October 6, 2022

A Concert for the Monday Musical Club

The Monday Musical Club is a non-profit organisation dedicated to music education and promotion of creative and performing arts. Based in St. Joseph, Michigan, they hold a wide variety of education events and music performances. We were excited to be asked to present a shared concert with our friends Gary and Martha Matthews!

About Gary and Martha Matthews

Gary and Martha also live in Holland, and they’re a talented couple! Gary studied organ, music education, and sacred music, and holds a doctorate in Worship Studies. He served as Pastor of Worship and the Arts at Highland Park Baptist Church in Southfield, MI, and at Christ Memorial Church in Holland, MI. He’s a published composer, and has been performing for more than forty years, with piano, organ, trumpet and voice.

Martha holds a Bachelors in Music Education and a Masters in Flute Performance. She has played principal flute with Florida Symphonic Pops, Florida Wind Symphony, Gold Coast Opera, Gold Coast Ballet and the Washington Idaho Symphony. Martha directs the Kalamazoo Ringers, and is a sought-after handbell clinician. In concert with Gary, she plays flute, whistles, bell tree, and piano.

A concert with handbells, flute, piano, trumpet, and more!

We held our shared concert at First Congregational Church of St. Joseph. This is a beautiful sanctuary for a music performance! It was a treat for the four of us to be able to perform together. We’d spent most of our summer at our cottage near Petoskey, and Gary and Martha had been in Holland. Planning a concert and rehearsing is a challenge when you’re in different towns! Thanks to the power of email, and our individual rehearsals, we made it work.

Our program included music on a variety of instruments, including handbells (of course!) Gary and Martha opened the concert with a piece for piano and trumpet, and we continued with a couple of our favorite handbell duets. We also enjoyed the opportunity to get together as a quartet to perform some pieces – including Larry’s infamous arrangement of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing that the four of us had previously played for one of the Kalamazoo Ringers’ online Christmas concerts. We all played Blessed Assurance together, with a brand-new flute part that Larry had written specially for this concert. It was fun to find that some of the audience hadn’t seen handbells played in our 4-in-hand style before. We talked to audience members afterwards, and answered questions about our technique and the way we move.

Here’s the full program!

We enjoyed listening to Gary and Martha’s pieces, particularly Brent Olstad’s I Love to Tell the Story. Martha’s flute-played was enthralling to hear, and the audience clearly loved this piece. We finished the concert with an extra surprise – Larry’s lively arrangement of Ding Dong, Merrily on High. This is another arrangement for handbells, piano and flute, and it makes a perfect ending for a concert.

Our thanks go to the Monday Musical Club for inviting us to share our music in concert, and to everyone who came to listen. We hope to have the opportunity to perform in concert with Gary and Martha again someday!

If you’d like to provide an opportunity for us to perform in concert with Gary and Martha again, or you’d like to host a handbell duet performance, please get in touch with us, and we’ll talk more!

October 10, 2021

Ding Dong, Merrily on High – for Handbells, Piano and Flute

Our lively arrangement of Ding Dong, Merrily on High was part of last year’s Kalamazoo Ringers online Christmas concert. We had a great time collaborating with Gary Matthews on piano, with the super-talented Martha Matthews playing a brand-new flute part. We promised that the flute part would be available to purchase in time for Christmas 2021 – and here it is!

More information about this arrangement

Ding Dong, Merrily on High is an 8-bell arrangement, available with either an organ or piano accompaniment, and now an additional optional part for flute. The flute really adds some extra sparkle! The organ accompaniment was created by T. Paul Rosas from California. Sheet music is available to purchase and download from Choraegus.

Buying handbell music from Choraegus

Your Choraegus music score will come to you in a download link, as a PDF file. You’ll be responsible for printing your own music, and you won’t receive anything in the mail. You can order the music, download and print it on the same day, and be ready to rehearse!

