading. This still exists, outside the entrance to the Harris Arcade.
www.biographi.ca/en/bio/smith_goldwin_13E.html
SMITH, GOLDWIN, writer, journalist, and controversialist; b. 13 Aug. 1823 in Reading, England, son of Richard Pritchard Smith, an Oxford-educated physician and railway promoter and director, and Elizabeth Breton, and the only one of their seven children to survive to adulthood; d. 7 June 1910 in Toronto.
After attending a private school and Eton College, Goldwin Smith in 1841 went to Christ Church and then in 1842 to Magdalen College, both at Oxford. He was awarded a first class in literae humaniores and obtained a ba in 1845 and an ma in 1848. He also carried off a series of prizes in classical studies, including one for a Latin essay on the position of women in ancient Greece. He both translated and wrote Latin verse, interests he would retain throughout his life. His education was intended as a preparation for the law and in 1842 his name had been entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1850 but he never pursued a legal career.
When Smith was at Oxford the university was racked with religious controversy which focused on John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. Smith apparently admired Newman’s style but he was repelled by the movement’s ritualistic tendencies and its affinities with Roman Catholicism. Although he was a member of the Church of England, as was required of all Oxford students at the time, his mother’s Huguenot background may have contributed to his developing religious liberalism and dislike of clericalism. He would remain interested in religious issues until the end of his life, but his knowledge of theology was superficial. In addition, his understanding of the scientific controversies that were beginning to arise in pre-Darwinian Oxford was modest and was probably gained at the geological lectures of William Buckland, who upheld William Paley’s view that God’s existence was demonstrated by design in nature. Although Smith would come to accept a version of evolution and to realize, as he wrote in 1883, that it had “wrought a great revolution,” he never fully understood Charles Darwin’s hypothesis.
Smith spent the late 1840s in London and in travels on the Continent with Oxford friends. His growing interest in liberal reforms, especially in reducing the privileged status of the Church of England, was stimulated by events and personalities at home and abroad, though he quickly joined the side of authority during the Chartist disturbances in 1848. His first reformist thrusts were directed at Oxford. A fellow in civil law at University College from 1846, he joined in a demand for a reduction in clerical control over the university. Partly as a result of the agitation, which included letters from Smith to the Times of London in 1850, a royal commission, with Smith as assistant secretary, was struck in that year to investigate the university. The commission reported in 1852 and the Oxford University Act two years later relaxed but did not abolish religious tests.
During his years with the royal commission Smith widened his contacts in the political and intellectual world and turned to journalism, which was to be his permanent vocation. In 1850 he began contributing to the Morning Chronicle and in 1855 to the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, both published in London, reviewing poetry and advocating university reform. In 1858 he was made a member of a new royal commission, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle, to examine Britain’s educational system, and he wrote part of the report which appeared in 1862. Meanwhile, also in 1858, the Conservative government of Lord Derby appointed Smith regius professor of modern history at Oxford. This post carried such prestige that Smith, who was only 35, might have been expected to settle into it for the rest of his life. In 1861 he indicated his intention to withdraw from active journalism and devote himself to his new profession as an historian. He apparently planned to write some serious scholarly works, but this goal proved incompatible with his intense interest in contemporary affairs. Lack of detachment was the most prominent characteristic of Smith’s historical writing. He always knew which side was right. For him history was not an arid, scientific search for objective accuracy. “History,” he argued, “without moral philosophy, is a mere string of facts; and moral philosophy, without history, is apt to become a dream.”
Smith used his chair largely to engage in controversies over political and religious questions. Although he was undoubtedly a stimulating and devoted lecturer and tutor, he showed no interest in original research and published nothing of scholarly merit. His later historical publications and literary biographies, including histories of the United States and the United Kingdom and studies on William Cowper and Jane Austen, were little more than a reworking of secondary sources usually spiced up with a dose of his principles and prejudices. He was a man of letters, not a research scholar, and he also published travel books and Latin and Greek authors in translation. His first book was typical. Of his five Lectures on modern history (1861), three dealt with religious controversies related to rationalism and agnosticism, another with the idea of progress, and only one with a historical topic, the founding of the American colonies. Though denying that history was a science, Smith was quite prepared to draw moral laws from his reading of the past. In the first place, he considered “the laws of the production and distribution of wealth . . . the most beautiful and wonderful of the natural laws of God. . . . To buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, the supposed concentration of economical selfishness, is simply to fulfil the commands of the Creator.” These laws, discovered by Adam Smith, whom he viewed as a prophet, expressed a tenet of political economy from which he would never deviate: a market economy guided by the “hidden hand” was divinely sanctioned and if faithfully observed would lead to a just social order. Secondly, Smith’s reading of history convinced him that religion provided the cement holding the social order in place. “Religion,” he warned those who contended that progress had made Christianity obsolete, “is the very core, centre, and vital support of our social and political organization; so that without a religion the civil tie would be loosened, personal would completely prevail over public motives, selfish ambition and cupidity would break loose in all directions, and society and the body politic would be in danger of dissolution.”
To these lessons of history Smith added a third which would serve as a permanent guide to his judgements on the way of the world, a conviction that “colonial emancipation” should take place as rapidly as possible because it was – except for India and Ireland – inevitable. This conclusion appeared in a series of articles published in the London Daily News in 1862–63 and then in pamphlet form as The empire in 1863. There he presented a distillation of the opinions of his friends John Bright, Richard Cobden, and others of the so-called Manchester school who believed that Britain’s economic power, under free trade, was so great that the formal, political empire could be disbanded without economic loss. The lesson of the American revolution, for Smith a disaster which had divided the Anglo-Saxon people, was simply that colonies should be allowed to grow naturally into nations. Once they were freed of the yoke of dependency, “something in the nature of a great Anglo-Saxon federation may, in substance if not form, spontaneously arise out of affinity and mutual affection.” Though condemned by the Times and attacked by Benjamin Disraeli as one of the “prigs and pedants” who should make way for statesmen, Smith clung tenaciously to his anti-imperial faith.
A drastic alteration in Smith’s personal circumstances led to his departure from England in 1868. He had resigned his chair at Oxford in 1866 in order to attend to his father, who had suffered permanent injury in a railway accident. In the autumn of 1867, when Smith was briefly absent, his father took his own life. Doubtless blaming himself for the tragedy – and now without an Oxford appointment – he decided to travel to North America, which he had previously visited in 1864, when Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution. Smith was attracted by the determination of its founder, Ezra Cornell, to organize a university that was non-sectarian and open to all classes of society, though he had no sympathy for its commitment to coeducation. He remained at Cornell on a full-time basis for only two years but his connection with the university, which in 1906 named a building after him, continued for life. Whether it was the climate or the presence of women, admitted in 1869, that caused Smith to leave, he decided in 1871 to move to Toronto and to be near some relatives. Four years later that move became permanent as a consequence of his marriage in Toronto on 3 Sept. 1875 to William Henry Boulton*’s widow, Harriet Elizabeth Mann, née Dixon, who was two years his junior, an American by birth, and possessor of a significant fortune which included the estate named the Grange. Smith settled into a late-blooming marital bliss and the Grange’s affluent surroundings with ease: “a union for the afternoon and evening of life,” he told his American friend Charles Eliot Norton. He was, as he remarked after Harriet died in 1909, “finally bound to Canada by the happiest event of my life.”
