Change ringing

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Bell ringing practice in Stoke Gabriel parish church, south Devon, England
Bell ringing practice in Stoke Gabriel parish church, south Devon, England

Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns called "changes". It differs from many other forms of campanology (such as carillon ringing) in that no attempt is made to produce a recognizable melody.

Today, change ringing can be found all over the world, performed in a variety of media; but it remains most popular in the context where, in the 18th century, it developed: English church towers. These typically contain a few large bells rigged to swing freely. The considerable inertias involved mean that each bell usually requires its own ringer. Thus, contrasted with a carillon, in which a large number of bells are struck by hammers, all tied in to a central framework so that one carilloneur can control them all, a set of such bells is comparatively unwieldy— hence the emergence of permutations rather than melody as an organizing principle.

The popularity of "The Exercise" (as it is sometimes known) reflects its opportunities for physical recreation, intellectual stimulation, aesthetic enjoyment, and social camaraderie.

Contents

[edit] The mechanics of change ringing on tower bells

Today some towers have as many as sixteen bells; six or eight bells are more common for the average church. The bell highest in pitch is known as the treble and the bell lowest in pitch the tenor. For convenience, the bells are referred to by number, with the treble being number 1 and the other bells numbered by their pitch — 2,3,4, etc. — sequentially down the scale. (This system often seems counterintuitive to musicians, who are used to a numbering which ascends along with pitch.) The bells are usually tuned to a diatonic major scale, with the tenor bell being the tonic (or key) note of the scale.

The bellringers typically stand in a circle around the ringing room, each managing the rope hanging from his or her bell in the chamber above. Each bell is suspended from a headstock, which in turn is connected to the bellframe by bearings, allowing the bell to rotate through just over 360 degrees; the headstock is fitted with a wooden wheel around which the rope is wrapped.

During a session of ringing the bell sits poised upside-down while it awaits its turn to ring. By pulling the rope, the ringer upsets the balance and the bell swings down then back up again on the other side, describing slightly more than a 360-degree circle. During the swing, the clapper inside the bell will have struck the soundbow, making the bell resonate once. This action constitutes the handstroke, at the end of which the ringer's arms are above his head and a portion of the bell-rope is wrapped around almost the entirety of the wheel. After a pause, the ringer again pulls the rope and the bell revolves in the opposite direction, returning to its original position, again sounding once. This is the backstroke.

It is generally the custom (aside from in parts of Devon and Yorkshire) to leave a short one-beat gap left after every alternate row, i.e. after the ringing of each ‘backstroke’ row. This is called 'open handstroke' ringing (or open handstroke leading).

Although ringing certainly involves some physical exertion, ringers rely more on practised skill than mere brute force; after all, even small bells are typically much heavier than the people ringing them, and can only be rung at all because they are well-balanced in their frames. The heaviest bell hung for full-circle ringing is in Liverpool Cathedral and weighs over four imperial tons (over four metric tonnes)[1] . Despite this colossal weight, it can be safely rung by one (experienced) ringer. (While heavier bells exist — for example Big Ben — they are generally only chimed, either by swinging the bell slightly or using a mechanical hammer.)

[edit] Handbells

Change ringing can also be carried out on handbells (small bells, generally weighing only a few hundred grams). This was particularly common during the Second World War when church bells often could not be rung; although the ringers returned to the towers as soon as the war was over, for a number of years thereafter handbell ringing retained great popularity.

When used for practice by tower ringers, each ringer typically handles one bell, just as in the tower. But change ringing on handbells is today quite popular in its own right; and in that context the relevant physial realities of handbells (compared with tower bells) have their effect— on handbells each ringer usually handles two bells (adding considerably to the mental challenge). Likewise, a set of handbells often contains considerably more bells than towers ever do— sometimes several octaves' worth. Today many record-length peals, including the longest peal ever rung, come from handbell ringers.

Typicaly, change ringers using handbells sit or stand in a circle (like tower ringers). The towerbell terms of handstroke and backstroke are retained, referring to an upwards and downwards ring of the bell respectively; and as in towers, the ringing proceeds in alternate rows of handstroke and backstroke.

There is, however, a second school of change ringing on handbells, which uses a technique called 'lapping', or 'cross and stretch': the ringers stand or sit in a straight line at a single convenient table, from which they pick up a bell each time they ring it; and to which they thereupon return it. But as the sequence of the bells is permuted the ringers physically swap the bells accordingly; the bells actually move up and down the table and each row is rung in strict sequence from right to left. A ringer in cross and stretch thus does not have responsibility his or her own personal bell but handles each as it comes.

[edit] Permuting the bells

The simplest way to use a set of bells is ringing rounds, which is sounding the bells repeatedly in sequence from treble to tenor: 1, 2, 3, etc.. (Musicians will recognise this as a portion of a descending scale.) Ringers typically start with rounds and then begin to vary the bells' order, moving on to a series of distinct rows. Each row (or change) is a specific permutation of the bells (for example 123456 or 531246) — that is to say, it includes each bell rung once and only once, the difference from row to row being the order in which the bells follow one another.

