Cornell University Chimesmaster Ilia Karp to play St. Saviour’s bells

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Thursday, June 7 at 3:00 PM, Cornell University Chimesmaster Ilia Karp will play a recital on the carillon of St. Saviour’s Church. Although the church is at 41 Mt. Desert Street, the bell concert will be audible all over downtown Bar Harbor. Ilia Karp is a graduate of Cornell University, and for the last six years has been a member of the guild of chimesmasters who play daily concerts on the 21-bell chime atop McGraw Tower on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York. More information on the Cornell Chimes can be found at www.Chimes.Cornell.edu. St. Saviour’s carillon of ten bells was given in 1938 by William Pierson Hamilton, in thanksgiving for his wife Theodosia’s recovery from a serious illness. The bells were cast at the Meneely Foundry in West Troy, New York, and are played from an electro-mechanical keyboard in St. Saviour’s Parish Hall. Church records indicate that Mr. Hamilton had planned to donate a stone bell tower, but withdrew the donation of the tower for reasons that are not recorded. To house the bells, the church constructed the “temporary” steel tower that still stands eighty years later.