It’s 4:29 Thursday afternoon and Steve Knight sits high above the Samford University campus in Birmingham, waiting.
Blind since childhood, he slides a gold pocket watch out of the right front pocket of his khakis for the fifth time in the last couple of minutes, flips the top up and runs a finger lightly along the minute hand.
Then he snaps the watch shut with flair — it’s time.
He reaches out in front of him and with perfect instinct grabs several of the wooden batons — arranged somewhat like a piano keyboard — in a familiar succession.
A deluge of bells chiming a simple eight-note melody spills with force through the open trapdoor above his head. Outside, it shakes the whole campus.
“That’s my musical signature,” Knight said of the melody, “just so they know it’s me who will be playing.”
As if it could be anyone else.
Samford’s carillon
Since 1979, Knight has frequently felt his way up the four tiny spiral staircases — 71 steps total, he noted — to the library’s bell tower to play the 60-bell carillon.
Before the bells were moved to the library that year, he played them in the top of Samford’s Reid Chapel. He gave his first recital there in 1969, the year after the Rushton Memorial Carillon was first brought on campus.
“The carillon came the semester after I graduated from (the University of) Alabama,” Knight said.
“I was in the middle of my graduate work at Samford before I finally got to play it.”
But it was worth the wait, said Knight, who was first sold on the instrument as a 6 year old invited into the playing room of a carillon elsewhere. “There’s something really godly, really Christlike about playing these carillons.”
Samford’s carillon is one of just under 200 nationwide and the first in the nation to have five full chromatic octaves, he said. “But even more than being unique, it’s glorious,” he added.
And then he begins.
The half-hour that follows is a sweeping and complicated bell spectacular that fills the ears of faculty members in their offices, students relaxing on the quad and passers-by who roll their car windows down.
With adept hands and fancy footwork, Knight pulls the batons and dances on the pedals. The steel cables whiz up and down from the batons through the ceiling, and the bells above — ranging from 26 pounds to 5,192 pounds — swing in perfect time.
“There must be a breeze out there,” he shouts over the chiming. “I can feel the wires wiggling around while I’m playing.”
The longtime carillonneur’s music moves from C.P.E. Bach to Johann Berghuis and then to English and French folk songs. “Pop music sounds great on the carillon, too,” Knight said later with a laugh. “Beatles music sounds real good, and there are some Elvis tunes that are fantastic.”
Knight’s twice-a-week concerts — every Monday and Thursday at 4:30 p.m. — frequently mix it up musicwise. Knight, an adjunct music teacher at Samford, also plays for major events on campus, including weddings.
“He played some of my favorite pieces as my wife and I were leaving Reid Chapel on our wedding day,” said Bryan Black, a 1991 Samford grad and director of music at First United Methodist Church of Marietta, Ga.
It was a fitting cap on a long relationship Black and Knight, fellow carillon aficionados, had cultivated over several decades.
Black became fascinated with the carillon as a young child when his parents would park on campus at Christmastime to listen to Knight’s recitals.
“We caught him once as he was going up to play and introduced ourselves, and he took us upstairs with him to the playing room,” Black said.
Following Knight up the precarious stair arrangement to his inner sanctum was a life-changing experience for the young Black, much as it was for Knight. “The instrument is so unusual, and then to encounter him and realize that he does it all without the benefit of sight, it’s staggering.”
Like the young Knight, Black was hooked.
More than a decade later, he came back to Samford as a student and quickly signed up for carillon lessons with Knight.
“He’s very, very well read — an expert in that particular discipline,” Black said. “I learned a great deal from him.”
One lesson was toughness and dedication, Black said with a laugh. “Playing the carillon is brutal on your hands — to the point that my doctor nearly told me to stop. But Mr. Knight just said, ‘You’ll be fine. You’ll get callouses.’ And I did.”
Knight “lives and breathes” the carillon, Black said. “I’ve never seen anyone so dedicated to that calling.”
To Knight, it definitely is just that — a calling.
“I believe that the Rushton Memorial Carillon of Samford University has definite Christian artistic and social responsibilities to be fulfilled in a most inspirational way,” he wrote in a Carillonneur’s Creed in 1991 in an effort to attract more student interest in the instrument.
“I’ve taught lessons on the carillon over the years, and I hope some students will keep it up,” he said. To facilitate such lessons, a practice console identical to the one in the bell tower is located just down the hall from his office.
“It’s like this one,” Knight said, gesturing toward the carillon he had just stopped playing, “batons and all manual. They do have electronic carillons, but we don’t want that around here.”
‘Timeless’
The instrument is practically timeless, according to Knight. The bells only have to be “turned” once every half a century and “set back” once a century or so.
And like the carillon, Don Sanders, professor of music at Samford, said Knight is timeless, too.
“His playing adds so much to this environment,” Sanders said. “It’s like the sunshine — it’s something you take for granted until it’s not there. People are so accustomed to hearing it that if suddenly it were silent, people would miss it.”
If it’s up to Knight, then silence won’t be an issue for a long, long time.
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