The marriage, a personal healing of the unfortunate breach of 1776, was an extremely successful one. After years of transiency and a life seemingly limited to male friendships, Smith had found a perfect mate. His new wife was socially sophisticated and apparently utterly devoted to her austere husband who, in contrast to her first, spent his waking hours in reading, writing, and good talk. His circle of friends and visitors, the intellectual élite of the English-speaking world, joined local celebrities and politicians in the drawing-room of the Grange. “Here one is suddenly set down in an old English house,” Albert Venn Dicey wrote, “surrounded by grounds, with old four-post beds, old servants, all English, and English hosts . . . an English mansion in some English county.” For the remaining 35 years of his life, Smith lived in Canada, but he was never quite of it. From his “English mansion,” this talented and acerbic political and literary critic would hurl his jeremiads at a world that irritatingly deviated from the Manchester liberal faith in which he was steeped.
The move to Canada and marriage and domestic tranquillity did nothing to diminish Smith’s intellectual energy or his eagerness to improve public morality. Indeed, what he viewed as the underdeveloped, overly partisan state of Canadian public discussion spurred him on to greater effort. No sooner had he arrived in Toronto than he began reviewing for the Globe, but he quickly fell out with George Brown*, the paper’s proprietor, whose dogmatic righteousness brooked no competition. Smith soon turned to a series of attempts to establish independent organs, though independence usually meant agreement with Smith. First, he assisted Graeme Mercer Adam* in the founding of the Canadian Monthly and National Review (Toronto), where in February 1872 he adopted the nom de plume that would become his most characteristic signature, A Bystander. It was intended to imply that he was an outsider and therefore detached and analytical. In fact, it was soon obvious enough to readers that the author was a committed, often fierce, partisan, even if somewhat of an outsider. When the supporters of the Canada First movement launched the Nation in Toronto in 1874, Smith signed on as one of the principal contributors, both financially and as a writer. Then, in April 1876, he participated in a more ambitious project, the establishment, with John Ross Robertson* as publisher, of the Evening Telegram, a daily to compete with Brown’s Globe. It soon developed Conservative sympathies and Smith departed.
In June 1878 Smith returned to Toronto following an 18-month sojourn with Harriet in England more convinced than ever that the country needed the benefit of his intellectual guidance. Within a year he opened his own one-man show, the Bystander, subtitled “A monthly review of current events, Canadian and general.” The performance was a breathtaking one. For three years Smith’s outpourings filled its pages with brilliant, opinionated comment on virtually every political, cultural, and intellectual development in Europe and North America. He was determined to broaden the mental horizons of Canadians and by 1880 was pleased to admit that “the great questions of religious philosophy are beginning to engage a good many Canadian minds.” He expounded Adam Smith’s political economy, denounced women’s suffrage as a threat to the family, warned of the dangers of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, castigated Bismarck, expatiated on the Eastern Question, and sniped at Disraeli. He even found space, when Sarah Bernhardt visited Canada in 1881, to agree with Bishop Édouard-Charles Fabre* and the Presbyterian (Montreal) in condemning her for her unsanctified liaisons. The Bystander’s suspicious eye frequently detected clerical power in Quebec and Ireland, and Jewish control over the European press. When Smith decided to give his active pen a rest in June 1881, he had established himself as a vigorous intellectual voice in Canada. A second series of the Bystander, this time published quarterly from January to October 1883, began after his return from another lengthy stay in England. The third and final series appeared between October 1889 and September 1890. In the interim he lent his support to another new journal, the Week, edited by Charles George Douglas Roberts*, which began publication in December 1883. Smith’s final venture in Canadian journalism came in 1896 when he acquired a controlling interest in the faltering Canada Farmers’ Sun (Toronto), a paper which, under George Weston Wrigley, had actively supported such radical causes as the political insurgency of the Patrons of Industry. The Bystander promptly put the paper back on orthodox rails by calling for free trade, retrenchment, and opposition to Canadian participation in the South African War. All of this activity still left time for a flood of articles in the international press: the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, and the Nineteenth Century, a Monthly Review in London, the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, and the Sun, the Nation, and the Forum in New York. Indeed, he published in any daily or monthly that would print his articles, reviews, and letters. His output was prodigious, the writing crisp and often epigrammatic.
Smith’s activities were not confined to intellectual labour. A public-spirited person, he devoted both money and energy to a variety of causes. Civic affairs especially concerned him for he believed that local governments should take greater responsibility for the welfare of citizens than was the case in Toronto. He chaired a citizens’ reform committee, advocated the commission system for city government, fought for the preservation and extension of parks for public recreation, campaigned for Sunday streetcars, and opposed free public lending libraries. (“A novel library,” he told Andrew Carnegie, “is to women mentally pretty much what the saloon is physically to men.”) He was distressed by problems of urban unemployment and poverty, and contributed generously to such charities and benevolent societies as the Associated City Charities of Toronto, which he founded, and the St Vincent de Paul Society. He also supported the building of a synagogue. For two decades he urged the appointment of a city welfare officer to supervise grants to social agencies, a cause that succeeded in 1893 only after Smith agreed to pay the officer’s salary for the first two years. Underlying these and other humanitarian endeavours was a philosophy of noblesse oblige, the Christian duty of the fortunate towards their weaker brethren. He feared that the failure of Christian voluntary charity would increase the popularity of those who advocated radical social programs. “Care for their own safety, then, as well as higher considerations, counsels the natural leaders of society to be at the post of duty,” Smith told a conference of the combined charities of Toronto in May 1889.
Education was another concern which Smith brought with him to Canada. In 1874 he was elected by Ontario teachers to represent them on the Council of Public Instruction and he was subsequently chosen president of the Ontario Teachers’ Association. But once again, university reform captured his deepest interest, and as in so many things, he advocated reforms that revealed his Oxford connections. Almost from the time of his arrival he proposed the federation of Ontario’s scattered universities on an Oxford model. He followed progress towards that federation in the 1880s and 1890s, regularly participating in University of Toronto functions and advocating university autonomy. In 1905 he accepted membership on, but not the chair of, a royal commission on the University of Toronto. One outcome was a new act in 1906 establishing a board of governors for the university, to which Smith was appointed. Among the many honorary degrees which Smith received from the great universities of the English-speaking world he must have particularly savoured the one conferred on him in 1902 by the University of Toronto; six years earlier he had withdrawn his name from nomination for a degree in the face of the furious opposition of George Taylor Denison* and other imperial federationists who protested against the granting of the degree to a “traitor.”
For all of his breadth of knowledge and interest, Smith’s overriding concern was the contemporary world. His reputation rests on that collection of ideas which he regularly, and with remarkable consistency, applied to the issues of his time. Though he has most often been categorized as a “Victorian liberal,” it is not his liberal principles but rather his faith in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization that is his most striking trait. That faith not only frequently contradicted his liberalism, but also, in its application to Canada, limited his ability to understand and sympathize with the aspirations of the people among whom he had chosen to take up residence.
Smith’s liberalism expressed itself most fulsomely in his commitment to free market economics, the secularization of public life, and opposition to empire. Though a firm believer in individualism and parliamentary government, Smith showed no special interest in civil liberties, except in his criticism of clericalism, and he favoured neither universal manhood nor women’s suffrage. He distrusted democracy and pronounced the French revolution (an event admired by most liberals) “of all the events in history, the most calamitous.” Inequality, he believed, was mankind’s permanent condition. While he repeatedly professed sympathy for labour and supported trade unions, he abhorred strikes and denounced as “chimeras” those reforms – single tax, currency inflation, public ownership, the regulation of hours of work – which labour radicals began to advocate in the late 19th century; progress he thought possible, but “there is no leaping into the millennium.” Although limited government intervention in the economy might sometimes be justified (he reluctantly supported Sir John A. Macdonald*’s arguments for a National Policy), collectivism and socialism were anathema. He opposed income tax, old-age pensions, and even publicly financed education. In his introduction to Essays on questions of the day (1893), he summed up his social philosophy by confessing that “the opinions of the present writer are those of a Liberal of the old school as yet unconverted to State Socialism, who looks for further improvement not to an increase of the authority of government, but to the same agencies, moral, intellectual, and economical, which have brought us thus far, and one of which, science, is now operating with immensely increased power.” Clearly, it was not just “state socialism” that had failed to convert the master of the Grange; the new social liberalism of Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse was equally heretical to him. Indeed, by the late Victorian era one of Smith’s own adages could reasonably be applied to its author: “There is no reactionary,” the Bystander informed the readers of the Week in 1884, “like the exhausted Reformer.”
