Beautiful article. One of the most interesting music/math topics ever. I am still mystified by how the ringers keep track of the patterns completely in their heads!
I'm also gonna need to know more about this statement: "as someone who deliberately chose to live beside a bell tower" !!!!
Haha, thanks Chris. Well, basically, I decided to live in the Old Town of Valencia, partly because there are a lot of bell towers here. I am about 50 meters from one of them. It rings the hour, quarter past and quarter to, and half hour, from 8 am to 12 pm. Then extra on saint days (of which there are many) and the Angelus Bell. I find it beautiful to live close to and count myself lucky.
You've also got me thinking about the silent 'peals' of Push, Press, Roll-Back and Ward-Off in T'ai Chi pushing hands, the way they cascade in this rhythm until interrupted by a 'change'.
Indeed. I was thinking specifically of the Cheng Man-Ching version of double pushing hands drills, which have set changes in order to teach students a sensitivity to the proper reasons for changes in form. For me they resonated with how Dom's music in his piece felt and sounded.
In T'ai Chi partner work of all kinds famously, 'the principles are few, but the permutations are endless'. Perhaps like a tower of innumerable bells, but with only two bell-ringers...
Fascinating, thankyou. Besides marking the time of day, church bells were primarily for calling people together for worship, (akin to the Call To Prayer of Islam's Muezzins). The bells of each Sunday, or for a wedding, say, summoned people for communal rites which would have included further communal sound-making - including hymns, prayers, responses and most certainly conversations... It is poignant that the bells during WW2 would have been calling people to gather in darkness and silence rather than light and conviviality.
The peals' computations seem to produce that 'natural progression' in sound that one sees in leaf-placement spirals, shell-hollows and ripples in sand.
Thanks Caroline! Yes, their historic connection to ritual is significant and remains so. As part of the research for this piece, I listened to some of the pealings of St Paul's Cathedral from Prince Charles's wedding. The BBC has a huge archive. The fact a bomb was not dropped on that building remains a miracle.
What I find interesting about change ringing, which connects to Anglicanism and the reformation, is that some larger transformation seems to be at work. Marking ritual in sound is interesting, but unremarkable. Whereas change ringing seems to act as a premonition of a society to come: one where algorithm and creation are intimately linked. Just as mechanical time planted the seed for international railways and industrialism, change ringing contributed to forms of artistic algorithmic thinking that are relevant today.
Hi Su, I have experimented with it but have not found a meaningful function for the Fibonacci sequence/golden ratio. I did for a couple of weeks keep buying pineapples to check that they really followed Fibonacci and discovered they did.
After reading this brilliant and stimulating piece, I was about to make exactly the same point as you did in this reply. Until the Reformation, church bells were primarily (I think) rung for the Angelus in England, and many of the bells were either named after Gabriel, the announcing angel, or Mary, or had words of the Angelus inscribed on them. The regular daily ritual, rung morning noon and night like the Muslim call to prayer involved something like three lots of three tolls, then a longer peal. But the Angelus and its bells were cancelled by the Reformers in the 1540s...opening the path to a different intellectual world, set to music as you show by musical algorithms. We also live under a church tower - will listen with more patience now to those endless sequences!
Hi Clare, thanks for your comment. I lost a book during a move, whose title and authour I have now forgotten, but which was fascinating. Until reading it, I had presumed mechanical time was a result of a mechanical civilisation; however, he presented the view that the desire for mechanical time created mechanical and industrial civilisation. The Benediction idea - or obsession - that 'idleness is the enemy of the soul' drove the desire for greater punctuality and efficiency through monastic bells. In this sense - as I understand it - there was no initial distinction between religious time and mechanical time, though once towers created communal time, they changed the culture in unanticipated ways; I'm not sure Benedict could have anticipated that he was paving the way for railways, factories, and computers.
As an aside. The musical project I mentioned in this piece uses samples from both pre-reformation and post-reformation bell ringing. One from bells in Cornwall, another from bells in Austria. Their feeling is completely different - they speak of different worlds.
“Ringing is an addiction from which few escape once they have ventured into the
small fortress-like room beneath the bells, and the sally - the soft tufted grip at
the end of the rope - leaps to life against the palm of the hand like an animal.
There then begins a lifetime of concentration, of perfect striking and a co-ordination of body and mind so destructive to anxieties and worries of all kinds that one wonders why campanology isn’t high on the therapy list.
