While we were in Soledad for our #Pinnacles15 adventure, we played through some of our brand new, unpublished pieces.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!
Exciting news! We’ve been invited to Pennsylvania at the end of this month, to perform in concert with Philadelphia Bronze!
This will be our first-ever trip to the Philadelphia area, which looks like an interesting place to visit! We’ll only be there for three days, but we’re already busy making plans for the trip. We’ll definitely include a visit to Malmark Bellcraftsmen, the manufacturers of the bells we use for playing our duets.
More information about the concert
The concert with Philadelphia Bronze will take place on Saturday, May 30th,2015 at 7:00pm. It will be at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, 132 E. Valley Forge Road, King of Prussia, PA 19406. We’ll perform some brand-new and unpublished duets in this concert. We’ll also share a new piece written by Larry for eight handbells and flute. We’re looking forward to hearing some exciting music from Philadelphia Bronze too!
On Sunday, May 31st, we’ll play some of our duets during the morning worship service at Newtown United Methodist Church. Then we’ll fly back to California later that day.
We’ll be posting more information about our trip on our Facebook page in the coming week. You can find Philadelphia Bronze on Facebook too!
We very much enjoyed our trip to Ashland, Oregon for the Siskiyou Summit Handbell Conference. We love long road-trips, and the drive from Mountain View up to Ashland is always a fun one.
Larry was this year’s guest clinician/director, and Carla taught classes on British-style four-in-hand ringing. We both had a busy weekend! We performed a selection of our 8-bell duets for event participants, at the Friday evening Showcase Concert. Saturday involved a full day of massed-ringing rehearsals and classes, followed by a well-attended public concert.
Here’s a photo from one of Carla’s classes, where participants were enthusiastic about learning to play 4-in-hand the British way! This is a particular challenge for anyone who hasn’t attempted to play two bells in one hand before. It’s also fairly mind-blowing for people who usually use the ring-and-knock style of playing 4-in-hand. Switching to a whole new method is a tricky thing to do!
Larry very much enjoyed the opportunity to direct this massed-ringing event. We enjoyed the individual group’s performances too!
Our thanks go to Diane Barnes, the event organiser. We’re also thankful to the musicians who worked so hard to make the Siskiyou Summit Handbell Conference a success. You can find more photos from the weekend are on our Facebook page!
The SECC Handbell Festival was a great success. More than a hundred skilled young handbell musicians attended, and worked very hard to prepare for the concert. Larry had the privilege of being their clinician for the event.
We were both so impressed by the skill and dedication of the young musicians at this event. The choirs arrived well-prepared, and stayed focused throughout the rehearsals. Their individual performances were of a very high standard, and they performed the massed ringing pieces very well. If you’d like to see some of the highlights from the SECC Handbell Festival, here’s a video with excerpts from the rehearsals and the evening concert. The concert featured music by Arnold Sherman, Kevin McChesney, William Gross, Jason Krug, Linda McKechnie, Tim Waugh, Michael Glasgow, Catherine McMichael, Matthew Compton and our very own Larry Sue. A snippet from our performance of our eight-bell duet “Great is Thy Faithfulness” appears about 18 minutes into the video.
We also very much enjoyed this performance of Matthew Compton’s arrangement of “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?”, by Bellissimo, a group from Redlands Advent Academy. Here’s a video from the event:
If you’d like to see more photos from this event, you can find them on our Facebook page!
34th Annual SECC Handbell Festival, Riverside, CA – 2015
We’re excited that Larry has been invited to be the clinician at the SECC Advanced Handbell Festival this year!
We’re looking forward to making a trip to Riverside for this one-day event. Larry will be leading rehearsals with advanced young handbell musicians, and preparing for an evening concert. The handbell choirs will work on massed-ringing pieces to perform as a group, and will also prepare individual performance pieces. We’ll be playing an 8-bell duet or two during the concert too!
We’re looking forward to our visit to Riverside, and hope to do some sightseeing after the Advanced Handbell Festival. We’re also making tentative plans to play handbell duets in a church service on the Sunday morning. We’ll give you more details about this as they become available. Keep an eye on our Facebook page for updates!
If you’re in the area, you might like to join us on Friday, March 13, for the evening concert at La Sierra University’s Alumni Pavilion. There should be some exciting music to listen to, performed by some of the area’s finest young handbell musicians. Find out more information from the SECC Office of information, or contact us if you have any questions we might be able to help with.
Our trip to Portland will be happening in just a few days’ time. We’ll be taking part in Distinctly Bronze West, a fun and challenging event where over a hundred experienced handbell musicians will gather together to rehearse and perform some exciting music, under the direction of Dr. Bill Payn.
This year’s repertoire is as follows:
Carillon on a Ukrainian Bell Carol – Gerald Near, transcr. Sondra Tucker
Consecration – William Payn
Down the River (Riding the Rogue) – Jason Krug
Festive Dance – Georges Bizet, transcr. Kevin McChesney
Gravitas – Michael J. Glasgow
Gwerzy – D. Armstrong/C. O’Snodaigh, arr. Clint Hagen
Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen, arr. Joel Raney
Horizons – William Payn
Light of Peace – Veronica Bigham and Derek Hakes
Passacaglia – G.F. Handel, transcr. William Griffin Beckenhorst
One of the challenges about Distinctly Bronze, and other high-level handbell events, is that it’s essential to know the music very well before you go there. It’s not the kind of handbell event where you can get there, sight-read the music, and hope for the best. You have to be familiar with each piece – and “learning the notes” is just the first part of that. If you think about it, playing handbells in a large group is like being just part of one big instrument; imagine a piano where you have just a handful of notes that are your responsibility (and they’re not necessarily all notes that are next to each other on the keyboard), and other people have control of the other notes around you.
The interesting challenge is to be able to play your notes at the right time, fitting them between other people’s notes, and playing them with the right touch to match what’s happening around you. The goal is to play your bells in such a way that the listener hears the music as a whole, and isn’t distracted by the fact that different bells are being played in different ways by more than a hundred different people. Events like these are not about individuals; they’re about a group of people making music together – and that takes teamwork and practice.
Using graph theory to position bass handbells
So we’ve been preparing for this since Christmas; annotating the scores to make sure we don’t miss a tempo change, or forget to pick up a bell or handchime in time to play it; marking difficult passages to remind us not to miss those accidentals or tricky rhythms. Yes, all those scribbles really do mean something important! And even the scribbles in the picture below mean something – at least, they do to Larry, who uses his knowledge of graph theory to help work out the best way to position the bass bells for each piece.
We’ve also been playing the music on actual bells, over and over – because even when you feel that you’ve stared at the notes on the paper until your eyes are burning, there’s no substitute for picking up some bells (preferably the right ones) and making sure all your ideas are actually possible – or will become possible with a lot more practice!
The upcoming performance of Larry’s arrangement of Tico Tico will be the first one ever! The piece has been the subject of much discussion among DB West participants, as we all get to grips with sharing bells with neighbours, changing bells at high speed, and working out the best ways to deal with fast chromatic passages. It’s going to be exciting to see how this piece sounds in performance next Sunday!
We’re looking forward to this year’s Distinctly Bronze West. Full details of the concert are below. If you’re in the Portland area on Sunday, March 1st, we’d love to see you there!