Had Smith’s social philosophy become threadbare merely as a result of the passage of time, then he might none the less rank as a significant liberal, if only of the “old school.” But the limits of his liberalism are even more evident when placed in the context of his nationalism – his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority. In common with most 19th-century political thinkers, especially liberals, Smith believed that “nations” were “an ordinance of nature, and a natural bond.” Like John Stuart Mill, and in contrast to Lord Acton, he defined a nation in terms of the concept of cultural homogeneity. And although he opposed imperialism, he was nevertheless utterly at one with those imperialists who believed that the Anglo-Saxon cultural community, centred in Great Britain with branches around the world, was a superior civilization. Its political institutions, economic system, morality, and culture were all signs of its primacy in a world of diverse nations. In his first, and most famous, critique of the empire, he gave voice to his own form of nationalism, one which verged on cultural imperialism. “I am no more against Colonies than I am against the solar system,” he wrote in The empire. “I am against dependencies, when nations are fit to be independent. If Canada were made an independent nation she would still be a Colony of England, and England would still be her Mother Country in the full sense in which those names have been given to the most famous examples of Colonization in history. Our race and language, our laws and liberties, will be hers.”
For Smith the great failure, even tragedy, of Anglo-Saxon history was the American revolution. “Before their unhappy schism they were one people,” and the healing of that schism through the “moral, diplomatic and commercial union of the whole English-speaking race throughout the world” became the goal to which all else was secondary. He shared that goal with those Canadians who advocated imperial federation – Denison, George Monro Grant, George Robert Parkin* – but because his chosen route began with the annexation of Canada to the United States he found himself in permanent head-to-head combat with those same men.
Smith’s convictions about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon values are most strikingly illustrated in his attitude towards “lesser breeds without the Law.” His advocacy of colonial freedom was limited to those colonies which had English majorities. India, a conquered territory, was exempt; for Britain to relinquish what he called this “splendid curse” would be to abdicate its responsibility and leave the subcontinent to certain anarchy. If India troubled Smith, Ireland infuriated him. He mistrusted Roman Catholicism everywhere; in Ireland he despised it. As an ethnic group the Irish were an “amiable but thriftless, uncommercial, saint-worshipping, priest-ridden race.” He fought Home Rule as though his very life depended upon its defeat. “Statesmen might as well provide the Irish people with Canadian snowshoes,” he declaimed sarcastically, “as extend to them the Canadian Constitution.” His one-time associate William Ewart Gladstone was denounced as “an unspeakable old man” when he took up the Irish cause.
Other non-Anglo-Saxon groups fared little better. Though Smith occasionally expressed sympathy for “the wild-stocks of humanity” – the people of Africa, for example – he saw no reason to lament the oppressed state of the native North American. The doomed state of the native people was not the fault of the British who “had always treated [them] with humanity and justice”; with their disappearance, “little will be lost by humanity,” he concluded callously.
For the Jewish people, Smith reserved a special place in his catalogue of “undesirables.” The critical problem with the Jews was what Smith saw as their stubborn unwillingness to assimilate, to give up their religious beliefs and cultural practices, to become “civilized.” He regularly stereotyped them as “tribal,” “usurious,” “plutopolitans,” incapable of loyalty to their country of residence. The Talmud, the Bystander affirmed, “is a code of casuistical legalism . . . of all reactionary productions the most debased, arid, and wretched.” If the Jews would not assimilate they should be returned to their homeland. In a sentence that reeked with racist arrogance he declared that “two greater calamities perhaps have never befallen mankind than the transportation of the negro and the dispersion of the Jews.” Smith’s extreme ethnocentricity in the case of the Jewish people, as Gerald Tulchinsky has shown, can only be described as anti-Semitism.
Smith’s belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority and the importance that he attached to the reunification of the “race” provided him with both his questions and his answers when he analysed “Canada and the Canadian question.” On his arrival in Toronto Smith had discovered a nascent nationalist movement. He threw his support behind this amorphous group of young men whose platform was set out in William Alexander Foster*’s pamphlet Canada First; or, our new nationality: an address (Toronto, 1871), which called for the promotion of a national sentiment and the clarification of Canada’s status in the empire as well as for a number of political reforms. While Smith believed that the movement would promote Canadian independence, others favoured some form of equal partnership with the other members of the empire. For a time the movement attracted the sympathy of the prominent Liberal party intellectual Edward Blake*, but by the mid 1870s it had disintegrated, and its organ, the Nation, disappeared in 1876. This brief experience apparently convinced Smith that Canada could never become a genuine nation and that its destiny lay in union with the United States. In 1877 he set out these conclusions in an article for the Fortnightly Review and then in the Canadian Monthly, conclusions which he would repeat over the remainder of his life and which found their most famous expression in his Canada and the Canadian question in 1891. At the heart of his case was the claim that Canada could not be a nation because it lacked cultural homogeneity. The principal obstacle to nationhood was Quebec, composed as it was of an “unprogressive, religious, submissive, courteous, and, though poor, not unhappy people. . . . They are governed by the priest, with the occasional assistance of the notary. . . . The French-Canadians . . . retain their exclusive national character.” Confederation had failed to meld the competing “races” and regions into a single community and only political corruption, bribes to the regions, and the vested interests which benefited from the protective tariff kept this artificial country from collapsing. “Sectionalism,” he had written in 1878, “still reigns in everything, from the composition of a Cabinet down to that of a Wimbledon Rifle team.” In Smith’s mind the natural geographical and economic forces of North America worked against the unnatural political and sentimental opinions of Canadians. Like the United States, Canada was a North American nation and once this fact was recognized the two communities would achieve their destiny in unity. “The more one sees of society in the New World, the more convinced one is that its structure essentially differs from that of society in the Old World, and that the feudal element has been eliminated completely and forever.” Everything pointed towards “an equal and honorable alliance like that of Scotland and England” between Canada and her southern neighbour, “Canadian nationality being a lost cause.”
Over the years Smith’s conviction about Canada’s destiny intensified, his observation of French Canada hardening his hostility to that community. By 1891 he was willing to state emphatically that one of the principal benefits of union with the United States would be the final solution of the French Canadian problem. “Either the conquest of Quebec was utterly fatuous or it is to be desired that the American Continent should belong to the English tongue and to Anglo-Saxon civilisation.” Though the opposition of French Canadians to the South African War moderated these sentiments somewhat – Smith even considered joining forces with Henri Bourassa* in an anti-imperialist movement – he continued to fear, as he told Bourassa in 1905, “the connexion of your national aspirations with those of an ambitious and aggressive priesthood.” His ideal of cultural homogeneity left no room for a political nationality based on cultural diversity, the cornerstone of confederation. For him the call of race was irresistible: “In blood and character, language, religion, institutions, laws and interests, the two portions of the Anglo-Saxon race on this continent are one people.”
