We’re heading home from Michigan after five wonderful days at the Bay View Week of Handbells. For those of you who don’t know about it, BVWoH is a handbell performance event where about 100 musicians get together, rehearse for about twenty-five hours, and perform in an evening concert. It’s a huge commitment (among other things, we’re supposed to go there ready to play all of our music at score tempo on the first downbeat), and it’s tremendous fun with very special family and friends.
The venue is at the Bay View Association, originally a Methodist ministers’ retreat on the shore of Lake Michigan. The Victorian-era houses have lots of character, and going to the shore is just a matter of crossing Highway 31 (carefully during tourist season!). If you poke around the rocks by the water, you often can find some Petoskey stones – they’re fossilized Hexagonaria polyps (so… prehistoric coral). We found a few, and will be trying our hand at polishing them when we get home.
The concert is a magnificent experience. Given that we’re playing seven-and-a-half octaves of bells as a ten-choir mass ring, the sound is insanely wonderful. Carl Wiltse and Fred Gramann, our leaders-at-podium, give us the benefit of their deep and profound experience, and integrate our individual flailings into a coherent whole that often thrills the audience that arrives on Thursday evening at 8:00 . The thrill is for them too, I think – when we went to lunch in town the following day, someone in the restaurant recognized us and thanked us!
It’s the type of experience you want – no, need – to take home with you. Most of the time this doesn’t happen because recording handbell programs can be a notoriously difficult undertaking. We’re singularly blessed at BVWoH to have Pierpont Productions to record and produce CDs and DVDs of the concert. If you want to see and hear what it’s like, you can order one from them!
Because we love visiting “the Mitten” (for those of you who don’t know, Michganders call the Southern Peninsula by that term because it looks like one) so much, we’ve also bookended our Bay View time with weekends in Traverse City and Holland. Those extra days are worth hundreds or thousands of additional words, but I won’t go into detail right now.
So… how do we return to real life after such a musical high? We’re planning to be back, and perhaps that’ll sustain us during the other 51 weeks of the year.
