Hopeman Carillon Summer Concerts at the University of Rochester

Some of my earliest memories of music came from above my head. My father came to Rochester for graduate school at the Eastman School of Music, and his love of music was the kind that rearranges a family's weekends around it. On summer evenings we would spread a blanket on the Eastman Quadrangle, unpack a picnic, and listen as the bells in the Rush Rhees Library tower rang out over the lawn. I didn't understand yet that I was hearing one of the rarest instruments in the state. I just knew the whole campus had turned into a concert hall with no walls. Those evenings have a name — the Hopeman Carillon summer concerts — and they are back again this year.

Four free outdoor performances will ring out over the University of Rochester's River Campus on Monday evenings this July and August. No tickets, no seats to reserve, no dress code. Just a lawn, the bells, and whoever decides to show up.

What a Carillon Actually Is — and Why Rochester Has One of the Best

What a Carillon Actually Is — and Why Rochester Has One of the Best

A carillon is not a recording, and it is not automated. It is a real instrument of at least 23 tuned bells, played live by a person using a console of wooden batons and foot pedals — the heavier bells take a closed fist. The Hopeman Memorial Carillon is a set of 50 bells weighing more than three tons, played from a cabin roughly 186 feet up inside the Rush Rhees tower. Everything you hear travels from a musician's hands and feet, through bronze cast at the Royal Eijsbouts foundry in Asten, Netherlands, and down onto the quad. As Doris Aman, who has coordinated the University of Rochester's Carillon Society for years, puts it:

"These bells from Asten ring music by human hands. Nothing AI here."

Bells have rung over the River Campus since it opened in 1930 — first as a 15-bell chime, expanded to 17 in 1956, and finally replaced by today's 50-bell carillon, installed in 1973.

According to the 2026 series program, Rochester's carillon is the most actively played of the six in New York State — students and faculty play it by hand throughout the school year, and the quarter-hour Westminster chime is one of its few automated moments. The rest is people. When was the last time you heard live music you didn't buy a ticket for, on the grass beside strangers who become, for an hour, neighbors?

Four Free Hopeman Carillon Summer Concerts in 2026

Four Free Hopeman Carillon Summer Concerts in 2026

This year's guest carillonneurs, profiled in the 2026 series program, come from across North America, and each brings a strikingly different program. All four concerts begin at 6:30 pm.

The series opens July 20 with Andrée-Anne Doane, titular carillonist of Saint-Joseph's Oratory in Montreal, playing Quebec folk songs, French chanson like "La vie en rose," and Gershwin's "Summertime." On July 27, Sheryl Modlin — a carillonneur from Ohio who is also a pediatric anesthesiologist at the Cleveland Clinic — moves from Bach and Florence Price to the spiritual "Wade in the Water" and the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun." August 3 brings Julie Zhu, a composer and assistant professor at the University of Michigan, who leans into spectral minimalism, jazz standards, and a pair of her own compositions written for the high bells. And on August 10, Michael Gancz, a carillonist and Ph.D. researcher at Stanford, closes with a program he calls "look up" — Oscar Peterson, Dvořák's "New World" Symphony, and a full carillon arrangement of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." Gancz writes that in a world bent on turning communities into consumers, the carillon asks us to do exactly that: stop, and look up.

Taken together, the four programs are astonishingly varied. By our count of the published programs, the music splits almost evenly across five worlds:

You can come for the Beethoven and stay for the Beyoncé. Which program calls to you?

How to Make an Evening of It

How to Make an Evening of It

The concerts take place on the University of Rochester's Eastman Quadrangle, in front of Rush Rhees Library. Parking is free in the library lot at 755 Library Road after 4 pm, so you can arrive early and settle in with a blanket, folding chairs, and a picnic. Doris recalls one evening hearing Koen Cosaert, director of the famed Jef Denyn carillon school in Mechelen, Belgium, play a century of romantic Belgian carillon music while she and her friends drank wine and ate baguettes, grapes, and cheese on the lawn — and pretended, for an hour, that they were in Europe.

These are the kinds of nights that lodge in people's lives. Doris once met a couple picnicking nearby who return every year to mark their wedding anniversary at the carillon, because 25 years ago, at one of these very concerts, he asked her to marry him. There are fireflies as the light goes, trees moving in the breeze, a sunset over the Genesee, and sometimes an artist who has come simply to sketch the moment. After the last bell, the performers climb down and greet the audience on the quad — a rare chance to talk with a working carillonneur about an instrument most of us only ever hear from below. Can't make it in person? Every concert is livestreamed on the Hopeman Carillon's channels.

A Best-Kept Secret Worth Sharing

A Best-Kept Secret Worth Sharing

For all the devotion this series inspires, it stays one of those Rochester gifts that hides in plain sight, ringing out over a campus thousands of people cross without ever looking up.

"These charming carillon concerts are Rochester summer's best kept secret."

— Doris Aman

What I love most about the carillon is how few conditions it places on belonging. Doris remembers bringing her mother — in a wheelchair, hard of hearing, and too shy for the formality of an indoor concert — to sit together on the plaza in the last years of her life. The carillon made room for her when other venues couldn't. "A shared moment in freeze frame," Doris calls it. That is the quiet radicalism of an instrument that asks nothing of you except that you stop and listen.

In this USA250 summer, Doris says, the wish is simple: to hear our bells ring freely, for everyone. Bring your friends. Bring your community. Bring whoever in your life needs an evening that asks nothing of them. I learned the worth of one of these nights on a blanket beside my father, years before I had words for it — and this year, four musicians will climb 186 feet of stairs and play their hearts out over a lawn full of people they'll never meet. What would it mean to spend one summer Monday looking up?