In all of his pronouncements on politics, economics, and Canada’s destiny, Smith seemed a self-confident, even dogmatic, pundit. But underneath that confidence was a profoundly uneasy man. The unease arose not only from Smith’s personal religious uncertainty but even more from his anxiety about the future of society in an age of religious scepticism. Though Smith does not seem to have experienced that typical Victorian “crisis of faith,” Darwinism and the higher criticism of the Bible certainly left him with little more than a thin deism and a vague humanism founded on Christian ethics. Throughout his life he struggled with religious questions, and his inconclusive answers were recorded in his Guesses at the riddle of existence (1897). But it was always to the social implications of the decline of faith that he returned. In an essay entitled “The prospect of a moral interregnum,” published in 1879, he observed: “That which prevails as Agnosticism among philosophers and the highly educated prevails as secularism among mechanics, and in that form is likely soon to breed mutinous questionings about the present social order among those who get the poorer share, and who can no longer be appeased by promises of compensation in another world.” For 30 years he repeated this gloomy theme, revealing his forebodings about the decline and fall of practically everything he accepted as eternal verities. Everywhere “prophets of unrest” loomed – Karl Marx, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, assorted socialists and anarchists, and the leaders of “the revolt of women” – questioning the established order, no longer satisfied by the opiate of religion. His increasingly shrill polemics signified his alienation from a world that had passed him by. He was simply too set in his ways to admit, as he was urged to do by Alphonse Desjardins*, the leader of the Quebec cooperative movement, “that improvements can be got by recognizing that the old liberal school of Political Economy has not discovered everything.”
Harriet Smith died at the Grange on 9 Sept. 1909. The following March the old man slipped and broke his thigh. He died on 7 June 1910 and was buried in St James cemetery. The Grange, which remained his wife’s property, was willed by her to the city of Toronto to serve as a public art gallery. The £20,000 Smith had inherited from his father had grown to more than $830,000 by the time of his death. He left his excellent library to the University of Toronto. Most of his fortune and his private papers went to Cornell University as a mark, Smith’s will revealingly declared, of his “attachment as an Englishman to the union of the two branches of our race on this continent with each other, and with their common mother.”
Ramsay Cook
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
McGraw Tower
•Construction Date: 1888
At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers. At the base of the tower, Uris Library is a spacious and well-furnished study spot, and a great place for students to work on research projects and papers.
Throughout the day, chimes in the McGraw Clock Tower at the top of the slope mark the passing hours. Daily concerts by student chimesmasters feature Broadway hits, Beatles favorites, and Cornell’s alma mater. The famed Cornell Chimes is one of the oldest musical traditions on campus.
The McGraw Clocktower, named in honor of John McGraw, stands as the most recognizable landmark on the Cornell campus. The original nine bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, were rung on a wooden stand and played for the first time at the University’s opening ceremonies in 1868. After several years in McGraw Hall, the chimes moved to the 173-foot McGraw Tower in 1891. The tower now contains twenty-one bells.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower’s spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin.
Faces of the Seth Thomas Clock glow red for Valentine’s Day, green for Dragon Day, and orange for Halloween.
Today, student Chimesmasters climb the tower’s 161 steps to play three concerts every weekday during the academic year. Music selections are drawn from a diverse repertoire, ranging from Beethoven to the Beatles. Each concert includes a standard Cornell song: “Changes” in the morning (also known as the Jennie McGraw Rag), the Alma Mater in the afternoon, and “Evening Song” at day’s end.
The Base
The McGraw Tower is the Cornell landmark. New students lost downtown or across campus use it to orient themselves and aim for familiar ground. Undergrads studying in the libraries nearby mark the hours with the chiming of its 1875 Seth Thomas clock, now computer-operated. And Albert W. Smith, class of 1878, who wrote the lyrics to “The Hill,” included the clock tower and its chimes in a nostalgic tune still sung on campus today.
Designed by William Henry Miller in 1891, the tower originally provided storage for overflow library books. Now its seven rooms include practice space and a library of musical arrangements, and a museum.
The Belfry
Like violins and pianos, the quality of sound produced by a bell reflects its maker. Seventeen of Cornell’s bells came from the Meneely Foundry in Watervliet, N.Y., including the nine given by Jennie McGraw, which marked the university’s inauguration. A pair donated in the 20th century came from Padccard Foundry in France. In 1998, all of the bells were sent to Meeks, Watson & Company in Ohio, for tuning.
While the bells were in Ohio, a renovation of the clock tower included construction of a new practice room and installation of a specially designed stand that balances the sound of the bells.
The Chimes
Music may be an art, but for Cornell’s chimesmasters, it’s also a full-body workout, including a 161-stair climb to the top of McGraw Tower, and muscle-burning effort to depress the hand and foot levers that ring the bells.
Each spring several dozen students compete in a ten-week program to become chimesmasters. During this time, they learn the “Cornell Changes,” a 549-note rag that has been played at each morning concert since 1869. Ultimately, just a handful are selected to become one of the ten students who play three daily concerts plus special events, such as Halloween and Valentine’s concerts and weddings.
The more than 2,000 arrangements in their repertoire include Schubert and Scott Joplin, as well as “The Mickey Mouse March” and original compositions by former chimesmasters.
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes are the university’s oldest musical tradition, and one of the most frequently played set of bells on any American college campus. Housed in historic McGraw Tower, the 21-bells are played primarily by student chimesmasters.
All concerts are open to the public—you simply have to climb the tower’s 161 steps. The door to the tower opens five to ten minutes before a scheduled concert and closes before concert’s end. Your stair-climbing efforts will be rewarded with a spectacular view of Cornell and the surrounding community, and a musical performance like you’ve never seen before.
The Cornell Chimesmasters perform a regular program of three concerts daily while classes are in session and a modified schedule during exams and breaks. Please check the concert schedule for complete concert and special event information.
About the Chimes and Tower
The Cornell Chimes
The Cornell Chimes has been the heartbeat of campus life for more than a century, marking the hours and chiming concerts. The original set of nine bells first rang out at the university’s opening ceremonies October 7, 1868. Over time the chime has been recast and expanded to 21 bells; it continues to ring daily concerts, making it one of the largest and most frequently played chimes in the world.
Playing the Chimes
The bells are played by “chimesmasters.” An average of ten chimesmasters play three concerts daily during the school year and a reduced schedule during the summer and semester breaks, in addition to a variety of specialty concerts. Each spring a rigorous ten-week competition is held for anyone interested in becoming a chimesmaster. Previous chime experience is not a requirement to playing this unique instrument, only the ability to read music and the energy to climb 161 steps. There is no electronic assistance to the playing mechanism — all the work is done by the player. In the 1940s a chimesmaster received physical education credit for her efforts!
Virtually every kind of music is played on the bells, from Baroque to Beatles, Schubert to Scott Joplin, “Pomp and Circumstance” to the “Mickey Mouse March,” selected from a collection of more than 2500 pieces specially arranged for the Cornell Chimes by current and former chimesmasters. There are even duets. Because of the direct link between the playing stand and the clapper of the bell, it is possible to vary the dynamics of the music.
The chimes remain a bastion of tradition on campus. The “Cornell Changes” (known affectionately as the “Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of the donor of the original bells) has heralded every morning concert since 1869. Its 549 notes provide a challenge to chimesmasters, whose goal it is to play it as fast as possible. It must be memorized by aspiring chimesmasters. Also played daily are the “Alma Mater” at the midday concert, and the “Cornell Evening Song” at the end of the evening concert.
McGraw Tower
The bells were originally played on a ground level playing stand on the site of the current clock tower, before moving to McGraw Hall in 1873. In 1891, upon its completion, they were moved to their permanent home atop library tower (later renamed McGraw Tower). Local architect William Henry Miller designed the 173-foot tower and adjacent Uris library.
The seven rooms in the tower were originally used to store the library’s stacks (presumably the lesser-used works!). They now house the chimes office, museum, practice room, and the 1875 Seth Thomas clock with a 14-foot pendulum. Visitors can still see the clockworks and pendulum, but a computer now operates the clock. In 1999 as part of the restoration of the bells and tower, a global positioning system was linked to the clockworks keeping all four clockfaces correct, up to the second!