Purchasing this arrangement gives you permission to print and maintain up to four copies for your handbell group, plus the accompaniment score/s – so you only need to pay once. Purchase also gives permission for performance, broadcasting, live-streaming and video-sharing online. You can find full details in our licensing agreement, and in our instructions about what you’re allowed to do with Choraegus music. Please remember to mention the title and arranger of the piece on video-sharing sites, social media and any printed materials such as concert programs. If you enjoy playing our music, please share our website link with other musicians, and help us to get the word out!

If you haven’t purchased music online from Choraegus before, you might like to look at our step-by-step guide. We designed this to help you navigate the purchase and download process in a (we hope!) stress-free way.

Any questions?

If you have any questions about our music, please start by reading our Frequently-Asked Questions. Just about every question anyone’s ever asked us is there, along with answers. Please contact us if you don’t find the information you need, and we’ll be happy to help.

June 13, 2015

A tour of the Malmark Handbell Factory

We were recently in Philadelphia to perform our concert with Philadelphia Bronze – our first-ever visit to Philadelphia! This seemed like an ideal time for a tour of the Malmark handbell factory. It’s the place where our handbells were made!

The Malmark Bellcraftsmen factory is located in Plumsteadville, PA. We were strangers to the area, but still managed to get on the right road and find the place we were looking for. This big sign helped a lot:

Our tour started in a room full of history. We were able to see the “1st production” Malmark handbell, made in December 1974, and a selection of various handbells made many years ago and in other countries. Our tour guide, Martha, talked about the process of making the bells, starting from the design itself, where the sound and overtones are determined by the shape, diameter and wall thickness of the bell. Handbells are made of bronze; 80% copper and 20% tin. You can read about the casting process at www.malmark.com.

The smallest and largest handbells ever made!

Here’s a picture of the largest and smallest bells ever made by Malmark; the G0 and the C9.

biggest and smallest handbells by Malmark

Larry’s a bass bell specialist, and he was pleased to be allowed to try playing the G0 bell – with great care! People have observed that it sounds more like a gong than a bell.

We visited the machine shop next, and admired the obvious skill and dedication needed to operate the lathe and tune the bells in the next part of the tour. It’s precision work, and a fascinating process to watch. We have to admit that all those golden, gleaming turnings – the shavings from the bells, which sparkled all over the machinery – made us think of Christmas!

The polishing department was an exciting place! It was impressive to see the difference between the bell at the start of the process and after machine-polishing.

So many shiny bells!

We discovered that walking into a huge room full of bells can be an awe-inspiring experience. Was Carla the first person to CRY when she saw this? We don’t know, but ohhh… so many bells! So much bronze! So much SHINY!

Skilled and dedicated people

Something that really impressed us at the Malmark factory was the obvious skill and dedication of the people working there. It’s great to meet people who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the work they’re doing. They are all aware of the important part they play in the creation of the finished product. If we lived near Plumsteadville, we’d definitely want to work there!

We found out that bells can be “rejected” at any stage of the production process. This can even happen in the very final stages, when they’ve already gone through several stages of tuning, been polished and given their handles and clappers. Some of the rejected bells are returned to the foundry to be melted down again, while others become beautiful gifts.

Others are not so fortunate and end up gathering dust, as makeshift doorstops.

Bass handbells!

Next… those great big bass bells. Larry calls them “aluminum”, and Carla tries hard not to call them “aluminium” (there’s a subtle US/UK difference there!) . Whatever you call them, they’re large, and they start off very heavy before some of the weight has been tuned out of them. For the last few years, Larry has played these aluminum bells at the Bay View Week of Handbells, which takes place in Michigan every August. That’s where his t-shirt came from!

Malmark also manufactures Choirchime® instruments, which also go through a tuning process. It was unusual for us to see so many handchimes in one place!

We finished our tour of the Malmark factory in the Demonstration Ringing Room, where we rehearsed a few pieces for the following evening’s concert with Philadelphia Bronze.

If you’re ever in Pennsylvania, we’d recommend taking a tour of the Malmark factory. There’s so much to see there, and you’ll have the opportunity to meet a group of people who are really passionate about the instruments they create. Even if you don’t play handbells, it’s a fascinating place to visit. We took lots more photos, so please click on this link to see the complete set!