In call change ringing each row is specifically called for: one ringer (the conductor) tells the others how to swap their bells' places from row. In method ringing, by contrast, the ringers have learned a "method" — an algorithm to govern the swaps which they can thus perform on their own like clockwork; a conductor's intervention is needed only periodically, when a slight variation in the pattern is necessary, or to correct errors by the ringers.

[edit] Call change ringing

Most ringers begin their ringing career with call change ringing; they can thus concentrate on learning the physical skills needed to handle their bells without needing to worry about methods. But there are many towers where experienced ringers practise call change ringing as an art in its own right (and even exclusively), particularly in the English county of Devon.

There are two customary ways of making calls; in each the conductor calls out a pair of numbers referring to two of the bells by their numbers (not to their positions in the row). If calling up, he or she tells the first of a pair of bells to follow its erstwhile successor; the two bells named swap. If calling down, on the other hand, the second of a pair is told to move up and follow its predecessor's erstwhile predecessor; the pair of bells called was not previously a pair but now becomes one.

As an example, consider the following sequence of rows, and the calls a conductor would use to evoke them:

Row Conductor's intent Call, if calling Up Call, if calling Down
1,2,3,4,5,6 to swap bells 2 and 3 "2 to 3" "3 to Treble"
1,3,2,4,5,6 to swap bells 4 and 5 "4 to 5" "5 to 2"
1,3,2,5,4,6 to swap bells 2 and 5 "2 to 5" "5 to 3"
1,3,5,2,4,6

[edit] Method ringing

The "Blue Line" of Plain Bob Minor, shown in red. Note that, for clarity, the row at the bottom of each column is repeated at the top of the next.
The "Blue Line" of Plain Bob Minor, shown in red. Note that, for clarity, the row at the bottom of each column is repeated at the top of the next.
Main article: Method ringing

Method ringing is what many people mean by change ringing. Thanks to it, ringers can spend hours ringing thousands upon thousands of unique changes with no outside direction or coordination. They do not have to memorize impossible quantities of data; nor do they attempt to read it all off some dizzying sheet of numbers. Rather, they are all following a method, a relatively simple pattern they have learnt to direct them from row to row.

Since a ringer is responsible for one bell, learning a method consists mainly of memorizing how that bell changes position from row to row — when it advances towards the beginning, when it retreats towards the end. Often ringers study a blueline, a graphical representation of a bell's course from row to row according to a particular method. The methods are simple enough to memorize and so are relatively limited in length; but taken in conjunction with slight standard variations the ringers know to make at regular breaking points, a more robust algorithm is formed. From time to time, a conductor calls out the need for another variation.

For some people, the ultimate goal of this system is to ring all the permutations, to ring a tower's bells in every possible order without repeating — what is called an "extent" (or sometimes, formerly, a "full peal"). The feasibility of this depends on how many bells are involved: if a tower has n bells, they will have n! (read factorial) possible permutations, a number that becomes quite large as n grows. For example, while six bells have 720 permutations, 8 bells have 40,320; furthermore, 10! = 3,628,800, and 12! = 479,001,600. Estimating two seconds for each change (a reasonable pace), we find that while an extent on 6 bells can be accomplished in half an hour, a full peal on 8 bells should take nearly twenty-two and a half hours. (When in 1963 ringers in Loughborough became the first and only in history to achieve this feat on tower bells, it actually took them just under 18 hours.[2]) An extent on 12 bells would take over thirty years!

Since extents are obviously not always practicable, ringers more often undertake shorter performances. Such ringing starts and ends with rounds, having meanwhile visited only a subset of the available permutations; but trueness is still considered essential — no row can ever be repeated; to do so would make the ringing false. A performance of 5040 (=7!) changes can be called a peal and likewise 1260 changes make a quarter peal. (They tend to last about three hours and 45 minutes, respectively.) A short stretch of ringing, perhaps only a few hundred changes, is called a touch.

[edit] History and modern culture of change ringing

Change ringing emerged in England in the mid 17th century; the Ancient Society of College Youths, a ringing society still active today, was founded in 1637. The recreation began to flourish in earnest later that century, in the Restoration era; an important milestone in the development of method ringing as a careful science was the 1668 publication by Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman of their book Tintinnalogia, which promised in its subtitle to lay down "plain and easie Rules for Ringing all sorts of Plain Changes." Stedman followed this in 1677 with another famous early guide, Campanalogia.

The first true peal in the modern sense is generally considered to have been rung 2 May 1715 at St Peter Mancroft in Norwich, according to the method today known as Plain Bob Triples[3] (although there is some evidence that an earlier peal in that method was rung January 7, 1690 at St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London by the Ancient Society of College Youths [4]).