The tower, a symbol of the university, as it stands above Cornell and the community is known to take on different appearances during the school year. Every Halloween the glowing clock faces resemble four jolly jack-o-lanterns. In March the clock faces take on a greenish hue in anticipation of Dragon Day when the first-year Architecture students debut their giant dragon to be thwarted by the rival Engineers.
McGraw Tower
Visitors are welcome and encouraged to attend our chimes concerts to fully appreciate these icons. Something essential would be missing from the campus without that cheery tintinnabulation that serenades Cornellians and visitors daily. In the words of Albert W. Smith 1878:
I wake at night and think I hear
Remembered chimes,
And mem’ry brings in visions clear
Enchanted times
Beneath green elms with branches bowed
In springtime suns,
Or touching elbows in a crowd
Of eager ones;
Again I’m hurrying past the towers
Or with the teams,
Or spending precious idling hours
In golden dreams
— from “The Hill”
You can read more about the history and lore of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower in The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown, available at the Cornell Store. Recordings of the Chimes is also available.
Chimesmasters
Each spring semester, the Cornell Chimesmasters hold an open competition to find new chimesmasters for the upcoming years. This ten-week event is open to all members of the Cornell community. No previous experience in chimes-ringing is needed, but you should be able to read music and climb 161 steps.
Although this is called a competition, compets are not really competing against each other. Rather we look for a certain level of excellence as you progress through the ten week competition. There is no quota. Some years we accept one new chimesmaster, some years three or four; we average about two new players each year.
Cornell Chimes Merchandise
All Cornell Chimes merchandise is available exclusively at the Cornell Store. Call 1-800-624-4080 or follow these links to order online: Music from the Tower compact disk is $15. The Cornell Chimes book is $24.95.
The Cornell Chimes: Music from the Tower
Music from the Tower, the newest CD in the Cornell Chimes music collection, is a 23-piece recording, grouped into 5 categories: Cornell Songs, Original Compositions, World, Classical, and Popular Music, to highlight the diverse array of music that rings daily from McGraw Tower. The individual pieces were selected to showcase the chimesmasters ever-expanding musical talents.
The Cornell Chimes, by Ed McKeown
This comprehensive history of the Cornell Chimes and McGraw Tower—published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the tower—contains more than 50 archival photos and illustrations, anecdotes and memoirs. Beginning with James O’Neill, class of 1871, who was moved by the inaugural-day concert to petition President Andrew D. White for permission to play the bells, chimesmasters from throughout Cornell’s history tell the story of the changing campus and the changing times.
The Cornell Chimes
As anyone who has studied in Uris Library can tell you, Cornell’s chimes are housed in McGraw Tower, which is attached to the library. Every fifteen minutes, bells mark the passing of time, and two or three times a day, the campus is treated to a bell concert that features such time-honored and memorable tunes as (of course) the Alma Mater, the Evening Song, the Jennie McGraw Rag, “If I Only Had a Brain,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
Trek up the tower’s 161 steps during one of those concerts and you can watch chimesmasters in action, working solo or in teams with both hands and at least one foot working levers and pedals to play the 21 bells that comprise the renowned Cornell chimes. The original nine bells rang for the university’s opening ceremonies in 1868. Hung from a temporary wooden framework, and given by Jennie McGraw (later Jennie McGraw Fiske), the bells have been an important part of campus life ever since. McGraw Hall, one of Cornell’s first buildings, included a bell tower so that those nine bells could have a permanent home. When the library opened in 1891, the bells were installed in an even larger tower built for no other reason than to house them. As a distinctive Cornell landmark, McGraw Tower is frequently used to represent the university. Its iconic presence on campus has been felt, heard and seen by generations of Cornell students, and remembered by alumni around the world.
The Cornell Chimes is a student-run organization, and the chimesmasters themselves are student and alumni musicians who bring music to the campus every day. Two Cornell chimesmasters, SiYi Wang and Scott Silverstein, both class of 2008, took time out to discuss what it has been like to participate in one of Cornell”s most cherished, most enduring traditions. Listen to the interview and find out why chimesmasters will “always have the tower.”
Remembering Jennie McGraw Fiske
On October 7, 1868, at the inauguration ceremonies for Cornell University, Francis Finch, friend and legal advisor to Ezra Cornell and later, Dean of the Cornell Law School, presented the University with a very special gift on behalf of a young benefactor. Miss Jennie McGraw had given Cornell a chime of nine bells. They were played for the first time that afternoon from a wooden scaffold set on the site now occupied by Uris Library.
In his address Mr. Finch paid tribute to Jennie McGraw’s generosity:
“These bells are now yours [Cornell]—given cheerfully, given gladly, given hopefully; given with the best wishes of a kind heart to all to whom their chime shall ring….Let the memory of their giver make them sacred; let them ring always harmonies and never discords; let them infuse into the college life, and interweave among the sober threads of practical study and toil some love of art and lines of grace and beauty; let them teach the excellence of order and system… I give these bells, [on] behalf of her whose name I trust their melody will always commemorate….”
According to Cornell historian Morris Bishop, the chime was “the first to peal over an American campus.” A thankful Andrew D. White, Cornell’s first president, would request that the first song played each day be, “The Cornell Changes.” Adapted from a popular carillon tune that White had heard in London, it was soon rechristened, “The Jennie McGraw Rag” in honor of their donor.
Today the music of the bells carries her name across the campus, and her story and the legacy of her gifts to Cornell are memorialized in a collection of monuments found along the crest of Libe Slope.
Jennie McGraw shared her father’s enthusiasm for the new university and his interest in its library. John McGraw, a founding trustee of Cornell, had provided the money to build McGraw Hall, located between Morrill and White Halls in today’s Arts Quad. When it was completed in 1872, the library was moved there from cramped quarters in Morrill Hall, and Jennie’s bells were placed in its tower, which had been specifically designed to house them. The library and the chime would reside in McGraw Hall until the new library building and its tower were completed in 1891.
Both father and daughter had intended to endow the university’s library with generous funds to build and maintain its collections, but neither lived to see this work accomplished. When John McGraw died in 1877, Jennie inherited the bulk of his estate. Working with many of Cornell’s “founding fathers”—Ezra Cornell, Andrew D. White, Judge Douglass Boardman, and her father’s former business partner and fellow Cornell trustee, Henry Williams Sage, Jennie prepared to continue and expand her father’s charitable donations to the university.
But she died tragically of tuberculosis at the age of 41 just four years later. Her will revealed some of her intentions:
“I also give and bequeath to said Cornell University $200,000 in trust to be securely invested and known as the McGraw Library fund, the interest and income thereof to be applied to the support, maintenance, and increase of the library of said university….I give, devise, and bequeath all the rest, residue, and remainder of my property (if any there shall be) to Cornell University.”
Her combined gifts to Cornell were estimated to be at least one million dollars—an astounding sum at that time—and included funds for building a student hospital and a monument to her father and Ezra Cornell. It was also presumed to include the mansion she commissioned architect William Henry Miller to build on the hillside just west of campus. With this bequest, it appeared that Andrew D. White’s dream of a great library building would be realized.
Unfortunately, there were complications. The size of her gift exceeded the university’s endowment limits set in its charter, which would require state legislative action to be amended. And in the waning months of her life, Jennie McGraw had married Cornell’s first University Librarian, Willard Fiske. Troubled by the university trustees’ actions to secure their bequest, he contested the will and spent the next nine years in litigation with the university.
When the United States Supreme Court ruled in Fiske’s favor, it appeared that many of Jennie’s gifts to the university were lost. Most of the estate formerly pledged to Cornell went to her husband, who had retired to a villa in Florence to continue his avocation of book collecting. The mansion intended as the university’s museum went to Jennie’s extended family, who subsequently sold the building along with the artwork and furnishings that she had collected for it.
