Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The 2009 Boston Handbell Festival

Host intro:

On Tuesday, May 19, one hundred or so handbell ringers are going to be descending on Old South Church on Copley Square to perform in the Third Annual Boston Handbell Festival. Independent producer Jackson Braider offers the skinny on what listeners can expect to hear at this unusual event.

(ACT: Salvation Army kettle bell)

Bells -- there is something insistent, something even alarming about them. You hear them at Christmas,

(ACT out, crossfade; ACT: Kent Treble Bob)

You hear them ringing from a church tower; their tintinnabulation famously drove Edgar Allen Poe to distraction.

Or they can electrify you with their sheer otherworldliness.

(ACT: Assembled bells)

These are the massed ringers at last year's Boston Handbell Festival playing Gaudemus by Arnold Sherman.

My question is this: how do they make that sound?

(ACT: Lavender Blue on glockenspiel)

My early music lessons are no help here. For example, Mrs. Houlliman taught nine-year-old boys like me to sing sweet little ditties like "Lavender's Blue". Wearing a tea cake for a hat, she banged out the tune on her little glockenspiel, playing every note from beginning to end. And we boys sang along, like lagging musical indicators.

At first blush, Mrs. Houlliman seems to have a curious affinity with the players who gather annually for the festival. After all, they all play metallic idiophones.

But that's where the similarity ends.

As Peter Coulombe {COOL-ohm}, director of the Old South Ringers, explains, the handbell choir is an unusual musical ensemble. The symphony orchestra blends brass, strings, and woodwinds. For their part, the handbell choir is a collection of people who …

1:16 ring this one instrument, and that's the first big difference.

Think about that: Fifteen, twenty players all playing the same instrument, the handbell. It's as if you have a bunch of people singing Happy Birthday -- only they're not doing choir-like, four-part harmony -- instead:

everyone gets only certain syllables, and trying to sing, a group, each of you only singing certain syllables. (2:03) So I might get the "ha-" and the "bir" and someone else gets the "py" and the "day",

Guests at a recent birthday party in Hull demonstrate:

(AX: Happy birthday, syllable by syllable)

This is how handbell choirs play. It may sound strange here, but with handbells, it works. Consider Rossini's William Tell Overture played by the New England Ringers.

(ACT: William Tell Overture)

Watching them take on the Lone Ranger, you see the melody travel along the line of players. No one is playing more than two or three pitches, but the sound of the tune flows as if it were being played by just one person. Again, Peter Coulombe:

7:44 We work very hard to get our ringers to ring in sync with one another so that the ringing stroke is uniform throughout the choir.

A uniform stroke makes the tinker bell speak as easily as the fourteen-pound bronze bell in the bass.

(4:35) for the right way to do it, but in some ways, it is also like synchronized swimming -- you know, with enough rehearsal, and enough sympathetic ringing, if you will, you can achieve what seems to be almost impossible.

Synchronized swimming: Instead of bathing caps and gleaming smiles emerging from the water, of course, what you see are the various musical threads moving among the players up and down the line.

Case in point, the Back Bay Quartet, who perform a tune more closely associated with Fenway Park than Old South Church:

(ACT: Sweet Caroline)

It's easy to forget Sweet Caroline has a lovely melody. The arrangement is as crisp as the surprising sounds they pull from the bells.

And that's before they pull this rabbit out of their hat:

(ACT: transition to Take Me Out)

The ultimate baseball song entwined with the hometown's favorite hit from the seventies. For the handbell enthusiast, joining the tunes is a stroke of pure genius -- or, in the immortal words of the bard Neil Diamond: so good, so good.

I'm Jackson Braider.

********

Host Outro:

The Boston Handbell Festival happens at 8pm on Tuesday, May 19, at Old South Church on Copley Square in Boston.

Among the groups at this year's Festival: the New England Ringers, the Old South Ringers, the Merrimack Valley Ringers, and the Back Bay Ringers. The Hancock Carillon from Lexington, Massachusetts are this year's special guests.

You can find links to the Boston Handbell Festival at our website.

Jackson Braider is an independent radio producer and music journalist based in Boston.

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