Jan 18

Gig Time

We’re continuing to see how wonderful it is to have our own line of eight-bell pieces. Only two four-in-hand ringers are needed (or you can play them as quartets, too), and no tables are needed – just put the music on a stand, and get the bells out, and you’re rolling.

That means we can pack light, and move quickly, so we can pick up gigs without having to go through severe logistical hoops that you’d have to negotiate with a full choir. No, it’s not the same sound… but it’s a good one. Our pastor has said things like “I never knew you could get that much music out of eight bells”, for instance.

More music will be released soon – we just have to record the videos. Keep checking in!

Dec 31

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year!

Carla and I have been really busy ringing this holiday season:

  • Twelve hours at the Salvation Army kettle. One time our relief didn’t show, so we just stayed for an extra couple of hours… and on Christmas Eve we took both two-hour shifts. We decided that ringing the usual little bell wasn’t enough, so we took our own handbells and played our eight-bell duets. Reward: By the end of our Christmas Eve shifts, people were having a bit of difficulty stuffing money in the kettle!
  • Two two-hour sessions ringing in the gift shop at the San Francisco Zoo’s “Zoo Lights” event. We had a wonderful time the first time, and even more fun the second time as people asked us about bells and how we ring them.
  • Two hours at Macy’s in Sunnyvale, CA. This was just a kind of whim, and our friend Teri coordinated our visit with her manager. We were placed near one of the customer service desks, and so were in view and earshot of lots of people as they passed by. Teri noted that there was a lot of “stealth listening” going on. 😀
  • Two of the Christmas Eve services at Los Altos United Methodist Church. We rang with the bell choir, and also added a duet at the 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. services. We love playing for the family at our home church.
  • We also contributed to Immanuel Lutheran Church’s presentation at The Meadows (Los Gatos, CA).

So now… we’re going to relax for a few hours, and then we’ll get going on our other music!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Dec 04

Advent!

Advent is here, and we’re looking forward to Christmas with anticipation. Carla and I have had a wonderful time sharing our eight-bell music with the world. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re aiming to record a video of us playing each piece when we add them to our catalog. Of course, it also means we have a lot of scores that we haven’t yet mastered completely enough to post!

However, the ones that we have posted have turned out well. We also find ourselves becoming better four-in-hand ringers because of it! If you’re a ringer, we hope that you’ll give these arrangements a try… or that you might get three of your friends to join you and play eight-bell quartets, or maybe even get your start in ringing!

And… if you’d prefer just to watch the videos, you’re welcome to visit here again and again. We promise we’ll keep posting more music… well, when we learn it! 🙂

Oct 18

Finally! Finally! :D

At long last I’ve gotten to the point of having new music to sell! It took a lot to get there… and now that Carla, my wife and ringing partner is here, we can make videos of the new eight-bell arrangements. (Other ideas are in progress for working with bigger-than-duet compositions…). You’ll find them under Ring->Eight-Bell Music.

Have fun – there’s a lot more to come!

Feb 01

Slow Goin’

I notice that life has caught up with me, and that I haven’t been here in awhile. Perhaps I’ll get to the point where I’ll be back to making progress again soon… but for now I’ll have to zip off to tend to other things! Grrrr.

Dec 03

Progress!

So far, building the Choraegus website has been a good experience. Among other things, I love how the new platform makes sweeping changes possible with a very small amount of effort. A little more effort, and you can do even more interesting things, too!

I still have to uplink my music PDFs, and add a PayPal interface, but I’m well on the way. This time, the public-downloadable PDFs will be print-locked, thereby requiring a purchase to obtain the music… but that’s not such a huge change after more than fifteen years of download-and-pay-by-honor-system operations!

Thank you to all of you who’ve been using my music over the years.

Nov 10

Updating “Spiritual Boogie”

LDZ (Low Ding Zone) has been going through a lot of changes over the past two seasons. One of the huge ones is the way we’re writing our scores. This is exceedingly important to us – there really isn’t any repertoire for an all-bass handbell ensemble to play!

