Sep 07

Friends with Videos

No… not *those* kinds of friends with videos… (nudge, nudge, 😉 😉 )

Actually, we’re referring to friends who like playing our music enough to post videos to the Internet. It’s exciting when this happens, because it means that someone else is ministering to their church family, or learning new skills, or just plain having fun!

  • “Ring 4 Glory” Quartet of the First United Methodist Church of Pacific Grove, California has been recording their Sunday morning performances. They’ve found that eight-bell music suits their needs really well. Just recently, they posted videos of themselves playing To God Be the Glory and Shalom Chaverim.
  • The handbell quartet at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado shared a rehearsal video of O the Deep Deep Love of Jesus. It’s become one of their regular Good Friday pieces!
  • We also had the privilege of performing O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus as a double duet last year at the HMA (Handbell Musicians of America) Area 10 conference. It’s a great idea if you have the opportunity to bring multiple duos together!

However, by no means do we want to leave anyone else out. If you’ve made a video of yourself playing some of our music, let us know if you’d like us to add a link here!

Sep 04

Twelve-Bell Christmas Music is Here!

We’ve been holding onto five new twelve-bell Christmas arrangements, and the time has come to let you have a look at them. You’ll find them to be loads of fun, and there’s plenty of time to prepare them for the holidays!

Here are our new pieces – we hope you enjoy playing them!

We also thank J.C. for helping us with recording the videos!

Aug 28

Welcome to the New Season!

If you’re a church musician, August/September is about the time to start the new season (should I delay the first rehearsal until after Labor Day*? what can we have ready for the first Sunday we’re scheduled? And so on, and so forth).

If you’re in a minor squeeze because that first service with music is starting to look a bit tenuous, we have good news for you. We’ve just released our third “Surprisingly Easy”™ Eight-Bell Hymn Collection. We’re sure you’ll like it – the seven hymns that comprise it are long-time favorites in many churches:

Praise to the Lord
Sing Praise to God Who Reigns Above
All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name (hymn tune: CORONATION)
At the Cross
Great is Thy Faithfulness
Jesus Shall Reign
He Keeps Me Singing

All you have to do is get the music, and then find two, three, or four handbell players. As they say in England, “easy peasy”.

Have fun, and welcome to a new music season!

*For those of you who aren’t familiar with US holidays, Labor Day is the first Monday in September.

Aug 23

Bay View: Winding Down from the High

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.

Aug 16

Praise Him! Praise Him!

We’re in Harbor Springs, Michigan for a few days. It turns out that we’ve arrived on the hottest weekend of the whole year – it’s about 90º F. outside, so we’re thankful for air conditioning! We have a day to kick back before rehearsals start tomorrow, and plan to have a nice time, probably in the hotel. 🙂

Meanwhile, wherever you are, and whatever temperature it is in your neighborhood, we have a new eight-bell arrangement to share with you. Fanny Crosby is one of the great names in American church music, and we’ve added our new “standard” version of her hymn “Praise Him! Praise Him!” to the Surprisingly Easy™ one we published awhile ago.

Aug 15

Sixteen Bells and Michigan

We’ve added a new sixteen-handbell score to our catalog, Prelude No. 1 from J.S. Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. You can play it as a four-in-hand quartet (as friends from Bells of the Sound demonstrate in their video), or you can gather as many as eight musicians to play it. Take a look!

* * *

We’re in Bay View, Michigan for the annual Bay View Week of Handbells. About 100 handbell musicians will gather next week to rehearse for four days, and then will perform in our concert on Thursday evening at 8:00. Do drop by John M. Hall Auditorium at the Bay View Association if you’re nearby – you’ll enjoy the program!

Aug 10

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Today, we’re releasing our new eight-handbell arrangement of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”. It’s a great piece with which to start the new season, especially if you’d like to give your full-size bell choir a bit of additional time to prepare their first piece for service.

Do take a look, and pick up the score for your own ministry!

Aug 04

Wrong Foot Forward

We’ve just released our arrangement of “Wrong Foot Forward”, a new generation Irish jig by Brian Finnegan and Sarah Allen of the band Flook. It’s on their album “Haven” – and it’s a lot of fun!

You might ask yourself why Brian and Sarah chose this title. Well… there are two kinds of Irish jigs. The “regular” ones, usually danced by the men, have two triple beats (six eighth notes) per bar. “Slip jigs”, usually danced by the women, have three triple beats (nine eighth notes) per bar. But…”Wrong Foot Forward” has seven eighth notes per bar – so you can imagine what it will do to the unprepared dancer!

We truly enjoyed hearing Sarah’s rendition of “Wrong Foot Forward”, on which she adeptly plays five minutes of continuous music on a flute that she feeds with ultraquick “snap breaths”. Here’s our version, without having to worry quite as much about breathing!

Jul 19

And Here’s Some New Twelve-Bell Music!

We’ve just added seven new twelve-handbell arrangements to our catalog! You can play these as anything between a four-in-hand trio to a sextet of ringers with two bells each. And they’re fun, because they’re a bit challenging (well, okay, some of them are just plain challenging!) – but if you practice, you’ll find they have a wonderful sound, and will work well in your concerts of worship services. Do take a look – you’ll find the demonstration videos on the pages for the pieces!

  • Farandole: We hinted at having an arrangement of Georges Bizet’s famous piece in the previous post. Our twelve-bell score gives each player quite a bit to do, and will be an exciting piece to share with your friends.
  • Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee: This part of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is one of the reasons that it’s been a world favorite for over a century.
  • Morning Has Broken: Cat Stevens helped make this song famous a relatively small number of years ago, but it actually has been around for much longer than that.
  • My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean: You probably have sung this from time to time at campfires, or maybe when you’ve been on the water someplace.
  • O Worship the King: Twelve-bell hymns are great for any service! This arrangement would be perfect as a prelude or as gathering music.
  • Shenandoah: This American folk song recalls gentle rivers, gorgeous scenery, and idyllic times.
  • There is a Fountain: The Christian faith is filled with vivid imagery. This hymn recalls the magnitude of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.

Jul 14

Summer Doldrums?

It’s summer, and most of us are in off-season mode. That, of course, is because we traditionally synchronize our handbell (or choir) year to when folks are in town, so that means mid-August to mid-June. When we think of playing bells during the summer, we call around to see who’s available, and see whether we can find music that works.

Good news! If you have only two or three (or four, five, or six) friends who can get together to play in church or for a picnic, we have plenty of music for you to try. Our videos of our eight-bell music are presented as four-in-hand duets, but our friends have played them as trios and quartets as well. We’d like to mention “Ring 4 Glory” of Pacific Grove, California, who have played some of our eight-bell scores.

Our more recently-released twelve-bell scores are loads of fun, too. Who would have thought that Georges Bizet’s famous Farandole could be condensed into just a dozen notes? And we’re planning to add some more to what we have, so drop by now and then to check!

Have a wonderful summer!