How Do You Play a Tune on Bells That Weigh Tonnes? A Keyboard You Hit With Your Fists

A set of bells covering at least two chromatic octaves is hung in a tower, fixed rather than swinging, each with a clapper that can be pulled against the inside. Wires run from those clappers down to a keyboard of wooden levers, arranged like a piano keyboard but far larger, with the lower bells also connected to pedals. The player strikes the levers with a loosely closed fist and plays the pedals with the feet. The connection is entirely mechanical, so the player feels the weight of each clapper directly and controls how hard it strikes, which is what allows dynamics and expression on an instrument made of fixed metal.

The instrument imposes problems no other keyboard has:

• •Enormous variation in touch weight between the smallest and largest bells
• •A long decay, so notes overlap whether or not that is wanted
• •No means of stopping a note once struck
• •Sound reaching the player distorted, since the bells are above and around
• •A delay between striking and hearing, given the distances involved
• •Bell tone containing a prominent minor third, which colours every chord

A bell does not produce one pitch but a set of partials that a founder tunes deliberately, and the arrangement is peculiar. The principal partials are tuned to specific intervals against the nominal pitch, including one at an octave below, one at a fifth and, most awkwardly, one at a minor third above. That minor third is present in every bell, which means every chord played contains it whether the music wants it or not, and it is why bell music sounds characteristically dark and why writing for the instrument requires avoiding harmonies that clash with it. Tuning is achieved by machining metal from the inside of the bell after casting, which lowers particular partials selectively and cannot be reversed.

Most of these installations also play without anybody present, driven by a mechanism that predates the keyboard. A large drum studded with movable pegs rotates slowly, driven by the tower clock, and the pegs lift levers connected to the hammers so that a tune is played automatically at set times, typically before each hour strike. Repositioning the pegs changes the tune, which was traditionally done several times a year to mark the seasons and was a substantial job taking days. Electronic controllers have replaced the drum in many towers, which allows any tune and removes the constraint entirely. The mechanical drums that survive are studied as machines and several have been restored to working order.

The instrument is concentrated in the Low Countries, where it developed from the sixteenth century alongside the town halls and belfries that carry it, and roughly three quarters of the world's examples are in Belgium and the Netherlands. Others were built across northern Europe and, in substantial numbers, in North America during the early twentieth century, frequently funded by industrialists and installed in universities and churches. Players train at dedicated schools, of which the oldest was founded in Mechelen in 1922. Performance is necessarily public, since the sound reaches everybody within a considerable radius and nobody can choose not to hear it, which imposes an unusual responsibility on the repertoire chosen.

Fixed tuned bells are struck by clappers pulled through wires from a keyboard of wooden levers played with the fists and feet, with the mechanical connection giving direct control of how hard each strikes. Long decay, no way to stop a note and a prominent minor third in every bell shape the music. The instrument is concentrated in the Low Countries, and performance is unavoidably public.