Ring out, wild bells!

My curiosity began with a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which was new to me before this year. But 2020/21 was clearly the right time for this poem, and I came across it several times this past month — including a New Year’s offering from Jacquie Lawson, my favorite source for e-cards.

Tennyson’s collection In Memoriam, A.H.H. (1850), where this poem appears, was written in honor of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who was betrothed to Tennyson’s sister but who died suddenly at age 22. The first verses reference the poet’s personal grief, but most of the poem speaks to a more general grief at the state of the world and the poet’s desire to “ring out” the bad and “ring in” the good. After a grievous and contentious and tragic year, many of these verses seem almost prescient.

From In Memoriam, A.H.H.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Quite a number of composers have been inspired to set Tennyson’s poem to music. Here are three very different versions:

Ringing the changes

I especially love Gounod’s choral setting, because the descending lines that open his piece were clearly inspired by the campanologist’s art of “ringing the changes.” This sort of ringing is often done to usher in a new year, which seems metaphorically appropriate and satisfying — changes in the bell sounds announcing changes in the times. In some traditions, the bells are muffled while the old year persists “and then rung clearly after midnight to mark the birth of the new year.”

So what exactly is change ringing? In Wikipedia’s succinct phrasing, it involves

ringing a set of tuned bells in a tightly controlled manner to produce precise variations in their successive striking sequences, known as “changes.”

Change ringing is made possible by a practice developed in 17th-century England called “full circle ringing,” where bells do not just move back and forth in a pendulum arc but are swung all the way around a circle (“mouth up to mouth up”), then back around the other way… and so on. This style of ringing allows the ringers to precisely time the sounding of their bells.

The art of change-ringing, Dorothy L. Sayers tells us,

is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully-tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered to be a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations. When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musicians’ music — still less what the ordinary man calls music. To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association.  (The Nine Tailors, Chapter 1)

Though I admit to some initial sympathy for this anonymous ordinary man, hater of pealing bells, I found — as with so many things in life — that once I understood something about what I was hearing, I could begin to hear the “monotonous jangle” as a joyful and complex art form. So let’s wade in a bit deeper.

A primer for the budding campanologist

To begin with: A set of bells in, say, a church tower is known as a ring of bells.

Change-ringing can be practised in any situation where there is a ring of three bells or more. Worldwide there are reckoned to be more than 6,000 of these of which 5,748 are in Britain. They are sometimes to be found in secular buildings but in most cases they are in churches and cathedrals. (Church Bells – Interesting Facts)

Rings can be as few as three or as many as sixteen bells, though six- and eight-bell rings are most common. The bells are numbered sequentially from highest (1) to lowest (6, in a 6-bell ring). The highest bell in a ring is the treble, while the lowest is called the tenor. (In addition to these technical designations, tower bells are often named — think of Big Ben and Great Tom.)

Change ringing always begins and ends with the bells being rung in descending order from treble to tenor. This basic pattern is called a round; in a 6-bell ring, for example, a round would be 1-2-3-4-5-6. After the round come the changes — and this is where things start to get interesting.

Changes are variations to the sequence, with each bell sounding exactly once in an ever-changing order. Various methods have been devised to generate new sequences, and they bear such names as “Plain Hunt,” “Plain Bob,” “Grandsire Doubles,” “Triples,” “Stedman Cinques”… and many more. A simple set of changes generated by the method called “plain hunt” would look like this:

1-2-3-4-5-6 (round)
2-1-4-3-6-5
2-4-1-6-3-5
4-2-6-1-5-3… and so on through eight more changes, till you come back to the round.

Other methods generate the changes in different orders. How many possible sequences are there? That depends on the number of bells in your ring! The total number of possible changes is the factorial of the number of bells (a factorial is the product of the initial number and all the numbers below it). So six bells have 6-factorial (written as 6!) possible combinations — that is 6x5x4x3x2x1=720 unique sequences that can be played with a six-bell ring. A 10-bell ring has 3,628,800 possible changes, which would take more than three months to ring!