The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly
old and vast, with the names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants,
as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art- pastime-worship based on
blocks of circulating figures which look like one of those numeric keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a crashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the 'attempt' the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them. They are famous for avoiding church services. They keep in touch by means of a weekly magazine called The Ringing World which, to the outsider, presents a scene of extraordinary fantasy. The
ringing men are indifferent to all the usual 'craft' or ancient art talk and are a different race altogether to Morris Dancers, say. They just walk or drive to a given tower - the fact that the building is a church is always a secondary consideration - and ring. The curious thing is that the sweet uproar of change-ringing is so integral a part of the village sound that it is often not consciously heard. When listened to by the non-ringer, the general effect is soothing, bland, a restoration
of God to his heaven and rightness to the world. The reality of what is occurring is known only to another ringer.
A ringer is first attracted by the sound of the bells, then he comes to see how it is done and something quite different gets a hold of him. Some people say it is the science of the thing. What a ringer needs most is not strength but the ability to keep time. Everybody must be dead-on with their pulls. Nobody must be uneven.
You must bring these two things together in your mind and let them rest there for
ever - bells and time, bells and time. When I first started, the young men were so
keen to ring that they would be lucky to get five minutes’ practice each - so many
of them wanted to have a go. We would think nothing of walking six or more miles just to have a five-minute practice ring in a good tower. And I have walked between twenty and thirty miles in a day to ring a peal of 5,000 changes. All the ringers were great walkers and you would meet them in bands strolling across Suffolk from tower to tower. Many of the old ringers couldn’t read or write, yet
they turned out to be really famous bell-composers and conductors. They could
get hundreds of rows of figures into their heads and put them all into practice when they reached the belfry. They could set all the bells ringing wherever they went and bring them all back to 1-2-3-4- 5-6-7-8.
The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, 'Hullo, a death?' Then the years of the dead person's age would be tolled and if the bell went on speaking, 'seventy-one, seventy-two ...' people would say, 'Well, they had a good innings!' But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty a hush would come over the fields. People were supposed to pray for the departed soul, and some of them may have done. This practice was continued up until the Second World War,
when all the bells of England were silenced. It was never revived.”
Beautiful article. One of the most interesting music/math topics ever. I am still mystified by how the ringers keep track of the patterns completely in their heads!
I'm also gonna need to know more about this statement: "as someone who deliberately chose to live beside a bell tower" !!!!
Haha, thanks Chris. Well, basically, I decided to live in the Old Town of Valencia, partly because there are a lot of bell towers here. I am about 50 meters from one of them. It rings the hour, quarter past and quarter to, and half hour, from 8 am to 12 pm. Then extra on saint days (of which there are many) and the Angelus Bell. I find it beautiful to live close to and count myself lucky.
You've also got me thinking about the silent 'peals' of Push, Press, Roll-Back and Ward-Off in T'ai Chi pushing hands, the way they cascade in this rhythm until interrupted by a 'change'.
And of course, peng-lu-ji-an is only an exercise pattern.... when we use it in tui shou it's full of changes😉
Indeed. I was thinking specifically of the Cheng Man-Ching version of double pushing hands drills, which have set changes in order to teach students a sensitivity to the proper reasons for changes in form. For me they resonated with how Dom's music in his piece felt and sounded.
In T'ai Chi partner work of all kinds famously, 'the principles are few, but the permutations are endless'. Perhaps like a tower of innumerable bells, but with only two bell-ringers...
Fascinating, thankyou. Besides marking the time of day, church bells were primarily for calling people together for worship, (akin to the Call To Prayer of Islam's Muezzins). The bells of each Sunday, or for a wedding, say, summoned people for communal rites which would have included further communal sound-making - including hymns, prayers, responses and most certainly conversations... It is poignant that the bells during WW2 would have been calling people to gather in darkness and silence rather than light and conviviality.
The peals' computations seem to produce that 'natural progression' in sound that one sees in leaf-placement spirals, shell-hollows and ripples in sand.
Thanks Caroline! Yes, their historic connection to ritual is significant and remains so. As part of the research for this piece, I listened to some of the pealings of St Paul's Cathedral from Prince Charles's wedding. The BBC has a huge archive. The fact a bomb was not dropped on that building remains a miracle.
https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=Church%20bells
What I find interesting about change ringing, which connects to Anglicanism and the reformation, is that some larger transformation seems to be at work. Marking ritual in sound is interesting, but unremarkable. Whereas change ringing seems to act as a premonition of a society to come: one where algorithm and creation are intimately linked. Just as mechanical time planted the seed for international railways and industrialism, change ringing contributed to forms of artistic algorithmic thinking that are relevant today.
