500 years of city carillonneur: a musical journey

One fine day in 1526, a certain Thomas climbed the Great Tower, where he had fitted the approximately 17 bells hanging there at the time with a new mechanism. It must have smelt, because the wood for the bell frame came from the tables of the fish market. With this carillon, he was able to make live music, and his successors have continued to do so to this day. But we know little else about Thomas Den Beyaert, apart from the fact that he received an annual salary of 16 guilders. Little is known about many other carillonneurs, musically speaking, beyond their salaries.

Paul Maassen (1981) has been Breda’s 21st city carillonneur since 2012. It is a profession that has been practised by the Maassen family for 103 years now. He studied jazz piano at Codarts (the Rotterdam Conservatoire), and in 2009 obtained his Master of Music in Utrecht under Bert van den Brink. In addition to being the city carillonneur, Paul works in musical theatre as a musical director, currently for the musicals "De Kleine Prins" and "Piaf". For his work on "the Color Purple" in 2018, he was nominated for a Musical Award.

Paul takes us on a journey through history and tells us about those carillonneurs, the bells and their significance for the city. As a musician rather than a historian, he reconstructs, using musical examples, what the city might have sounded like over those 500 years: an artist’s impression of the sound of the bells of the Great Tower.
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