Ring forth, ye bells

Those of you who keep up to date on my theater life are aware that I am between shows. Red vs. the Wolf closed on Sunday and I'm not rehearsing anything right now, nor likely to be soon. And you're probably wondering how I plan to fill that those horrible empty hours.

Well, I found a way. And it doesn't involve watching more pointless TV either. Or sitting on the sofa, which Pekoe regards as rather a pity.

My church has a hand bell choir which meets on Tuesdays and this week I attended for the first time. The other members of the group have actually been meeting for several weeks but when I told Danny, the church's music director, that I could already read music (and that I had rehearsals on Tuesdays) he gave me a pass until after Red was out of the way.

I love bells - big bells, small bells, great bells and little ones. I've never before touched a hand bell, let alone played one, but I sing and I had enough piano lessons during my wastrel youth that I can count to four unassisted. I can even - though not as well - count 1-uh-2-uh-3-uh-4-uh if we're using 8th notes.

As my friend Andi can tell you, far too many singers are lazy counters, depending instead on either what they hear from everyone around them or their own sense of "timing." Really and truly, this is what separates singers from musicians. I am a lazy counter (and thus a singer instead of a true vocal musician) because I don't count well in my head and usually mouth the numbers. But, hey, if one is playing a hand bell up in the balcony, out of sight of the congregation, mouthing the numbers is no big deal.

So the way that a hand bell choir works (for those of you not yet in the know) is sort of like playing a piano by assigning everyone just a few notes. We were working with pieces written in C (thank you, Lord!) and covering about three octaves, so for my very first time I only had to play the G and the A bell. Or rather, the G5 and A5, which are the G and A on the treble staff.

The technique is pretty easy: wearing cotton gloves, hold the bell so that it rests lightly on your chest, but on neither the clavicle nor the areas of the breast that are chock full of nerve endings. Count as though your very life depends on it and when it's time for your note, use a generally oval motion with a wrist-flick at the end of the oval to cause the clapper to strike the casting. At the end of the note, damp the bell against the non-clavical, non-breast home position. Just like it looks when you see other people do it.

Danny conducts and tells us the measure numbers as we go along, so if one might, like a sheep, go astray (a-a-a-a-a-a-ay), one can rejoin at the top of the next measure. Counting is to hand bells as breathing is to diving - not the most exciting part until you do it wrong.

Each of us has a copy of the music and because Danny is both efficient and nice (and because he is trying to delay the inevitable descent into madness that is inherit in being a church music director), he has circled the notes for each position: blue for left hand (for me, G5) and red for right hand (A5). So I only have to look ahead for the next occurance of red or blue and count until we reach it. I've spent enough time turning pages at Gilbert & Sullivan get togethers (sing-ins) and enough time singing choral music with wretched BPTs* that I know to look ahead and turn the page as soon as I can once we hit the middle measure of the last staff.

David and I saw Into Great Silence not long ago and I can amuse myself - if not necessarily others - by imitating a contemplative monk blowing with complete focused attention on the glue on a boot he's repairing, but those monks have pretty much exactly the right attitude for playing handbells. Count and ring. Dance if it's helpful, but focus, count, and ring. Be your notes.

My internal (yeah, okay, mouthed. Whatever.) monologue was 1 - left - 3 - left, or 1 - uh - 2 - right - left- right - 4 - uh. Which will fascinate folks at the next sing-in I attend when I practicing doing that with the solos I'm not singing. Hmmm. Maybe I should sit at the back.

We started with Amazing Grace, one of my favorite hymns, and it was delightful to hear order come from chaos as we went over it a few times and the actual tune surfaced. We also played another one (name escapes me) and "Shall We Gather at the River." I feel like a pilot who has made an actual plane go up in the actual sky and brought it back down again without actual lose of life. And the view is amazing up there.


*BPT = Bad Page Turn which is when one has a fairly immediate entrance with something complicated on the upper left hand side of the page. People who don't mark and pay attention to BPTs usually screw up entrances and say stuff like "oh, crap" a lot under their breath in rehearsal. They also get yelled at a lot. Don't be one of them.


The bells! — hear the bells!
The merry wedding bells!
The little silver bells!
How fairy-like a melody there swells
From the silver tinkling cells
Of the bells, bells, bells!
Of the bells!

The bells! — ah, the bells!
The heavy iron bells!
Hear the tolling of the bells!
Hear the knells!
How horrible a monody there floats
From their throats —
From their deep-toned throats!
How I shudder at the notes
From the melancholy throats
Of the bells, bells, bells —
Of the bells —

An early version of "The Bells" by E.A. Poe