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The
blast of sound is not to be missed — but it's not to be savored too
closely, either.
"Anyone up in the
belfry then would be deaf in three to four minutes and dead soon,"
says Mary Clark of Arlington, ringing master of the Washington
Ringing Society.
The Society rings the
bells at the cathedral and at the post office for the new year, on
other national holidays and other ceremonial occasions. To make sure
the peals go off without a hitch, rehearsals are held every Tuesday
night high in the central tower of the cathedral — one of only about
40 towers in the United States and Canada to house active peal
bells.
Above a round, carpeted platform
in the ringing room, 10 ropes tied at the end in loose knots hang
through the ceiling like a circle of nooses. About a third of the
way up each rope is a long piece of dark blue or purple wool called
a "sally."
"The sally saves your hand,"
explains Mrs. Clark, who doubles as director of Instrumental Music
at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda.
"Without it, your hand would be
shredded. Ringers don't wear gloves. You and the bell become one.
Experienced ringers feel every nuance of the bell's sound. With
gloves on, you couldn't do that."
As the
ringers gather for rehearsal and help themselves to refreshments, a
few of their number climb a set of lighthouse-like iron stairs into
the belfry, where 10 bronze bells — ranging in weight from about 600
pounds to nearly 2 tons — sit cradled in sturdy wooden frames.
The ringers carefully move the pieces of
wood that hold the clappers right in the middle, silencing the
bells, then return to the ringing room and announce: "We are down."
With everyone's ears safely away from
the deafening sounds in the belfry, some of the more experienced
ringers work the ropes to move the bells into the mouth-up position.
"The only way to control the bell is to
start from the mouth-up position," says Mrs. Clark.
Each bell is attached to a wooden wheel
with a rope around it. One pull of the rope swings the bell from the
mouth-up position in a full circle and back to the up position. With
the next pull, the bell swings in the other direction.
"It doesn't take much leverage," says
ringer Paula Fleming, a retired Smithsonian archivist who lives in
Annandale. "Gravity and physics take over."
It does, however, take control and
teamwork to get a smooth, even sound.
"We start with rounds, ringing down the
scale, from the treble to the tenor, trying to get a smooth sound —
not lumpy," says Mrs. Clark, as six ringers take their places on the
platform — some on raised steps for added height. "Rounds are used
to get a nice rhythm going, and anytime there's a mess-up, you go
back to rounds."
• • •
The ringers are getting a nice rhythm
going, pulling the ropes and then catching the sally, and David
Lindsay of Silver Spring, a retired NASA rocket scientist and
neophyte ringer, is watching admiringly from the sidelines.
"It's only my second week," he explains.
"See that woman in the white blouse?" he asks, indicating Quilla
Roth, one of the two tower masters. "It's beautiful what she can do
— so consistent."
Mr. Lindsay joined the
ringers' society with his daughter, Heather Lindsay, 28, a biologist
who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists and lives across the
street from the cathedral.
"I noticed
that on Tuesday nights the cathedral went crazy with bells," she
says. "I thought it would be so simple...The first week I just
observed — I didn't even touch a rope. You need to get the physical
motion down, then learn the timing, and, at some point, the
patterns."
The patterns are where the
term "change ringing" comes in.
"Change
ringing is a purely English thing," says Mrs. Clark, who is wearing
a black T shirt adorned with an image of the cathedral's west rose
window.
Indeed, dear to the hearts of
change ringers everywhere is British writer Dorothy L. Sayers'
mystery novel, "The Nine Tailors," first published in 1934, which
immortalized the quintessentially English precision of the art and
its place in Anglican parish life.
"When
you hear bells ringing in continental Europe, they're being swung
randomly," Mrs. Clark says. "This type of ringing is more
mathematical."
Since it takes about two
seconds for a peal bell to ring and be ready to ring again, these
huge bells can't play tunes.
"If we
tried to play "Jingle Bells," it would be the slowest "Jingle Bells"
you every heard," explains Mrs. Clark.
Instead, the ringers play mathematical
patterns, or "methods," constantly changing the order of the bells
that are rung. Hence, "change ringing."
One of the basic "methods," known as
"Plain Hunt," begins with the pattern 1,2,3,4,5,6, if there are six
bells in use — as there are on this rehearsal evening. On a signal
from the conductor, who is also one of the ringers, the "band"
switches the pairs.
" 'Plain Hunt' is
like 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat.' Then you tell somebody to switch,"
chimes in Ed Donnen of Annandale, a "computer geek for the
government" who is both a ringer and the Mr. Fix-It, or "steeple
keeper," for the group.
Tonight he is
splicing rope and wrestling with the problem of bolts sheared off
the clapper of the Number 4 bell, which is temporarily out of
commission.
"I've worked as an aircraft
mechanic," says Mr. Donnen. "I like bells. They're slow machines
with different sets of problems than any other machines."
The more bells in use, the longer the
bells can be rung without repeating a pattern. With eight bells, for
example, a band of ringers can ring 40,320 times without repeating a
row. A full peal requires 5,000 or more changes with no break and no
switching ringers. If there's any kind of mess-up, the attempt
doesn't count as a successful peal.
"We
rang a successful peal on the Fourth of July," says Mrs. Clark,
smiling happily.
• • •
The ringers will have a busy New Year
celebration. Usually it culminates with an attempt at a full peal on
New Year's Day but this year, with several old hands out of town,
they will make do with a quarter peal — 1,260 changes — at the
cathedral on Saturday.