Outraged by this outcome, Henry Williams Sage, the Ithaca businessman and university trustee who had been a financial advisor to Ezra Cornell and the McGraw’s, took it upon himself to fulfill Jennie’s plans. Sage donated the money to build the new library, hired William Henry Miller to design the Romanesque structure that we now know as Uris Library, and established an endowment for the purchasing of library books.
In the fall of 1891 the university opened its first library building and the chimes were transferred to their now permanent home in the new Library Tower. Recognized around the world as a symbol of Cornell University, it was renamed McGraw Tower in 1962.
Henry Sage had dedicated his efforts to Jennie and paid tribute to her with three library memorials. A plaque mounted at the entrance to Uris offers Sage’s version of the “Great Will Case” that reads:
“The good she tried to do shall stand as if ‘twere done; God finishes the work by noble souls begun. In loving memory of Jennie McGraw Fiske whose purpose to Found a great library for Cornell University has been defeated. This house is built and endowed by her friend, Henry W. Sage, 1891.”
Directly above the doors is a bronze portrait of Jennie by American sculptor Anne Whitney. Cornell was founded as a non-sectarian institution, but here at the entrance to the university’s Romanesque cathedral of books is the library’s guardian angel and patron saint.
The third memorial is more subtle and perhaps the most telling of the three. Located high above the main entrance to Uris, three monograms with carved initials honor those most responsible for providing Cornell with its library: ADW for Andrew Dickson White, HWS for Henry Williams Sage, and JMG for Jennie McGraw. Sage intentionally left off the F of Jennie McGraw Fiske’s married name as a slight to Willard Fiske.
Fiske’s placed his own memorial to his wife inside the library in the Great Reading Room, now known as the Dean Reading Room. Over the fireplace that is behind the current Circulation Desk is a marble bust of Jennie that honors her as a Cornell benefactress.
Funds from Jennie’s estate were used by the university to purchase additional bells for the chime, to set up an endowment for a student hospital, and to build an addition to Sage Chapel. Memorials at the tower entrance to Uris Library, outside the Gannett Health Services building in Ho Plaza, and on the north wall of Sage Chapel commemorate her generosity.
Sage Chapel’s Memorial Antechapel, built in 1883, is the final resting place for Ezra Cornell, Jennie McGraw Fiske, her father, her husband, and other Cornell dignitaries. Inside the chapel are several sarcophagi with reclining statues. A recumbent figure of Jennie, sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel rests below a stained glass window that pictures her surrounded by her nine bells.
If Jennie’s original intentions were thwarted by the legal case that challenged her will, they were more than fulfilled by another legal document: her husband’s last will and testament. Upon Willard Fiske’s death in 1904, he left Cornell nearly $600,000, a sum that exceeded the amount of money he had inherited from Jennie. In addition, he bequeathed his unrivaled collections of Dante, Petrarch, and Icelandic books and manuscripts to the Cornell University Library.
Jennie McGraw Fiske was a true supporter of Ezra’s dream. Through her generosity and good intentions, and the philanthropy they inspired, Jennie McGraw Fiske, was able to provide Cornell with its original chime, its student hospital, the University Library, and several priceless book collections and library endowments. Although today’s students may not realize it, her gifts are key fixtures of the Cornell tradition that remains today.
Cornell Pumpkin
On October 8, 1997 an astonishingly large, voluptuous pumpkin appeared nestled atop Cornell’s McGraw Tower. The pumpkin was thought to weigh up to 60 lbs., and sat pinned to the 173 foot Tower for several weeks. It was an incredible prank that made National news, which no one has come forth to claim credit. It remains a mystery as to how the stunt was pulled off, and the enigma has since passed on into Cornell lore.
Where is it now? The pumpkin (or what remains thereof) is currently being stored by the Department of Psychology in the basement of Uris Hall, after removing it from the displayed Wilder Brain Collection.
Mr. Robert Stundtner, of maintenance, believes the pumpkin “remains in our hearts and minds.” Mr. Segelken, with Cornell News Service, said that it has “composted” and that it is—if you will—in pumpkin heaven.
On March 13, 1998, the Pumpkin was knocked down ahead of schedule by workmen maneuvering a crane that would hold the Provost in an official removing ceremony later.
News Coverage: The mystery and sheer daring of the prank generated coverage by the national news media, beginning with an article in The New York Times on Oct. 27. The Cornell Daily Sun ran a daily “Pumpkin Watch” through Halloween and Editor-in-Chief Hilary Krieger was interviewed live on the scene by Matt Lauer of the Today Show on Oct. 28. The Associated Press ran a news story and photo of the pumpkin that appeared in newspapers across the nation. The Cornell News Service handled radio interviews from cities as far away as Minneapolis and Reno, Nev. CNN, MTV and NBC news programs also carried pumpkin reports.
This shot was taken right after the Cornellian reversed a hold to win his match at the last second.
The crowd was on their feet!
Eve's Cider was an apple cider vendor at Apple Fest in the Ithaca Commons. This stuff was warm, and delicious, and a good, tart lifesaver. The cold rain had nothing on this stuff!
But see the future here, a real worry! mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-19/river-derwent-sailors-c...
Videos still on the Pioneer HDD 08-09-19
There are 9 MiniDV tapes, 29 to 36 see B1 p93
On MiniDV tape #29 copied to VHS 1 B2 p208
copied to HDD 04-10-19 again to avoid digging out tape 28 and using camera again, then will use camera to copy MiniDV tape #29 to HDD on Pioneer.
This VHS #1 tape runs from Sydney departure with Smoky on Ferry and the cruise out thru the harbour chatting to Alison at Dick Smith's..
Blank bit at 13:30 then campsite video at Launceston then to Glenorchy campsite and new battery for Smoky..
Sing Australia Hobart Gathering (Breakup) 20' to 22'
VHS OSD stamp on at 20m 22:20 BLANK then Salamanca place with choir. Singing! Walk around stalls.Clouds over Mt. Wellington!
Walk to Rainforest and Skywalkwith choir and singing! 33' singing breakup Concert again OSD stamp 33'
see Youtube clip youtu.be/vaS2fYty_y4
"Orgasm radio joke" bit while driving to Port Arthur
second copy of clip to delete from HDD..
Paverty Band in Port Arthur..walkabout..(DVD copy ro Di & George 24/8/17)
Colin Slater solo and choir in old church "Follow your Dream" "You Raise Me Up" with Paverty!
Hobart walkabout.4hrs.Museum tour. "Lady Nelson" model. etc 48:55 breakup The Shot Tower.
Boat cruise to fish farms..18-10-05 @54min.. and past the Shot Tower! feeding Peregrine Falcons. Underwater views cruise.
Peppermint Bay lunch.. Breakup 1:07..to 1;08
There are not many notes on the VHS box.
Scuba dive, to more fish farms..1:09:50
Cruise under Derwent R bridge. Still ex MinDV #28
Dinner with Di and George "Drunken Admiral" @1:13:50
Blowhole tour.. Bruny Is Ferry wharf. Lunch stop!
Huon Wooden Boat Shed tour.. @1hr18m >
Cornellian Bay Boatsheds 1h23m
Big House views, Female Jail back to Salamanca Place.
Tasman Peninular.. Denison, Tessellated Pavement.@ 1h29m
Blowhole..
Copied to DVD TASI 1 VHS 1/29 04/10/19 1h31m33s
Peppermint Bay
see Videos still on the Pioneer HDD 08-09-19
There are 9 MiniDV tapes, 29 to 36 see B1 p93
On MiniDV tape #29 copied to VHS 1 B2 p208
copied to HDD 04-10-19 again to avoid digging out tape 28 and using camera again, then will use camera to copy MiniDV tape 29 to HDD on Pioneer.
This VHS tape runs from Sydney departure with Smoky on Ferry and the cruise out thru the harbour chatting to Alison at Dick Smith's..
