A revolution in English bell ringing
harpers.orgI love seeing a change ringing article on HN, especially with well labelled diagrams!
The move to a framework system where we can all ring what we like and just describe it within an agreed upon nomenclature is a great improvement rather than the legacy Decisions. Having strict rules always seemed quite dated to me - the ringing police after all do not show up if you ring a "banned" performance. But agreeing on names makes communication possible - a good role for a central body.
Jump changes are fun too, but I don't think I agree with the article that allowing them has really led to a revolution. The top performances on BellBoard are of commonly rung non-jump methods. In fact I don't think I've seen a jump method be featured at all. Philip himself doesn't seemed to have published a performance of "Jump" anything since 2013. For many I think it remains an interesting novelty.
The other reason jump changes are not a revolution and have remained just a curiosity is physics, something that's ignored by the article.
For non-ringers, in change ringing the bells rotate 360 degrees each time they strike, from mouth up to mouth up. The clapper hits the bell when the it has rotated roughly 270 degrees from mouth up and is more or less horizontal, approximately 2 seconds after it starts moving. The bells are usually in the 100kg to 1000kg range (for US folks, that's 220lb to 2200lb), although they can be up to 4000kg. The only point when the ringer can exert control on the bell via the rope is when it is near the balance and mouth upwards, and speeding it up or slowing it down any more than one "beat" is physically very difficult on heavier bells, particularly if you are doing it for a full peal, which usually takes 3+ hours.
About the least important thing in the 2022 rules changes (https://framework.cccbr.org.uk/version2) was the allowing of jump changes.
p.s. there's a split-screen video showing the ringer and the bell he's ringing here: https://youtu.be/qrdLP15Xsuk?t=67
Sayers, mentioned here in passing, wrote probably the only detective story explicitly called out (as an introduction to change ringing) in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (a mighty 20 volume encyclopaedia).
So if you like old detective stories and this article tickled your interest, perhaps give "The Nine Tailors" a whirl.
It has ringers taking breaks (for beer, I think) during peals and handing off to other ringers which I was surprised was allowed (till bellringing friends told me it wasn't...). Still a good book though.
The only way you can justify public bell ringing is by appeal to tradition. Church bells are very loud and are placed in tall bell towers to be heard over a wide area. Despite the disruption and annoyance they can cause, this is an important part of English culture and I support it.
Once you start changing the rules, you are no longer following the tradition. You're accepting that the tradition can be changed, and in that case, I'd prefer it changed to "silence" not "jumping".
What a liberty! Straight through the lights, of course!
> composers tend to base their methods in mathematical principles such as group theory
I know many composers were and are very in tune with the mathematics of music. But the “tend to” makes me wonder: were most of them in tune, or is it that pleasant sounding music will inevitably display mathematical patterns?
"I am taking such pains with these things, not so much out of concern that the pupil might, if they were not explained, thoughtlessly accept and mechanically apply them, as to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes. But aesthetics alleges it has discovered eternal laws."
-- Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony
That sentence is specifically about composers of methods in change ringing, where the musical possibilities are tightly constrained by the rules and the physics of ringing large bells. Change ringing is based on permutations constructed by swapping adjacent pairs. (Except for the jump changes that the article is about.) For a “triples” peal on 7 bells the ringers are supposed to ring all 5040 possible permutations. It’s called “triples” because you can make up to 3 swaps at a time; one of the challenges (for example) is to construct a triples peal that only uses triple changes.
Here's a video showing bell ringing in practice with some deep dive on the permutation nature: https://youtu.be/3lyDCUKsWZs?si=90sPn77wLGk-Sh48
Did someone say Bells on Sunday?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh
Which normally segues into the Shipping Forecast
I grew up hearing these bells and being able to listen to them on demand is one the last great things on the internet, for me https://youtu.be/IVvAIYA4uIA?si=qIQGqgNk1JNN4GTw
> Bells on Sunday
I prefer a nice drop of Laphroaig myself.
The fact that that webpage does not let me ring any bells is very upsetting!
I was in England when HM QE II died. It was a rare opportunity to hear quite a lot of change ringing, notable not least because many of the bells were fully muffled in mourning of the monarch.
Bell ringing is English?? I grew up in England and assumed all churches everywhere did it. I guess I just never noticed its absence in the USA, despite living here for over 20 years.
93% of the rings of 6 bells or more which are rung for English style change ringing are in England. Source: https://dove.cccbr.org.uk/
Change ringing is a branch of Group Theory and is mentioned in Knuth. The Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm for efficiently generating permutations was published in the early 1960s, but has been known about by change ringers since the 1600s. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinhaus%E2%80%93Johnson%E2%8...
Not bell ringing - change ringing. Most places they play a tune on them; our ringers work out mathematical permutations instead.
Edit: ...and I should add: Sayers was quite reactionary, preternaturally English, and writing in the 1930s, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it wasn't true that change ringing was uniquely English.
… and writing a detective story rather than a non-fiction book.
The reality is that someone writing in Harper's in 2025 and using a Dorothy L. Sayers Peter Wimsey story from 1934 as a supporting source is presenting a hopelessly outdated and fictional picture of the world and is going to come up for starters against the Australia and New Zealand Association of Bellringers, founded in 1962.
Apparently change ringing, or something similar, is practiced in Verona. But otherwise it seems unique to the UK, or UK influenced cultures.
Interesting, but the wikipedia article states that "they play slowly moving tunes, not the continuous change ringing of the English tradition"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronese_bell_ringing
So unless you have another reference...? (You did say "something similar" to be fair)
Here you go: https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/articles/basic-tuition/ita...
There are a fair few videos on YouTube as well.
That link (like the Wikipedia article) is talking about the mechanism by which the bell is rung, not what is rung out on them i.e. they are not ringing the changes.
It's got compositions on the page, a link to a PDF with compositions in it and a link to the Veronese ringing association which has many more examples - if you can read Italian.
Ah, I stand corrected. I couldn't listen to the examples last night so I have egg on my face this morning :)
I hadn't completely checked it either FWIW so worth asking the question.
It does sound slightly different as they use chords.
There is some change ringing in the USA, just not very much of it. There are towers around.. https://www.nagcr.org/towers-and-bands
There's even a few change ringing towers dotted around parts of Africa, Australia, some of Europe. Just few and far between.
But when compared to England, where practically every town can be relied upon to have at least a 6 bell tower where change ringing can happen, it's no comparison.
My college (Sewanee: The University of the South) is one of the few places in the US with a change ringing tower. It definitely fit the Anglophilic vibe of the place. It was always lovely to hear.
Apparently, I now live in one of the other places where there is a tower (Carmel, IN), but I’ve never heard changes rung on it. It doesn’t appear from the website that it has any local players, which is too bad.
Very few churches in the American suburbs have bells, and most have replaced them with speakers playing recorded bells if they have anything at all :(
A surprising number have bells or refurbished their bell towers in the last 20 years - but many are more gong than bell as the bell is hit with a powered solenoid.
Hand-rung bells do still exist and get installed; offhand I know of one new installation and three old.
This might be two ways of saying the same thing, but I wonder if it’s less about culture and more about having a lot more big-giant-bell-era churches. Not that you implied your observation is about culture. I’m doing that.
Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.
Specifically, it’s a subculture that emerged in the Church of England in particular - other churches in England built with big bells - Baptist, Methodist, Catholic and so on - are not built with the kind of bells that do this kind of ringing.
I wasn’t expecting to lose an hour this Saturday to a deep dive on the notation of 6-bell permutations, but here we are.