The 48 bells that ring over Allendale's campus

Cross the Grand Valley State University campus in Allendale on the right afternoon and the air fills with bells — not a recording, but real bronze swinging in a tower at the center of campus. The Cook Carillon Tower holds 48 of them, and a person actually plays it, hands and feet working a keyboard of wooden batons and pedals connected to the bells by wires.

That instrument is a carillon, and it’s far older than the school. The idea goes back to the bell towers of the Low Countries, and these particular bells were cast in the Netherlands, where the craft has been practiced for centuries. The largest weighs about 3,000 pounds; the smallest is barely 14. Together they cover enough range to ring out hymns, school songs, and the occasional pop tune drifting over students hurrying to class.

The tower went up in 1994, paid for by Pat and Peter Cook, longtime supporters of the university whose name it carries. Grand Valley itself is the younger institution by Michigan standards — it opened in 1960 as a college, on farmland about a dozen miles west of Grand Rapids, and grew into one of the state’s larger public universities while the surrounding township grew up around it.

The carillon does a quiet kind of work. It marks the hours, it plays at graduations and holidays, and it gives a sprawling modern campus a single voice that everyone within earshot shares. A student walking past the tower hears the same notes a retiree hears from a porch across town.

Stand near the base when it’s playing and you can feel the lower notes as much as hear them — five hundred years of European bell-craft, ringing out over the cornfields of Ottawa County.