Blank bit at 13:30 then campsite video at Launceston then to Glenorchy campsite and new battery for Smoky..
Sing Australia Hobart Gathering (Breakup) 20' to 22'
VHS OSD stamp on at 20m 22;20 BLANK then Salamanca place with choir. Singing! Walk around stalls.Clouds over Mt. Wellington!
Walk to Rainforest and Skywalk with choir and singing! 33' singing breakup Concert again OSD stamp 33'
"Orgasm radio joke" bit while driving to Port Arthur
second copy of clip to delete from HDD..
Paverty Band in Port Arthur..walkabout..(DVD copy ro Di & George 24/8/17)
Colin Slater solo and choir in old church "Follow your Dream" "You Raise Me Up" with Paverty!
Hobart walkabout.4hrs.Museum tour. "Lady Nelson" model. etc 48:55 breakup The Shot Tower.
Boat cruise to fish farms..18-10-05 @54min.. and past the Shot Tower! feeding Peregrine Falcons. Underwater views cruise.
Peppermint Bay lunch.. Breakup 1:07..to 1;08
There are not many notes on the VHS box.
Scuba dive, to more fish farms..1:09:50
Cruise under Derwent R bridge. Still ex MinDV #28
Dinner with Di and George "Drunken Admiral" @1:13:50
Blowhole tour.. Bruny Is Ferry wharf. Lunch stop!
Huon Wooden Boat Shed tour.. @1hr18m >
Cornellian Bay Boatsheds 1h23m
Big House views, Female Jail back to Salamanca Place.
Tasman Peninular.. Denison, Tessellated Pavement.@ 1h29m
Blowhole..
Copied to DVD TASIVHS1 1/29 04/10/19 1h31m33s
The plaque is unveiled during a dedication in Anabel Taylor Hall for 21 Cornellians killed on 9/11, 2001.
Elise is such a model student. This looks so "college brochure-ish" that I find it somewhat ironic :P
My last final is next Tuesday. I can't believe that by Wednesday I'll be home and done with freshman year. Time truly does fly by so fast. I feel so blessed to have such an awesome year, and for making such fantastic friends. I think my photography definitely benefitted from being here and being exposed to other students with my hobby and learning from them. I look back at the images I took this time last year and all I think is "How did I ever think I was good at this??" But I guess that's the thing...you're never as good as you think you are, but as long as you keep working you keep learning and improving, and that's the most important part!
-Sarah
Took a found object art workshop with Jessica Poor on February 11, 2012 and finally started putting together my Joseph Cornellian aviary shadow box in a sardine can using vintage parrots and hotel label from Ten Two Studios. Still have to finish this.
UP_2018_795 Return to Classroom
Cornellians listen to a presentation about touch and emotional sensitive robots by Assistant Professors Rob Shepherd and Guy Hoffman at Homecoming 2018.
UP_2018_795 Return to Classroom
Cornellians listen to a presentation about touch and emotional sensitive robots by Assistant Professors Rob Shepherd and Guy Hoffman at Homecoming 2018.
UP_2018_795 Return to Classroom
Cornellians listen to a presentation about touch and emotional sensitive robots by Assistant Professors Rob Shepherd and Guy Hoffman at Homecoming 2018.
UP_2018_795 Return to Classroom
Cornellians listen to a presentation about touch and emotional sensitive robots by Assistant Professors Rob Shepherd and Guy Hoffman at Homecoming 2018.
UP_2018_795 Return to Classroom
Cornellians listen to a presentation about touch and emotional sensitive robots by Assistant Professors Rob Shepherd and Guy Hoffman at Homecoming 2018.
•Title: The Song of the Vowels
•Collection: Campus Artifacts, Art & Memorabilia
•Creator(s): Lipchitz, Jacques (French sculptor, 1891-1973, active in the United States) Male
•Date: 1962; 1931-1932
•Acquisition Date: 1962
•Culture: French
•Style/Period: Cubism
•Work Type: Outdoor Sculpture;
•Materials/Techniques: Bronze
•Extent: 10 Feet Including Base
•Description: “The Song of the Vowels. Gift of Harold D. Uris and Percy Uris 1962.” Artist J. Lipchitz. Between Uris Library and John M. Olin Library.
•Artist Biography: Jacob Lipchitz (1891-1973) was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in Druskininkai, Lithuania, and later became a French citizen.
•Donor: Uris, Harold David, 1905-1982; Uris, Percy, 1899-1971
•Repository: Cornell Library
•Repository Location: Between Uris and Olin Libraries, Cornell University
Restored and revitalized, Song of the Vowels enjoys a newly-designed setting on the plaza between Olin and Uris libraries. Cornell University acquired the sculpture in 1962. Since that time, Song of the Vowels has been a fixture on the south end of Cornell’s Arts Quad, and a favorite gathering spot.
Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz created Song of the Vowels in 1931, and had it cast in a limited edition of seven copies, of which Cornell’s is the fifth. Other copies may now be found at Princeton University, UCLA, Stanford University, at Nelson Rockefeller’s Kykuit Gardens and at museums of modern art in Europe.
Born in Lithuania as Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, the artist spent much of his early career in Paris, working alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as a leader of the Cubist movement. The Cubistic attributes of his style are perhaps better displayed in the Bather, produced between 1923 and 1925, and also owned by the Cornell University Library.
Lipchitz’s Bather is a monumental study of geometric forms and intersecting planes that pivot around a central axis: the human bather’s torso. Bather was one of the last pieces Lipchitz created that can be considered strictly Cubist. Although his debt to Cubism is always apparent in his work, Lipchitz also drew inspiration from mythology, fantasy, and emotion to create expressive sculptural works. Song of the Vowels, created a few years later, represents a significantly different stage in Lipchitz’s oeuvre. While Bather is calm and carefully measured, Song of the Vowels is animated and energetic.
Lipchitz explained his inspiration for Song of the Vowels this way:
I had been commissioned to make a garden statue for Madame de Maudrot for her house at Le Pradet, in the south of France, designed by Le Corbusier. I was entranced by the location, a vineyard with mountains at the background, and since I was still obsessed with the idea of the harp, I decided to attempt a monument suggesting the power of man over nature. I had read somewhere about a papyrus discovered in Egypt having to do with a prayer that was a song composed only of vowels and designed to subdue the forces of nature … I cannot explain why the image of the harp and the Song of the Vowels should have come together except that both of them were in my mind at the same moment.
The design for Olin Library included a small sculpture court in an exterior alcove on the eastern side of the first floor, visible from the main reference area through a glass wall. As the building of Olin Library was nearing completion in 1961, a committee was charged with selecting sculpture for both the Olin Library sculpture court, and for the plaza between Olin and Uris libraries. The committee’s goal was to find modern sculpture of international renown. In January 1962, a major exhibition of Jacques Lipchitz sculpture came to Cornell’s Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art. With urging from art professor Jack Squier, the committee recommended the acquisition of Jacques Lipchitz’s work. Trustee Harold D. Uris, Class of 1925, and his brother, Percy, generously provided funds for both sculptures. Bather was installed in June of 1962, while Song of the Vowels came to its home at Cornell in October of the same year. Olin’s sculpture court has been replaced by a corridor that links Olin Library with the underground Carl A. Kroch Library, which opened in 1992.
After nearly 50 years as a landmark on the Cornell campus, concerns for the preservation and maintenance of Song of the Vowels led to an examination of the physical structure. Small holes had developed and were allowing moisture to penetrate the bronze and compromise the structure, so the sculpture was sent to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center for expert scientific analysis and conservation treatment. The planned return of Song of the Vowels provided an excellent opportunity to redesign the plaza between Uris and Olin Libraries, and landscape architect John Ullberg was hired to re-conceptualize the installation. He created a communal space that focuses attention on the sculpture, placed atop a limestone pedestal in a plaza that incorporates granite pavers, stone benches and new landscaping. The restored sculpture has now come back to its home, where it is appreciated by a new generation of Cornellians.
