New and Different A&S: Bell Ringing

Kate is visiting her folks this week; so as not to go mad from isolation, I'm doing a lot of social, including a couple of gatherings that I've been saying for years that I want to try out.

Last night was learning a periodish skill that I've never done before, and which I don't hear about much: church bell change ringing.

(Change-ringing patterns per se are probably post-period. But church bells are certainly period, so I suspect at least the basic handling skills go back to then.)

Boston being rather full of old churches, there are a number that still have active bell towers, with anywhere up to a full range of eight bells, and there's a small but active corps of folks who play and teach how to play actively. I've been hearing about it from sorcyress and verdantry for years (and I've learned a bit of "ringing on bodies" -- change ringing with handbells as essentially dance formations -- from Sorcy over the past couple of years), and it's always sounded like fun, so I finally took a Friday evening to get down to the beginners class.

This takes place in the Church of the Advent downtown, and is one of several Bells gatherings that happen in town each week. Last night there were about eight of us, ranging from quite experienced to a couple of us complete newbies, with instruction at various levels.

As a total beginner, last night was the serious basics:

• How to hold the rope. This is very formal, with specific standards on how to hold it, how to adjust your hand-hold, how to safely loop the rope when you have too much of it, and how to (very, very loosely) knot the rope when it isn't in active use.
• Doing a partial "ringing up". Each bells normally sits in the "down" position, with the open part of the bell facing downward, but that's not what you want for active ringing -- it takes way too much effort to actually make a sound. So instead, you pull it, over and over, so that it's swinging further and further each time, until it finally goes all the way around and rests (gently propped) with the opening facing upward, ready to actively go bong.
  Us beginners didn't do this all the way, but we did get to practice it about halfway, to the point where you can "chime" the bell by pausing its swing ever so slightly, so that the clapper hits the inside of the bell.
  (I found chiming surprisingly hard. Ringing the bell up is all about rhythm, and comes pretty naturally to me as a dancer. Slightly violating that rhythm to chime it goes against all my instincts.)
• Basic handling, just the downstroke. Each full swing involves the bell swinging one direction, then the other; these turn out to be significantly different. So us newbies would do the downstroke side, and our teacher (sorcyress), standing right next to us, would pull the upstroke.

So basically, in the course of the evening I got from A to B, while some of the folks in the room were working on N -- I'm still very much a beginner. But it's quite a bit of fun, and I expect to come back periodically and make more progress on it.

Next up on the social front: finally getting down to BIDA and starting to get the hang of contra.