Dom have you used the Fibonacci sequence in your work?
Hi Su, I have experimented with it but have not found a meaningful function for the Fibonacci sequence/golden ratio. I did for a couple of weeks keep buying pineapples to check that they really followed Fibonacci and discovered they did.
Also a bomb was not dropped on the Dom cathedral in Köln....but I think that was deliberate because pilots on either side needed it for navigation.
After reading this brilliant and stimulating piece, I was about to make exactly the same point as you did in this reply. Until the Reformation, church bells were primarily (I think) rung for the Angelus in England, and many of the bells were either named after Gabriel, the announcing angel, or Mary, or had words of the Angelus inscribed on them. The regular daily ritual, rung morning noon and night like the Muslim call to prayer involved something like three lots of three tolls, then a longer peal. But the Angelus and its bells were cancelled by the Reformers in the 1540s...opening the path to a different intellectual world, set to music as you show by musical algorithms. We also live under a church tower - will listen with more patience now to those endless sequences!
Hi Clare, thanks for your comment. I lost a book during a move, whose title and authour I have now forgotten, but which was fascinating. Until reading it, I had presumed mechanical time was a result of a mechanical civilisation; however, he presented the view that the desire for mechanical time created mechanical and industrial civilisation. The Benediction idea - or obsession - that 'idleness is the enemy of the soul' drove the desire for greater punctuality and efficiency through monastic bells. In this sense - as I understand it - there was no initial distinction between religious time and mechanical time, though once towers created communal time, they changed the culture in unanticipated ways; I'm not sure Benedict could have anticipated that he was paving the way for railways, factories, and computers.
As an aside. The musical project I mentioned in this piece uses samples from both pre-reformation and post-reformation bell ringing. One from bells in Cornwall, another from bells in Austria. Their feeling is completely different - they speak of different worlds.
From Alenfield, by Ronald Blythe:
“Ringing is an addiction from which few escape once they have ventured into the
small fortress-like room beneath the bells, and the sally - the soft tufted grip at
the end of the rope - leaps to life against the palm of the hand like an animal.
There then begins a lifetime of concentration, of perfect striking and a co-ordination of body and mind so destructive to anxieties and worries of all kinds that one wonders why campanology isn’t high on the therapy list.
The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly
old and vast, with the names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants,
as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art- pastime-worship based on
blocks of circulating figures which look like one of those numeric keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a crashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the 'attempt' the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them. They are famous for avoiding church services. They keep in touch by means of a weekly magazine called The Ringing World which, to the outsider, presents a scene of extraordinary fantasy. The
ringing men are indifferent to all the usual 'craft' or ancient art talk and are a different race altogether to Morris Dancers, say. They just walk or drive to a given tower - the fact that the building is a church is always a secondary consideration - and ring. The curious thing is that the sweet uproar of change-ringing is so integral a part of the village sound that it is often not consciously heard. When listened to by the non-ringer, the general effect is soothing, bland, a restoration
of God to his heaven and rightness to the world. The reality of what is occurring is known only to another ringer.
A ringer is first attracted by the sound of the bells, then he comes to see how it is done and something quite different gets a hold of him. Some people say it is the science of the thing. What a ringer needs most is not strength but the ability to keep time. Everybody must be dead-on with their pulls. Nobody must be uneven.
You must bring these two things together in your mind and let them rest there for
ever - bells and time, bells and time. When I first started, the young men were so
keen to ring that they would be lucky to get five minutes’ practice each - so many
of them wanted to have a go. We would think nothing of walking six or more miles just to have a five-minute practice ring in a good tower. And I have walked between twenty and thirty miles in a day to ring a peal of 5,000 changes. All the ringers were great walkers and you would meet them in bands strolling across Suffolk from tower to tower. Many of the old ringers couldn’t read or write, yet
they turned out to be really famous bell-composers and conductors. They could
get hundreds of rows of figures into their heads and put them all into practice when they reached the belfry. They could set all the bells ringing wherever they went and bring them all back to 1-2-3-4- 5-6-7-8.
The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, 'Hullo, a death?' Then the years of the dead person's age would be tolled and if the bell went on speaking, 'seventy-one, seventy-two ...' people would say, 'Well, they had a good innings!' But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty a hush would come over the fields. People were supposed to pray for the departed soul, and some of them may have done. This practice was continued up until the Second World War,
when all the bells of England were silenced. It was never revived.”
Fascinating quote Melissa. Thank you for taking the time to share this.
Typo, should be Akenfield! Sorry, it was late.