The Bather, too, has a new location. It now stands near the entrance to Olin Library, within sight of Song of the Vowels.
•Title: The Song of the Vowels
•Collection: Campus Artifacts, Art & Memorabilia
•Creator(s): Lipchitz, Jacques (French sculptor, 1891-1973, active in the United States) Male
•Date: 1962; 1931-1932
•Acquisition Date: 1962
•Culture: French
•Style/Period: Cubism
•Work Type: Outdoor Sculpture;
•Materials/Techniques: Bronze
•Extent: 10 Feet Including Base
•Description: “The Song of the Vowels. Gift of Harold D. Uris and Percy Uris 1962.” Artist J. Lipchitz. Between Uris Library and John M. Olin Library.
•Artist Biography: Jacob Lipchitz (1891-1973) was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz in Druskininkai, Lithuania, and later became a French citizen.
•Donor: Uris, Harold David, 1905-1982; Uris, Percy, 1899-1971
•Repository: Cornell Library
•Repository Location: Between Uris and Olin Libraries, Cornell University
Restored and revitalized, Song of the Vowels enjoys a newly-designed setting on the plaza between Olin and Uris libraries. Cornell University acquired the sculpture in 1962. Since that time, Song of the Vowels has been a fixture on the south end of Cornell’s Arts Quad, and a favorite gathering spot.
Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz created Song of the Vowels in 1931, and had it cast in a limited edition of seven copies, of which Cornell’s is the fifth. Other copies may now be found at Princeton University, UCLA, Stanford University, at Nelson Rockefeller’s Kykuit Gardens and at museums of modern art in Europe.
Born in Lithuania as Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, the artist spent much of his early career in Paris, working alongside Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque as a leader of the Cubist movement. The Cubistic attributes of his style are perhaps better displayed in the Bather, produced between 1923 and 1925, and also owned by the Cornell University Library.
Lipchitz’s Bather is a monumental study of geometric forms and intersecting planes that pivot around a central axis: the human bather’s torso. Bather was one of the last pieces Lipchitz created that can be considered strictly Cubist. Although his debt to Cubism is always apparent in his work, Lipchitz also drew inspiration from mythology, fantasy, and emotion to create expressive sculptural works. Song of the Vowels, created a few years later, represents a significantly different stage in Lipchitz’s oeuvre. While Bather is calm and carefully measured, Song of the Vowels is animated and energetic.
Lipchitz explained his inspiration for Song of the Vowels this way:
I had been commissioned to make a garden statue for Madame de Maudrot for her house at Le Pradet, in the south of France, designed by Le Corbusier. I was entranced by the location, a vineyard with mountains at the background, and since I was still obsessed with the idea of the harp, I decided to attempt a monument suggesting the power of man over nature. I had read somewhere about a papyrus discovered in Egypt having to do with a prayer that was a song composed only of vowels and designed to subdue the forces of nature … I cannot explain why the image of the harp and the Song of the Vowels should have come together except that both of them were in my mind at the same moment.
The design for Olin Library included a small sculpture court in an exterior alcove on the eastern side of the first floor, visible from the main reference area through a glass wall. As the building of Olin Library was nearing completion in 1961, a committee was charged with selecting sculpture for both the Olin Library sculpture court, and for the plaza between Olin and Uris libraries. The committee’s goal was to find modern sculpture of international renown. In January 1962, a major exhibition of Jacques Lipchitz sculpture came to Cornell’s Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art. With urging from art professor Jack Squier, the committee recommended the acquisition of Jacques Lipchitz’s work. Trustee Harold D. Uris, Class of 1925, and his brother, Percy, generously provided funds for both sculptures. Bather was installed in June of 1962, while Song of the Vowels came to its home at Cornell in October of the same year. Olin’s sculpture court has been replaced by a corridor that links Olin Library with the underground Carl A. Kroch Library, which opened in 1992.
After nearly 50 years as a landmark on the Cornell campus, concerns for the preservation and maintenance of Song of the Vowels led to an examination of the physical structure. Small holes had developed and were allowing moisture to penetrate the bronze and compromise the structure, so the sculpture was sent to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center for expert scientific analysis and conservation treatment. The planned return of Song of the Vowels provided an excellent opportunity to redesign the plaza between Uris and Olin Libraries, and landscape architect John Ullberg was hired to re-conceptualize the installation. He created a communal space that focuses attention on the sculpture, placed atop a limestone pedestal in a plaza that incorporates granite pavers, stone benches and new landscaping. The restored sculpture has now come back to its home, where it is appreciated by a new generation of Cornellians.
The Bather, too, has a new location. It now stands near the entrance to Olin Library, within sight of Song of the Vowels.
Libe Slope, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Thousands of Cornellians enjoy Slope Day 2007 on Libe Slope.
The morning after the 150 event, 50 Cornellians, including Professor Elizabeth Berliner and Michael Kotlikoff, the Austin O. Hooey Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, volunteered at the Washington Animal Rescue League. The service event was organized by the Cornell Club of Washington.
The morning after the 150 event, 50 Cornellians, including Professor Elizabeth Berliner and Michael Kotlikoff, the Austin O. Hooey Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, volunteered at the Washington Animal Rescue League. The service event was organized by the Cornell Club of Washington.
Cornellians may not know every word of the alma mater's six verses, but they certainly know the tune, thanks to the 21 bells in McGraw Tower. Student chimesmasters climb the 161 stairs to the top of the tower where they play three concerts daily. Each includes a Cornell standard. The "Jennie McGraw Rag" rings out each morning, the alma mater at mid-day, and the "Evening Song" at day's end.
The nine original bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, rang out "Hail Columbia" and "Old Hundred" from a temporary stand in celebration of the university's 1868 opening. The tower wasn't built for another two decades. Today the repertoire includes classical adaptations as well as Beatles hits, Broadway show tunes, and TV theme songs.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower's spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin. The following spring, an anonymous source told the Cornell Daily Sun the feat had been accomplished by a pair of local rock climbers.
Vessel's Details [ Thanks to Marine Traffic.com ]
Ship Type: Oil/chemical tanker
Year Built: 2010
Length x Breadth: 124 m X 20 m
Gross Tonnage: 7219, DeadWeight: 12000 t
Wednesday 15th February, 2012.
Photo By Steve Bromley
Cornellians may not know every word of the alma mater's six verses, but they certainly know the tune, thanks to the 21 bells in McGraw Tower. Student chimesmasters climb the 161 stairs to the top of the tower where they play three concerts daily. Each includes a Cornell standard. The "Jennie McGraw Rag" rings out each morning, the alma mater at mid-day, and the "Evening Song" at day's end.
The nine original bells, a gift from Ithacan Jennie McGraw, rang out "Hail Columbia" and "Old Hundred" from a temporary stand in celebration of the university's 1868 opening. The tower wasn't built for another two decades. Today the repertoire includes classical adaptations as well as Beatles hits, Broadway show tunes, and TV theme songs.
In 1997, the tower garnered national media attention when late-night pranksters adorned the tower's spire with what turned out to be a hollowed-out pumpkin. The following spring, an anonymous source told the Cornell Daily Sun the feat had been accomplished by a pair of local rock climbers.
David J. Skorton, President of Cornell University, and Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan, engage in a round-table discussion with Pakistani and Cornellian officials prior to Musharraf's speech at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City on September 26th, 2006.
[Published on page 4 of The Cornell Daily Sun on 09/27/06]
[Photo copyright Matt Hintsa / The Cornell Daily Sun and may not be used without proper permission / payment. Please contact me if you are interested in using this photo, and I will process your request.]