Throughout the years since, the group theoretical underpinnings of change ringing have been persued by mathematicians. Bells have been installed in towers around the world and many rings in the British Isles have been augmented to ten, twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen bells. Today change ringing is, particularly in England, a popular and commonplace sound, often issuing from a church tower before or after a service or wedding. While on these everyday occasions the ringers must usually content themselves with shorter "touches," each lasting a few minutes, for special occasions they often attempt a quarter-peal or peal, lasting approximately 45 minutes or three hours respectively. If a peal attempt succeeds, towers often like to mark the occasion with a peal board on the wall of the ringing chamber; the ringing chamber at St Peter Mancroft still has one documenting the first peal of 1715. Today over 4000 peals are rung each year.

Dorothy L. Sayers's mystery novel The Nine Tailors is famous for the central part played by change ringing. Much of the action centers on a bell tower and the peals rung in it, and to draw the reader in Sayers takes care to explain change ringing and analyze its improbable popularity; quotations from the book are popular with ringers. Moreover, the entire book is infused with an air of change ringing to the extent that her chapter titles all employ campanalogical terminology; and indeed, one of the book's conceits is that it is a sort of multi-part peal.

[edit] Organization

The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, founded in 1891, is dedicated to representing change ringers around the world. Most regional and local ringing guilds are affilitated with the council. Its journal, Ringing World, has been published weekly since 1911; in addition to news and features relating to bellringing and the bellringing community, it publishes records of achievements such as peals and quarter-peals. Most ringers around the world follow Ringing World in adhering to the Council's rules and definitions governing change ringing.

The Central Council, by means of its peal records, also keeps track of record length peels, both on tower bells and handbells. (The record for tower bells remains the 1963 Loughborough extent of Plain Bob Major (40,320 changes); for handbells it was set in 2004 in Coventry, with 50,400 changes of 70 different Treble Dodging Minor methods [5]) More importantly, perhaps, along with keeping track of the first peel ever rung in a method, the Central Council controls the naming of new methods: it generally allows the first band to ring a method to name it.

Much ringing is carried out by bands of ringers meeting at their local tower to ring its bells. For the sake of variety, though, many ringers like to take occasional trips to make a tower grab ringing the bells of a less familiar tower. The setting, the church architecture, the chance to ring more bells than usual, the bells' unique tone, their ease or difficulty of ringing, and sometimes even the unusual means of accessing the ringing chamber can all be part of the attraction. The traditional means of finding bell towers, and still the most popular way today, is the the book (and now internet database) Dove's Guide for Church Bell Ringers.

[edit] Named changes

Mathematical abstraction though each row may be, some rows do have a musical or melodic meaning to the listener. Over the years, a number of these have acquired names — they are named changes. Both the conductors directing call-change ringing and the composers coming up with plans for a bout of method ringing sometimes like to work their favorite named changes in. The table below lists some popular named changes on eight bells; many of these names are also applicable by extension on more or fewer bells.

Change Name
12345678 Rounds
87654321 Back rounds[6]
13572468 Queens (an apochryphal story says it appealed to Elizabeth I)
15263748 Tittums (so named because of the tum-ti tum-ti sound it is said to have)

Such names are often humorous; for example, the sequence 14235 on five bells is called weasels because it is the tune of the refrain to the children's song Pop Goes the Weasel.

[edit] Striking

Although neither call change nor method ringing produces conventional tunes, it is still the aim of the ringers to produce a pleasant sound. One of the most important aspects of this is good striking — not only should the bells never clash by sounding at the same moment, the bells' blows should come as steadily as possible, with constant gaps between each blow.

Striking competitions are held where various bands of ringers attempt to ring with their best striking. They are judged on their number of faults (striking errors); the band with the least number of faults wins. These competitions are organized on regional and national levels, being particularly popular among the call-change ringers of Devon.

[edit] International Activity

[edit] South Africa

South Africa became a remote center for change ringing because of the influx of English influence from the 1820 Settlers, many of whom eventually settled in Grahamstown. The first peal of bells was installed there in 1879. Today, the South African Guild of Church Bell Ringers oversees a significant amount of change ringing in South Africa. In 2006, there were eight towers which had rings of three or more bells. Listed in order of their installation, they are:

(There are also two bells hung for ringing at St Michael and All Angels, Queenstown, being the treble and tenor of a projected octave.)

[edit] Details of an Example Ring

  • The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. George in Grahamstown, South Africa has a ring of 10 bells, an atypical number of bells in change ringing.
Details of Grahamstown Bells
Bell No. Weight Note
1 288 G
2 319 F
3 362 Eb
4 376 D
5 392 C
6 500 Bb
7 698 Ab
8 781 G
9 961 F
10 1302 Eb

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Whitechapel Bell Foundry: history
  2. ^ Online peal board, from the Central Council records committee
  3. ^ Bells and Bellringing, from the CCCBR
  4. ^ Landmarks in the History of the Society, from the ASCY
  5. ^ Central Council records committee website.
  6. ^ Some sources (e.g. [1]) define back rounds slightly differently, as 76543218.

[edit] References

  • Bells and Bellringing, a presentation prepared by the Publications Committee of the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers
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[edit] See also


[edit] External links

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