After a busy Saturday morning of handbell workshops, we presented a handbell duet concert in Madison, WI. The sanctuary at Westminster Presbyterian Church is a beautiful performance space!

We played a whole concert with music using just eight bells at a time, although not the same bells for every piece. You’ll notice in the photo that we used three tables for the concert, even though we were only playing 8-bell music. We decided to do that because then we’d have a place to put our sheet music after we’d played it, and also because we used handchimes for one of the pieces. We don’t actually need a lot of space generally, but when we do have room to spread out, we do appreciate it!

Our concert program

Our concert was designed as a sacred concert. We added a couple of not-quite-sacred arrangements, but most of our repertoire consisted of hymns. Chopsticks was a fun addition; added fairly last-minute because we remembered how the audience had enjoyed it at our recent duet performance in Decatur, MI.

Here’s the program for the concert, listing the pieces we played:

It looks like a lot of pieces for one concert, but we don’t take as much time to reset our bells between pieces as a “standard size” handbell choir usually would, so we can fit more music into the program. We were grateful to Joe Chrisman from Westminster Presbyterian, who played piano for two of our pieces. We’d been rehearsing with an mp3 backing track played on a phone, so it was a real treat to have an actual pianist with us!

Here’s a video of Amazing Grace, with thanks to Larry’s brother Aj, who was at the concert:

Our 8-bell music

All of our 8-bell music is available for purchase and download from Choraegus. The helpful thing about Choraegus handbell music is that (with very few exceptions) it comes with fuss-free permission for performance, broadcasting and live-streaming. No one need worry about applying for separate licenses to perform or broadcast the pieces. We want to make it easy for other handbell ensembles to be able to perform our music too!

We’re thankful to everyone who came to our handbell concert in Madison. It was our first time performing there, and we appreciated the warm welcome we received. After the concert, on the Sunday morning, we played in two church services in Madison. We played prelude and offertory music at Covenant Presbyterian Church, then drove back to Westminster Presbyterian in time for offertory and postlude there. We’d had some doubts about being able to play in both services, but it turned out to be no problem at all, since the organizers Joe and Melissa had worked out the timing of everything so perfectly. The two churches were only a 6-minute drive apart, and we weren’t even out of breath when we arrived at Westminster. Playing in worship on the Sunday morning was a nice way to end our visit to Madison, before starting our long drive back to Michigan.

During our stay in Madison, we were able to visit the Wisconsin State Capitol building, which was opened in 1917. It’s a fascinating place to visit. When the trip was over, we drove back to Petoskey through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, stopping at various places along the way. If you’d like to see more photos from our trip, take a look at our Facebook page!

Thanks again to everyone who made this Handbell Weekend possible. We hope to visit Madison again someday!