The La Merce official schedule dropped on September 16 and there are hundreds of events in four categories. Our younger son is coming to visit us this week so I’ve been busy figuring out how many we can fit in. I imagine there will be a fire hose of new exploits to report after he leaves, though I can’t promise all of them will appear here.

The festival officially opens on Sept. 23 but there are plenty of pre-festival events, notably a carillon concert which happened to be 0.7 km away from and 90 minutes after our Saturday Scottish dance class, so we grabbed a couple of tapas on the way then just showed up. The venue was Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya, a 15th century building that still functions as the active seat of government for the entity that built it. Even in Europe that’s not very common.

This building is in the old section of Barcelona on a popular plaza, Sant Jaume, and we have seen it many times, but never been inside. My first surprise when we showed up was that we coulda shoulda gotten (free) tickets in advance. Happily there were some spaces left, and the ten or so people waiting in line were all able to get in after everyone who had read the details was already seated. We had to present our resident IDs and go through a metal detector.

We walked into this grand building, filled with statues and gardens and stairs and high ceilings. We dragged ourselves up a lot of stairs, since we had been dancing then walking for a while and our joints aren’t what they used to be, and found ourselves in an impromptu seating area on a balcony looking across an open-roofed space with interior gargoyles along the edges at the top. Three screens were mounted which showed the emcee and film clips before each piece, and the three musicians–playing carillon, cello, and piano–during the performances. I would estimate there was room for about 200 people, and only a handful of seats were empty.

Each piece was proceeded by a few minutes of commentary, accompanied by a video. The commentary was all in Catalan and we did not recognize any of the clips so we did not really know what was going on. The eight pieces each had 3 or 4 movements, and were quite different from each other, but very interesting and mostly pretty. All the pieces were composed by Mark Vaíllo, born in 1975, and each video had a different director.

I used “circle” in the title because I felt like I had a very circular approach to this event. I saw it and put it on the calendar and we just went. Then I realized I should have signed up for tickets, but we got lucky. Then we had no idea what was going on, but we enjoyed it. Then later I read up on the details, although I didn’t find a lot online. Here is an example from the film associated with the final piece, Orson West, directed by Fran Ruvira in 2012:

A film crew arrives in a borderland village in Spain to film a low-budget western, which changes the daily routine of its inhabitants, especially that of a group of young boys. The film represents the return of Sonia to her homeland, because she comes back home to play the leading role in the film. However, this is not the first time that the cinema industry has explored these lands. Fifty years before, Orson Welles wanted to shoot a western in the same area. Inspired by this story, Fran Ruvira searches for the phantom remains of this western, which was never made, and wants to finish the work as a form of expression.

Honestly, I don’t even know whether these movies, all created between 2001 and 2015, inspired these compositions, or if the music originally went with the movies, although I suspect the former, since the carillon would not be a very easy instrument to use for a soundtrack in my opinion. Later I found out that this was the opening concert of the 2026-2027 season. Got some free time? You can watch this exact concert here.

So what is a carillon anyway? We were in a building with a bell tower. There is a case and keyboard similar to those of a harpsichord, with additional notes operated by the foot pedals as on an organ. The keys are connected to the bells by cables and pulleys, so when the musician presses the key, a bell sounds but it doesn’t peal. I thought the notes sounded like sparkly jewels. We could hear the bell sounds above us, especially the lower tones, but it was also amplified by speaker, as were the cello and piano. The musicians were stuffed into a cramped space, presumably in the tower.

This particular carillon has 46 keys and was installed in 1976, replacing an earlier one that had been installed in the 1920s. The instrument was developed in what are known as the low countries centuries ago, and was more popular then though there are still 700 in operation, mostly in Europe. I believe there are about 200 in the United States.

Think about working in a government building with these sorts of features! The website also showed a picture of this particular carillon, and the circle was completed when I realized I had seen and photographed it in 2024 from the roof of the nearby cathedral. I didn’t know what it was.

The website said that if you don’t get tickets to a concert, you can hear the bells from outside the building, but that was not the case this time, at least not toward the end of the program, because the correfocs showed up in the plaza. The last piece was pretty much obscured even inside the building by the high whine of the spinning spark throwers, and numerous not-so-small explosions. We came out into the square just in time for a deafening display by about 20 correfocs holding nozzles pointing straight up with bright white streams of sparks pouring out of them into the sky.

The festival hasn’t even officially started yet!