Did someone say Bells on Sunday?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh
Which normally segues into the Shipping Forecast
A revolution in English bell ringing
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#12Bell 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.
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.
Apparently change ringing, or something similar, is practiced in Verona. But otherwise it seems unique to the UK, or UK influenced cultures.
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#13Bell 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.
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.
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#14Bell 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.
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in 2025 and using a Dorothy L. Sayers Peter Wimsey story from 1934 as a supporting source is presenting a hopelessly outdated and fictional picture of the world and is going to come up for starters against the Australia and New Zealand Association of Bellringers, founded in 1962.
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#15Bell 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...
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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)
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#18Bell 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.
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 :(
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: A revolution in English bell ringing
#20I 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…
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