True, we’ve tried dropping existing music an octave, but this works only up to a point. The biggest problem to solve is who plays what, when. One challenge that has to be met, for instance, is any medium-tempo-or-faster scales: With treble bells, you can often four-in-hand them, but when you move everything downward, weight and size have a huge effect. Some solutions we’ve tried are:

  • Playing four-in-hand/Shelley as low as the lower fourth-octave, and occasionally the lower fifth-octave, bells. LDZ members have come to think of “Shelley with 4s” as not just normal, but practical. Funny… there are still some workshop teachers who claim that this impossible or silly below, say, G4.
  • Creating snaggletoothed assignments to spread the load. A simple example that works well for the standard bass tandem is “lines and spaces”. That means one player takes all the “line” notes – therefore, every other one – and the other takes all the “space” notes. We’ve also used the same rotation-distribution approach for three or more ringers.
  • Use mallets. Some people think of this as cheating when it’s an all-bass ensemble. After all, anyone can mallet bells, right? 😀

I’ve been converting our music so that each part is in its own PDF, often with a second line of music to show the combination of several parts that share a line or pattern. The BUCs have mutated as well, with solid-headed pitches indicating bells that aren’t shared, and open-headed ones indicating bells that are. It’s been a learning experience.

Anyway, I’ve been working on Spiritual Boogie. It’s an arrangement of three spirituals (Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; When the Saints Come Marching In; and This Train is Bound for Glory) with an underlying boogie line. It was the first piece LDZ ever learned, and given the situational parameters, it was a bear to perfect even with six very adept bass ringers. The original form involved changing positions during the piece, and memorization, too, since we couldn’t drag our scores around with us.

The main thing I’ve been trying to change is the layout. Originally, we had the chimes in the middle of the table, but that made for some horrific resetting because every other piece was laid out “bells left, chimes right.” I wanted to get Boogie to work with that layout instead.

This has meant taxing the patience of the group members as they’ve tried new parts – something like four iterations in the last two months – all without complete success… until this one. Yeah, right… we’ll see!

Anyhow, the “latest final version” is ready to go, and we’ll test it at Sunday’s rehearsal. Hopefully, it’ll work!

Nov 08

Capital Area Handbell Festival weekend

This weekend was my annual trip to North Carolina for the Capital Area Handbell Festival. This year, just over 500 ringers got together to ring under Fred Gramann’s baton. If you don’t know about Fred, he’s been Music Director at the American Church in Paris for nearly 35 years, and over that time has become one of the most-sought-after bell clinicians in the world. Not only that, he writes incredible music!

I flew in on Thursday, November 3 – it’s much easier to arrive the day before if I’m being picked up, because the west-to-east cross-country flight takes a full day plus a three-hour time change, which means any delay on a Friday flight will make you late for the opening Special Session with the CAHF conductor. Barbara picks me up at the airport, and lets me stay at her place while I’m there.

Friday night is the opening session with the conductor. There’s an instructional component that varies according to whoever is leading the event. Fred gave us some excellent thoughts about ringing correctly and expressively, and then had us apply that knowledge to some of the festival repertoire. During the last hour (of three…), we read through some additional music – the Friday night session always includes some sight reading for us all to get a look at some music we may not have seen before.

Saturday’s all day thing; we rehearse for about five hours total, and then put on a public concert in the afternoon. The concert included five massed-ring pieces (for those of you who are handbell initiates, those are pieces that everyone – all 500+ of us – ring together as one huge ensemble), one “bronze” (advanced) piece, and half a dozen solos played by individual groups. Result: A marvelous time was had by all.

The CAHF is sponsored by the Raleigh Ringers, one of the best handbell ensembles in the world. It’s fitting that it’s a top-notch event, and that people keep coming back for more. There are two huge bonuses over and above the ringing. One of them is a wonderful Suth’n lunch of pulled pork, beans, slaw, potato salad, and hush puppies (well, not to mention the near-infinite supply of Krispy Kremes). The big treat, however, is a free concert by the Raleigh Ringers – with fantastic music, of course!

Sunday was the Advanced Read & Ring – we get to play through lots of music for the fun of playing it and hearing it. Some pieces were familiar, like William Payn’s “Prisms” and Fred Gramann’s “O Sons and Daughters”; others were new to us, like Jason Krug’s piece-that-had-been-rejected-nine-times. Oh! Fred dropped in to direct the first bunch of pieces! And I had the privilege of having the participants take a run through my “Rhapsody in C Minor” and arrangement of “Chopsticks”.

Dinner was at McAllister’s… huge baked potatoes with tons of stuff on them. They were each worth about two meals. Barbara’s daughter Katie joined us, too. And then Monday was the flight home!

Nov 04

Welcome to the new Choraegus website!

Welcome to the new version of the Choraegus website! I’m hoping it’ll be a huge improvement over the original site, with a better focus on music publishing and education. Onward!