Here’s our latest 12-bell piece – an arrangement of the popular hymn HowGreat Thou Art. Thanks to J.C, who came to visit us for a few days last month and was happy to play through some new stuff with us.
This piece proved to be fun to play, and came together surprisingly quickly. As with all our 12-bell pieces, we’ve made it available in two versions – one for the traditional twelve-bell range C5-G6, and one for F5-C7, so you can pick the one that suits your group.
How to get the sheet music
If you’d like to play How Great Thou Art, it’s available for purchase and download from Choraegus.
When you buy music from Choraegus, you’ll receive instructions to download the file as a PDF. That means you’ll be responsible for printing the music at home, and you won’t receive anything in the mail. Please read our licensing agreement for all the details. If you haven’t bought music from us before, you might like to read our step-by-step guide. We designed this to help make the purchase process stress-free!
Your payment gives you permission to print out up to 6 copies of this arrangement for your group. Don’t pay for more copies than you need!
Any questions?
If you have any questions about buying and playing our music, please contact us, and we’ll be happy to help!
During our trip to England in February, we enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with a few of our friends from the world of handbells. We’ve already posted about our rehearsal with Pizzazz Handbell Trio and Quartet. We also had the chance to visit our friend Meg from Inspiration International. This is a Berkshire-based handbell project that’s very important to us.
More about Inspiration International
Inspiration International is a project which grew from the community work of Inspiration – an initiative of Finchampstead Handbell Ringers in Berkshire, England. The group’s mission is to enrich the lives of the young and elderly in the Berkshire community. We take handbell music into the lives and homes of those who sometimes feel forgotten by society. Pioneered by Meg, the leader of Finchampstead Handbell Ringers, the group has visited and entertained the residents of many care homes in the area. They have volunteered to share their handbell music with social groups and at community events.
Carla first worked with Meg and Sally from Inspiration when she needed to take a trio of handbell musicians to perform at Heathrow Airport in 2011. The group entertained airport travellers during the busy Christmas rush. Meg and Sally were happy to be involved, and they had a great time sharing their music at the airport.
The trio at Heathrow Airport, Christmas 2011
After that, Carla joined Meg and Sally in taking their handbell music to people in the Berkshire community. They visited many care homes and community groups. Space is often limited in care homes, so it was a huge advantage to be able to perform as a small group playing 4-in-hand. The group was honoured to be nominated for the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service in 2012.
When Sally decided to focus on other projects for a while, Meg and Carla started playing duets. That’s when Larry started arranging music for eight bells!
Meg and Carla at the “All the Bells” event in Wokingham, 2012
Carla’s move to California, and Meg’s continued work in the community
When Carla moved to California in August 2012, it was a challenge to see how we could continue the “Inspiration” project across the miles. We really wanted to find a way! So, using the powers of modern technology, we’ve been working together to prepare and record music that Meg can use for performances. From the original Inspiration grew the new Inspiration International. Meg continues to visit care homes and community groups in Berkshire. She adds her live handbell-playing to pre-recorded tracks made more than 5,000 miles away in California.
A happy reunion in England
It’s a rare treat for us to be able to get together and rehearse as a group! Of course, we were determined to find some time to catch up with Meg during our visit to England in February. We enjoyed a lovely home-cooked meal, and caught up on some of the news and chit-chat. Then we dropped Meg right in at the deep end with some brand-new and unpublished 12-bell music!
Here’s a video of one of the pieces we tried; it’s the traditional Scottish melody Flow Gently, Sweet Afton. It’s not a note-perfect demonstration, but it should give you an idea of how the piece could sound, with a little more rehearsal time!
Would you like to play this piece?
If you’d like to play this arrangement, the music is available for purchase and download from Choraegus. Please see our step-by-step guide and licensing agreement for full information about buying our music online.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Inspiration International, please check out the group’s Facebook page!
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!
