As we say hello to the month of April, here’s a new 8-bell arrangement – the hymn For the Beauty of the Earth.
The useful thing about this tune is that it also doubles as the Christmas carol As With Gladness, Men of Old. Two titles for the price of one!
Would you like to play For the Beauty of the Earth?
If you’d like to play this piece, it’s available from Choraegus.
When you buy handbell music from Choraegus, it will come to you as a digital (PDF) file. That means you’ll be responsible for printing your own music, and you won’t receive anything in the mail. Your purchase will entitle you to print up to 4 copies of this 8-bell arrangement for your handbell group. Please see our licensing agreement for full details.
If you haven’t previously purchased music from Choraegus, you might like to look at our step-by-step guide. We designed this to make the process as stress-free as possible!
Any questions?
If you have any questions about buying or playing our music, please check our Frequently-Asked Questions, in case the answer is there! If you don’t find the information you’re looking for, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
During our recent visit to England, we enjoyed the opportunity to rehearse some handbell music with friends. Our trip was mainly for the purpose of meeting our new granddaughter for the first time and catching up with family members we hadn’t seen for far too long. However, we didn’t want to miss the chance to get together with Gay and Alan Cooper, the other half of Pizzazz Handbell Quartet.
More about Pizzazz
Back in the days when Carla lived in England, Pizzazz was a trio, with Gay, Alan and Carla as members. They rehearsed in Wallingford, with coffee, sometimes pizza, and lots of music. The three of them would often keep rehearsing until very late into the night. After all, who needs to sleep when there are handbells to play? The three group members shared a willingness to squash far too many bells, tables, foam pads, table covers, music and people into a car. They’d travel just about any distance to give a performance or take part in a handbell event.
As a group, Pizzazz gave performances and workshops at local and national events. They had success at music festivals and in the Trinity College London intermediate and advanced recital exams. The trio recorded a handbell track on a CD by London-based avant pop duo French for Cartridge. They also performed at parties, weddings, charity events and open-mic nights, and represented the UK at an exciting handbell event in Talinn, Estonia.
Christmas festivities at Heathrow AirportIn concert in Estonia
Carla’s move to California
After all the fun they’d had, the members of the trio were understandably reluctant to break up the group, when Carla moved to California (and got married) in 2012. The best solution was obviously for the trio to become a quartet – an international one – with Gay and Alan on one side of the ocean and Larry and Carla on the other. We had our first opportunity to rehearse together during our visit to England at the beginning of 2014.
Since then, we’ve been more than 5,000 miles apart, communicating on Facebook and by email, but not able to rehearse or perform together as a group. When we knew we’d be visiting England again, it was exciting to be able to make plans to get together with Gay and Alan for another rehearsal!
The Waltz from Sleeping Beauty
As we only had one evening to rehearse, we decided to use our time to try out something new. We played through Larry’s 16-bell arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz. You might recognise the tune as the Once Upon a Dream song from the Disney movie.
This piece was new to all of us. It meant that we weren’t able to get a note-perfect performance in the time available. Still, we hope this video will give you some idea of how the piece should sound. We had a lot of fun with it! We hope to be able to get together again someday, and perhaps try for a more polished performance next time!
Our thanks go to Gay and Alan! We appreciated their continued willingness to play insane handbell stuff at crazy hours of the day (and night).
Would you like to play the Waltz from Sleeping Beauty?
If you’d like to play this piece, the music is now available for purchase and download from Choraegus.
Choraegus handbell music is designed to come to you as a digital download (PDF file). That means you’ll be responsible for printing your own music, and you won’t receive anything in the mail. Your purchase of this 16-bell arrangement allows you to print up to 8 copies for your handbell group. Please see our licensing agreement for full details.
Any questions?
If you have any questions about Pizzazz, or about our music, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help!
Pizzazz Handbell Quartet – reunited in Wallingford!
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!
Last weekend, we saw the opportunity for another Concert with No Audience in Walnut Grove, California. We set up by the side doors of the Presbyterian church there, and played for an hour or so. There was no audience except the passing traffic, the birds, and a couple of passers-by.
We enjoy giving these “concerts” from time to time. In reality, a concert with no audience is probably not much more than another rehearsal. What makes it different is the possibility that an audience might arrive without warning. When we rehearse, we go back and practise passages of the music that need improvement. When we give a concert, whether to an audience or not, we’re selecting pieces that are performance-ready, and playing them to the best of our ability.
Here’s a video with excerpts from some of the pieces we played, all of which are currently available (or soon to be available) from Choraegus.
Would you like to host a concert – with an audience?
If you’d like to book us to perform a concert at your church, or a performance for your event, please contact us. We’ll bring the music, and you can provide the audience!
Over the past couple of years, we’ve had a lot of fun writing and performing our eight-bell music. We’ve recently published some fun and exciting music for twelve bells – a whole new adventure for us!
Getting some help with playing the new music
We wanted to make demonstration videos of the new 12-bell pieces. Of course, the problem with 12-bell music is that we can’t play it by ourselves. So we thought for a while, and decided to ask someone to help us:
“Hi, J.C. Are you free on Saturday? Want to come and help us with some bell stuff?”
“Okay. Uh… what kind of bell stuff?”
“Well, we need to try and record as many of the new twelve-bell pieces as we can manage… in not-very-much time.”
J.C. is more of a bass bell expert, and he doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to do 4-in-hand treble ringing, so we weren’t sure if he’d be too enthusiastic about our suggestion. But he’s a skilled musician, and he was up for the challenge. We met at the rehearsal venue, and the three of us spent an hour or so playing through our new twelve-bell music, to see how it worked “in real life”. We recorded our rehearsal, in the hope that we’d be able to get some demonstration videos for the website.
The videos we made are below. It should be noted that these are all first, second or third takes, so the pieces are not necessarily played 100% accurately. There are occasional wrong notes, and some inaccurate rhythms and occasional slip-ups of a random nature! But for a first read-through, we were quite pleased with how it all went. We felt that we’d only need a few more practice sessions to add a bit more polish to each performance.
Here are the rehearsal videos. Click on the titles if you’d like to buy the music!
Our thanks go to J.C. for helping us with this at short notice. J.C. – you’re a star, and we enjoyed working with you. We hope we can do it again soon!
