By The Landlord
“Colours in vibration, pealing like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death.” – Emil Nolde
“He hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks his tongue speaks.” – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
“Those evening bells! Those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells
Of youth and home, and that sweet time
When last I heard their soothing chime!” – Charles Lamb
“Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel's just got his wings.” – Frances Goodrich, co-screenwriter, It's a Wonderful Life
“A bell is a cup until it is struck.” – Colin Meloy
“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” – Annie Dillard
As Christmas approaches, the ping of purchase, rather than the jingle of sleigh or chime of steeple might be a more appropriately seasonal sound, tintinnabulation a ringing hangover, rather than some ornate dingle-dangle chime, and less a bell, more a soon-to-be-received doom-laden bill that tolls for thee. But nevertheless, there's something very striking, and also cheering about many or even a single ring, be it big or small, from a faint, tiny tinkle to massive, swinging clapper's dong.
While they may get a mention in lyrics (a subject actually touched on in the past) this week it's more the very sound of bells in songs or music we seek. Bells can resonate a wide variety of contexts, associations, meanings, settings, moods, from the foreboding to the joyful, and can suddenly swing into action in any genre. They might come to the fore, but they're also an instrument wherein less is more.
Bells then can herald all sorts of scenarios - the marking of time, sudden door arrivals, news of new life, dinner or even death. From time chimes, to weddings, to funerals, church events to cricket tests, the bookend sounds of school lessons or boxing rounds, distant ships on foggy nights, loud town criers to chirping passing bicycles to ambling Alpine cows. You name it, and a bell will sound it through history, with a rusty roll of the old to the knell of the new, all through the musical clang of change.
So your song suggestions might use field recordings, or sound effects of any kind of bell, or actual idiophones of the percussion family. In the past we've also featured sounds with instruments hit by hand-held mallets or hammers, particularly vibraphones, glockenspiels or xylophones, but bells stretch and echo and resonate this further, and they can be sounded in other ways, struck, shaken, activated by automation.
A conventional bell is a beautiful thing, a resonant body, with parts that chime with our own, timelessly forged, and made up of various parts from yoke or headstock, canons, crown, shoulder, waist, sound bow, lip, mouth, bead line and of course the clapper, also known as uvula, that swings and strikes the bell’s inside. Bells are usually made from pressed metal, sometimes glass or ceramic, but large bells such as a church, clock and tower bells are normally cast from a bell metal, originally a combination of brass and tin, but the largest, found in churches, enjoy a mix of 80% copper and 20% tin to bring the cleanest, warmest sound.
Though it's in the playful title of this introduction, a carillon is just one of several bell instruments, by definition an intricate minimum of 23 cast bronze, cup-shaped bells played melodically or in chords, and struck by metal clappers connected to baton keys. More on that here:
A chime, or set of chimes, meanwhile is a pitched percussion instrument consisting of 22 or fewer bells, often in clock towers, the word dating back to the 14th-century Middle English word chymbe, meaning 'cymbal'. Another variant of the chime is of course a set of tubular bells.
Carillon in Bruges
So any combination might ring out. We might feature the sequence sounds of rope-pulling campanologists, or groups of bell choirs, swinging individual bells by hand in change ringing or peals, evocative, and rather striking in any contrasting genre.
The tubular variety
Bells have been part of music for thousands of years, dating back to ancient China up to 3600 years ago, with bronze chime bells known as bianzhong or zhong/zeng. In 1978, a beautiful set of 65 bells was discovered in the tomb of Marquis Yi ruler of the Zeng dynasty. They were still fully playable after almost 2500 years, covering a range of almost five octaves but thanks to their dual-tone capability, the set also able to sound a complete 12-tone scale—predating the development of the European 12-tone system by some 2000 years.
Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng, dated 433 BC
Some traditional bells are not grand, but began as purely functional, but were later used in music. The konguro'o, a bit like a jingle bell, and made of copper, bronze, iron and brass, is a small metal bell with a distinctive sound, associated with nomadic life of the Kyrgyz people of Central Asia, and was often attached to horse harnesses or on leader goats or sheep to help guide the rest of the flock. We more commonly associate that sort of bell with Santa's sleigh.
Not all bells are made of metal. Another ancient Chinese innovation, known as a a qing (磬 pinyin qìng), is generally made of resonant stone.
Meanwhile the skrabalai is a traditional folk bell set from Lithuania, which consists of wooden bells of various sizes hanging in several vertical rows with one or two wooden or metal small clappers hanging inside them. Their sound is shorter and sharper, and are played with two wooden sticks. The result is a bit more like a xylophone, but it’s also distinctively different. Here's a demonstration:
Your suggestions might also feature the sounds of famous bells, from Big Ben in London to Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, although it's only by computer modeling that we might have an idea of how it sounded when Benjamin Franklin heard it.
Big Ben
Or perhaps, for a big resonant sound, there might also be room for something like PetersGlocke, also known as Dicker Pitter in Cologne Cathedral:
But what kind of bell sounds in your head at the first thought of this topic? What tone does it set? Is it the school bell that Alice Cooper imagines to inspire him to "drop your books and run like hell"? Or, as we approach this time of year, the peal of bells of a new year or era, pictured by Alfred Lord Tennyson, when he writes this:
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.
Is it a gentle ding or a loud dong? Is it a sweet or a brutal sound? Is a beauty and the beast metaphor in reverse as expressed by the great Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)?
Or is it something darker, more solemn, and yet even more resonant? What rings for one, rings for all, with this timeless piece of poetry by John Donne:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
But it is nearly Christmas, after all, so let's finish on a sillier, lighter note, in the ever capable hands of Christopher Walken, Will Ferrell and co. You know what's coming ...
So then, does this a-peal? What tintinnabulum tickles your fancy? What rings true as a song or musical piece for this topic? Like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, will you get your wings? Ringing in the new indeed, we welcome the sound, wise and versatile ears of Vikingchild for the very first time into the hallowed Song Bar chair! Place your suggestions in comments below, with deadline on Monday UK time 11pm for playlists published next week. And wishing you all a very fun and happy wonderful chime this holiday.
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