If there is a party in the Munich city council that sees satire as a core competency, it is the party for work, the rule of law, animal protection, the promotion of elites and grassroots democratic initiatives, in short: the PARTY. Once from the satire magazine Titanic She is represented on the local community committee by Marie Burneleit. The fact that she did not take part in a cross-party motion shows that the matter is serious and the concern is meant seriously.
Setting the tone in this matter is the SPD man Roland Hefter, a musician by profession and with an appropriately trained ear. During the carnival hustle and bustle on Marienplatz recently, he says, he and other musical city councilors noticed that the carillon in the tower of the new town hall sounded crooked. Something had to be done about it, they thought – and formulated a motion to have the bells “tuned as soon as possible”.
Now the realization that the 43 bells do not completely harmonize is not entirely new. Shortly after the last renovation in 2007, a church musician thought he could hear that a C sharp was sounding somewhere where a C should be sounding. Of course, the tourists interviewed at the time hardly noticed the semitone up or down.
But musician colleagues from outside the area repeatedly asked him about the strange sounds, reports Hefter. Locals have also joked that “persistent disgruntlement” in the town hall had been transferred to the carillon, he himself joked in the motion with the title submitted by the SPD/Volt, CSU/Free Voters, ÖDP/Munich List and FDP/Bayern Party factions “Clean up disgruntlement at City Hall”.
The Greens, with their partner Rosa Liste the strongest faction in the city council, stayed out of the matter. If they had wanted to take the matter seriously, they would have first had to appoint a carillon representative (m/f/d), we hear from their ranks – an objection that was not really meant seriously, as they immediately made it clear. In reality, of course, they would have known that the glockenspiel was already being renovated anyway, so the application was unnecessary.
In fact, the responsible building department confirms that work has been going on on the carillon since last summer and that the approximately 20 songs in the repertoire have been played on tape since then. The recordings were taken between 2017 and 2019, so the bells must have been out of tune five or six years ago.
Why no one noticed this or was bothered by it is a mystery, as is the question of how the building department managed, unnoticed by the majority of the city council, to simply do something without first obtaining a feasibility study and initiating a pilot project First of all, only four or five bells have to be tuned to see whether that has any effect at all.
Be that as it may, the work is complicated. The bells, which were previously rung mechanically using listed roller mechanisms and meter-long steel cables, will in future be set into vibration by an automatically controlled electrical impulse to the magnetic hammers. The construction department cannot determine exactly when the work should be finished; But there they assume that before the start of the European Football Championship, i.e. in mid-June, it will be: Ringt, bell, klingelingeling!
If nothing happens with the original town hall bells by then, a replacement has been taken care of: A few days before the European Championship opening game in Fröttmaning, the old rockers AC/DC will be performing in the Olympic Stadium. And you can definitely hear one of their big hits from them – “Hell’s Bells”, the bells of hell. They don’t sound any weirder than those of the town hall tower.