I don’t pretend to fathom the mathematics behind the various methods, but listening to this 12-bell handbell choir helps me to hear the shifting patterns of the changes — and this in turn makes me better appreciate the same effect, magnified, in the tower bells of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge. Take a listen and see if you don’t agree:

Peals, quarter peals, and extents

Ringing all the permutations is called an extent (sometimes, formerly, a full peal). But since an extent can take a very long time, it’s more common to ring a peal (at least 5000 changes, lasting about three hours) or a quarter peal (at least 1250 changes, lasting about 45 minutes).

NOTE: I’m simplifying a bit here, because the minimum number of changes for a peal or a quarter actually depends on the number of bells in the ring. I told you it was complicated! 

By the way, the record for an extent rung on tower bells was set in 1963:

In 1963 at Taylor’s Bell Foundry in Loughborough all possible permutations on eight bells were rung (40,320 in all). The eight ringers completed the marathon in a time of 17 hours and 58 minutes setting a record for the most number of changes rung continuously on tower bells. (Church Bells – Interesting Facts)

Even longer records have been set for extents rung on handbells!

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the complex art of change ringing. Campanology is jargon-dense but fascinating, and I’ll leave you to delve into its deeper mysteries on your own. While Wikipedia offers a great deal of information about bells, I also recommend reading Sayers’ The Nine Tailors to get a feel for the language and flavor of bell-ringing lore. (See “Connections,” below, for more information.)

How to tune a bell

Over the past several years, the Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life has documented and promoted the fight against the closure of the historic Whitechapel Bell Foundry, Britain’s oldest manufacturing company, which was founded in 1570. The foundry produced handbells as well as tower bells, but the business has been shuttered and its home is in imminent danger of being converted into a bell-themed boutique hotel (!) — hence the campaign. The GA has published photographs and drawings of the inner workings of the foundry, as well as interviews with foundry workers. (See “Connections,” below, for links to some of the GA’s relevant posts.)

I was especially interested in learning more about the tuning of tower bells, which was an important part of the foundry’s work.

Individual bells are tuned to a dominant note which is sounded when the clapper strikes the interior. The strike note, however, produces a series of complex vibrations which, according to the shape and thickness of the metal, in turn produce a series of tones or harmonics known as “partials”. It is the combination of the strike note (whose frequency is comparatively weak) and the stronger combined partials that gives rise to the bell’s distinctive sound. (From Church Bells — Interesting Facts)

The Gentle Author interviewed bell tuners Peter Rayner and Benjamin Kipling, both of whom had begun working in the bell foundry after being involved with bell ringing as young men. They explained that bells are cast sharp (i.e., to sound at higher than the desired final pitch), because casting techniques are not precise enough to allow you to cast a bell that will sound exactly the right note. “To get a bell absolutely precise, the only way is to cast it deliberately too thick and scratch a bit off,” Kipling explains. Here’s how it works:

 [T]he basics [of tuning] involve mounting the bell, mouth upwards, on a very big vertical lathe and taking metal out of different areas inside to alter the partial tones within the mouth… Bell tuning is a job of many stages… Usually, I try and make a series of cuts that will get me halfway between where I was and where I need to be, so I can check the bell is responding as I expect it to. Then I will go half as far again, and half as far again, and gradually close in, which theoretically means I never get there…

The tuner makes cuts in different parts of the bell, depending on the desired effect:

For instance, if you cut metal out of the shoulder of the bell, the second partial tone flattens more quickly. In the middle of the bell, it is the hum note, the lowest one, that flattens the most quickly. Towards the lip, it is the nominal tone which flattens most quickly. Generally, wherever you take metal off a bell all of the partial tones will move – so it is a juggling act.

The ear is always the final arbiter as to whether a bell sounds good or not… A nice bell should have a crisp, clear strike note, followed by the hum coming through underneath, and the hum should be stable and long-lasting… (Benjamin Kipling interview)

In reading Kipling’s description, it struck me that the art of tuning a bell — like so many other art forms — begins with approximation (a too-thick cast, a sketch, a rough draft, etc.) and leads through successive refinements to a satisfying end result (a well-tuned bell, a finished painting, a final draft).