They begin their
weekend at noon tomorrow, New Year's Eve, by ringing the bells at
the Old Post Office Building.
Later
tomorrow, society members will deck the ringing room at the
Cathedral with colored lights and put out a holiday spread of food
and drink. At 10:30 p.m. they'll ring a half-muffled quarter peal,
which will take about 50 minutes.
"We
put a leather cup on one side of each clapper," Mrs. Clark explains.
"When the bell swings one way, it makes a muffled sound, like an
echo. We use this in times of mourning — as when President Reagan
died.
"The old year is dying. We're
saying goodbye to the old year. At about 11:30, we'll start taking
the muffles off. They have to be very tightly strapped, and it takes
about half an hour. Then, we'll get ready for midnight.
"At midnight, we do a count down — one
person is designated to toll a bell 12 times. At the twelfth stroke,
we begin to ring all the bells. Everybody has an opportunity to
ring. We just keep going. If I'm ringing, I go off and give someone
else a turn."
The midnight concert
usually lasts about half an hour, and the best place to listen is
said to be the Bishop's Garden on the south side of the Cathedral.
Saturday at 1:15 p.m., following the cathedral's carillon recital, a
band of seasoned ringers will return for the New Year's Day quarter
peal.
• • •
What does it take to be a good ringer?
"It takes huge determination," Mrs.
Clark says.
First you have to get a feel
for pulling the ropes. Then you have to learn to work with the other
ringers. Then you have to memorize complex ringing patterns, or
methods.
"We usually start people on the
middle bells — they're more forgiving," says Mrs. Clark. "On light
bells, you tend to over-correct."
Jim
Snyder, a physician from Clifton Forge, Va., started ringing at a
church in Philadelphia. "I've been doing it for four years, and I'm
still a beginner," he says. "It's amazingly demanding."
John McKendrew, a retired systems
engineer from Silver Spring, started five years ago, when he was 71.
"The older you get, the more challenging
it is — your nerve endings aren't as sensitive," he says. "But it's
good exercise for the upper body, and a good mental challenge. It
keeps me active."
Another advantage,
says Mrs. Clark, is that ringing gains you entree into a
transatlantic fraternity.
"You can go
anywhere," she says. "One summer I showed up at St. Martin's in the
Fields in Trafalgar Square in London, and they needed one more
ringer. Then they put me on a train for another church that needed a
ringer, and after that someone drove me to another church. I ended
up ringing in three churches that day."
• • •
Just
about every parish church in England, even in remote villages, has a
bell tower. In the United States and Canada there are only 40-some
towers, and about 500 members of the North American Guild of Change
Ringers (with which the Washington Ringing Society is affiliated).
The Greater Washington area has four
towers: the Cathedral, the Old Post Office, Calvary Methodist Church
in Frederick, and St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Princess Anne,
Md. There are no bell towers in the United States west of Texas.
Change ringing began in 17th century
England, when the full wheel that enabled ringers to control the
bells was developed. In 1668, the basic rules still followed today
were published in "Tintinnalogia, or the Art of Change Ringing," by
Fabian Stedman.
The British brought the
art to the American colonies, installing bells in Boston,
Charleston, New York and Philadelphia. Paul Revere was a ringer at
Boston's Old North Church, where he arranged for one lantern or two
to be hung in the tower as a signal for the midnight ride ("One if
by land, Two if by sea, And I on the opposite shore will be ?")
celebrated in Longfellow's poem.
After
the Revolution, change ringing, like other things British, fell out
of favor, and it is only relatively recently enjoying a revival,
which Washington Cathedral's 10-bell ring, installed in 1964, helped
spark.
The cathedral's bells are the
heaviest ring of bells in North America. In 1983, 10 bells donated
by Great Britain's Ditchley Foundation to Congress to mark the
bicentennial were installed in the Old Post Office clock tower.
These bells are replicas of those in London's Westminster Abbey.
• • •
In the cathedral's central tower,
rehearsal is winding down. Tea and cookies are being stowed away,
and a delegation is sent up to the belfry to "close" the bells by
securing the stays that hold the clappers in place, silencing the
bells.
Then, in the room below, some of
the ringers gently rock the bells with the ropes so the mouths face
down, a safety precaution. The rope endings are knotted in a special
way to indicate that the bells are mouth-down.
"Check Number Three," says Paula
Fleming. "It's got an 'up' knot."
As the
more experienced ringers check the knots and put everything in order
for the next time, neophyte John Gillanders of Fairfax, who in real
life is a documentary filmmaker, talks about how he got hooked on
change ringing.
"The first time I held
the rope, it dragged me up about three inches. I was drenched in
sweat. I love it ... I came to the open house they have once a year.
I just wanted to see the view. Then I saw the bells and thought,
'This is the coolest thing.' "
Seasoned
ringer Mary Clark also thinks the joys of change ringing are worth
all the work and pain required.
"I love
the teamwork," she says. "Change ringing offers the opportunity to
be part of the music that is being created as we ring the bells.
"When a group of ringers is attempting a
peal, this means that every single second for three and a half hours
straight must be devoted to rhythmic accuracy and ringing each
change in the pattern correctly, even when one's legs and feet are
tired and when blisters develop on the hands and often break in the
process, when one would love to have a sip of water, a bite to eat,
a mental respite.
"At the same time, it
is exhilarating in a way that can only be experienced by those who
do it. And in the process, we are hopefully creating a beautiful
sound that those on the ground can enjoy and that will cause their
inner beings to soar."
from http://washingtontimes.com/weekend/20041229-100826-4176r.htm |
