While we were in Soledad for our #Pinnacles15 adventure, we played through some of our brand new, unpublished pieces. Come Christians, Join to Sing is one of these new pieces.
We didn’t want to annoy other hotel guests by playing handbells in our room. So we decided to find another practice location instead. We chose the pretty church of Our Lady of Solitude in Soledad. We played outside the church, as the sun went down and the light became poorer and poorer. Yes, it was pretty, and fairly quiet. No, it was not easy to see our music!
Here’s Come, Christians, which actually isn’t completely new to us. We’ve played it a couple of times recently in church services. For some unknown reason, we completely forgot to record or publish it until now. It’s a fun and lively arrangement of the Spanish hymn tune Madrid.
Would you like to play this arrangement?
If you’d like to play Come Christians, Join to Sing, the music is available for purchase and download from Choraegus.
If you haven’t bought music from Choraegus before, we recommend reading our step-by-step guide. Your purchase (pay once) entitles you to print up to 4 copies for your group. Please read our licensing agreement for full details.
Any questions?
If you have any questions, please get in touch, and we’ll be happy to help!
Unlike many of our handbell friends, we didn’t make it to this year’s National Seminar – Pinnacle – in Dallas, Texas. We read lots of news about this exciting event on Facebook. The whole thing was so awesome that it even had its own hashtag on social media – #Pinnacle15.
We’re not the kind of people to sit around and sulk because we were missing out on all the fun in Texas. Instead, we decided to have a handbell adventure of our own here in California. We packed our bells and equipment into the car, and away we went!
Here we are at our destination – PINNACLES!
Our very own handbell event
We checked in at a hotel in the nearby town of Soledad, and our handbell event – #Pinnacles15 – began.
Here’s a picture of the church where we held our Friday evening duet session. We played through some new and unpublished music outside the church of Our Lady of Solitude.
And here’s our opening night dinner. Hey, put your phone away, Larry!
Here’s Larry wearing our event t-shirt:
Here are some of our bells in the hotel room:
Here’s Carla wearing her “Hug Larry if you love Tico Tico” shirt:
Larry held a handbell polishing session:
Wait. Handbell polishing? THAT’S not how you do it, Larry!
Here’s Larry wearing his “Kiss me if you love Tico Tico” shirt. These shirts were worn by handbell musicians from Area 12 at Distinctly Bronze West in February 2015.
Here’s Carla, showing her skills at multi-tasking as she works on music for the Bay View Week of Handbells while drinking coffee!
We enjoyed the opportunity to do some sightseeing in the area too. Here’s a picture of the Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, where we played some of our duets inside and outside the chapel on Saturday morning:
And here we are at the Mission San Juan Bautista, which we visited on Saturday afternoon:
Our handbell event was over far too quickly, because we had to be home on Sunday morning, to play duets in a church service in San Jose. But we had a fun couple of days – and you can see more photos from our trip on our Facebook page!
We’ve had lots of fun with our eight-bell music. Sometimes it’s also fun to branch out and expand a little. Here’s some new music for twelve bells!
Of course, we can only play four bells each at one time. It’s a problem when we suddenly have 12-bell music, and don’t have a hope of playing it on our own! That’s when we turn to J.C for help. J.C. doesn’t do this stuff on a regular basis, but he has plenty of musical talent, and very little fear of scary handbell music situations. After all, he used to play in Low Ding Zone!
On this occasion we didn’t have a lot of time to spend together. We decided to read through the music, and record as many pieces as we could in as short a time as possible.
Here are the resulting videos from our recent sight-reading sessions. They’re all from either the first or second attempt at playing them. For that reason, the following demonstrations are far from polished. However, they should give you an idea of how the new pieces could sound with a bit more rehearsal!
Although we’re playing these pieces as a four-in-hand trio, they could also be played with up to 6 people, with just 2 bells each. Click on the titles if you’d like to find out more about each piece.
Have you ever heard about the tradition of “love padlocks”? A couple of years ago, we read about a bridge in Paris, France. This bridge was a famous location for couples to place padlocks known as “love locks”. We read more – and found out that a “love lock” is a padlock that a happy couple can lock onto a bridge or fence, as a symbol of their love. The lock usually has names or initials on it. By tradition, the key is thrown away, to show that the happy couple’s love will last forever.
We read that there are “love locks” locations in many places across the globe. Sometimes the local authorities view the locks as a public nuisance, and remove them. However, in other places, the padlocks are considered a romantic tourist attraction, popular with locals and visitors alike.
Finding a love lock of our own
Being a pair of hopeless romantics, we didn’t want to let an opportunity pass us by! We weren’t making any plans to visit Paris any time soon, so we looked online for a “love locks” location closer to home. There was a place that looked perfect – a purpose-built structure at the Museum of Art in Los Gatos, California.
We ordered an engraved padlock from a company called “Make Love Locks”, and this is what it looked like. Note the extreme purpleness:
A place for our love lock
On Valentine’s Day 2014, we drove to Los Gatos to lock our padlock in place. We found the Museum of Art, and saw a fence-like structure, with some padlocks on!
We locked our padlock in place, but didn’t do the traditional thing of throwing away the key. If we ever needed to remove the padlock, we’d prefer to do it without having to hack it apart! Here is the padlock in place, in all its purple glory:
Fast forward to June 2015…
We read online that authorities had removed 45 tons of love padlocks from the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. Apparently, the weight of the locks had been bringing down parts of the fencing on the bridge. We were very relieved that we hadn’t put our padlock there! It seemed like a fun idea to go back to Los Gatos and check that our lock was still in place.
We arrived at the Art Museum late in the afternoon, and headed straight for the love locks fencing. Where was our purple padlock?
We had a few moments of panic, until we looked more closely at some of the padlocks in front of us. Suddenly we saw it! Of course, we’d been looking for purple. Sadly, our padlock hasn’t fared very well in the strong sunshine, and has faded to more of a lilac-grey. Still, we were relieved to see it, and glad that we could still read the words on it.
Do you have a love padlock too?
So, that’s the story of our love padlock. We hope to go back and visit it again some day! If you and your partner have a love padlock of your own somewhere, why not let us know on our Facebook page. We’d love to see a photo too!
What do you do when it’s the Fourth of July, and you’ve finished eating party food and having fun with family and friends? The answer is… play handbell duets, of course!
An impromptu handbell duet performance
We were in Hayward, California for a family gathering, and we decided we needed to burn off some of the calories we’d consumed at lunch time. We were driving in the direction of home, and noticed the Chapel of the Chimes. Suddenly looked like a great location for a Concert With No Audience!
The Chapel of the Chimes is a 61-acre cemetery, crematorium and funeral home complex. It didn’t appear that we’d be disturbing anyone with our music, so we set up our table and bells. We played duets for around forty minutes! It was a great opportunity to play through some of the music for our visit to Los Altos Lutheran Church the following day. We also brought out some of the older pieces we hadn’t played for a very long time!
We had the usual interesting challenges that go with outdoor performances – a strong breeze, traffic noise, and even some festive firecrackers! The location and the sunshine also made it a very stripy-looking performance, as you can see from the video!
The following pieces are on the video:
America, the Beautiful
Come, Christians, Join to Sing
Drink to Me Only
Beautiful Dreamer
A Mighty Fortress
Moreton Bay
Great is Thy Faithfulness
Danny Boy
Botany Bay
Earth and All Stars
I Need Thee Every Hour
The King of Love My Shepherd Is
Allegro
We hope you enjoyed our handbell duets at the Chapel of the Chimes. All the pieces we played are available (or coming soon!) from Choraegus. If you’d like to book us for a performance with an audience, please let us know!
