in collaboration with the artist David Ward
Commissioned by artconnexion
Published by Little Toller Books
Order here.
As a composer and completely incapable bell-ringer I listen to change-ringing with delight and fascination and awe.
I wonder at the extraordinary level of skill and concentration. How do you remember your next move, how do you execute it, how do you keep focus for three hours on end?
I wonder at the subtlety of the methods – the algorithms which miraculously generate every possible permutation of bells. Is that really mathematically possible? Was Fabian Stedman a mathematical genius or a man of extraordinary instincts? Or both?
I wonder at the complexity of the mechanism that rings the bell – the wheel, the headstock, the rope. Why not just hit it with a mallet?
I wonder about a peal as music. How does it relate to other music-making? In the context of (most) Western music it seems radical, contrarian, unique. But in the context of (most) Eastern music it seems at home. So I wonder about its relationship with Russian Orthodox bell-ringing - zvon, with the gamelan music of Java and Bali.
I wonder about the peal as musical performance – an extraordinary kind of performance where the musicians are (usually) invisible, where the instruments and the performers and the audience are (usually) in different spaces.
And I wonder if it’s possible, given the restrictions imposed by the ringing system, to ring something that is not a peal. Would it be possible to subvert the concept of the peal so that it was rhythmically variable? So that it included more repetition? Less repetition? So that it burst out of permutation? So that it was in a different mode? So that it changed harmonically over time? And, if that were possible, would it even be worth doing? And would any self-respecting bell-ringer want to do it?
So my friend the artist David Ward and I set out to find out. We worked with ringers in Martinstown and Charminster in Dorset, two towers with a deep history of ringing. At Martinstown (six bells, five of them memorials to the village bell-ringers who were victims of the Second World War) we were interested in commemorating the centenary of the First World War, and worked on the idea of peal-as-lament. At Charminster (ten bells with ropes hanging down into the nave round the font) we were interested in the visibility of the ringers, and worked on the idea of ringing-as-dance.
We tried using a subset of the bells, so that we could play in a minor key, or in a strange mode, or play arpeggios. We tried adding and subtracting bells, so that the harmonic landscape could change. We tried repeating the changes, obsessing over certain changes, in a way that brought the ringing closer to the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, where a change, in the context of a static repetitive texture, is a radical moment. We tried a slow slow tune, an extension of funeral tolling, on several bells. Some of the ringers were discombobulated, wondering at the idiocy of meddling with change-ringing; some were enthusiastic, delighting in the new sounds, suggesting different experiments.
All these attempts would have been radically easier on an Ellacombe apparatus or on a carillon. One skilful person required. Or on handbells. But for David and me there is something magical about the extreme radical collaborative music made by a group of ringers with a group of ropes, and about the whirring Doppler sound of the rotating bells.
The Martinstown and Charminster projects never came to fruition (covid had a large part to play). We decided to make a book. Using mouth-blown, hand-spun glass discs known as crown glass, David has created a beautiful series of abstract images, The Bell Folio, which make vibration visible. They are juxtaposed with his dramatic photographs of bell-founding at Taylors in Loughborough. Earth and fire. I have written an essay which looks at change-ringing and zvon and the music of the semantron and the gamelan, at the social and religious implications of bell-ringing, at culture wars (rich idiots buying second homes in villages and complaining about the sound of the bells), at the future. The book is called A Sculpture That Sings – bronze sculptures are commonplace, but a bronze sculpture that makes music, ah, that is a kind of magic.
Now we are working at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. We walk through the crypt and go up in the lift into a massive corridor, past a display of the masonry remains of the original building, onto the cathedral gallery, we look awestruck down on the nave, Christopher Wren’s genius, we climb into the bell chamber where the ringers are in action, and out onto the parapet, we look awestruck down at the tumbling dancing bells – an extraordinary dance, for each bell has its own heft, its own rhythm, is in its own world, and yet they are dancing together - and we turn round and look down over the London night. Halfway between earth and heaven (well, ok, not quite), a glorious limbo-land.
We begin experimenting. There is a gloriously ambiguous moment when we start the first experiment - on the faces of the ringers a mixture of bafflement, piqued interest and glee. I myself ricochet from being deeply excited by what I’m hearing to wondering whether we’re fiddling pointlessly with a brilliant tradition, or that we’re boringly bringing it closer to normal music-making. Well if we don’t try we’ll never find out.
