Alternating bells
Change ringing (also variation ringing , English change ringing ) is a mainly Anglo-Saxon common cultural area art form of bell ringing . Three to twelve, sometimes more, but rarely more than sixteen bells are rung in turn, with each repetition, each change , the order of the bells being varied so that no row appears twice - except for the last change, in which the bells as at the beginning be rung in descending pitch.
Originally developed for church bells , changing ringing is now also practiced with hand bells . This practice gained a certain popularity during the Second World War , when church bells were not rung in England and the bell rangers had to resort to other training options.
technology
Church bells
The technical prerequisite for the alternating ringing of church bells is a bell cage that allows a controlled rotation of each individual bell from the rest position by 360 degrees back into the rest position. For this purpose, a wooden wheel is attached to the axis of each bell, in which the bell rope is guided. The bell is rung from a bell room below the bell cage, where the ropes end. Shortly before its end, each rope has a colored wool pad (sally) woven into it, which serves as a marker and improves grip comfort .
At the beginning of the ringing the bell is "swung up" (rung up) , i. H. by repeatedly pulling and letting it swing back, the bell is moved to ever wider deflections until it swings beyond top dead center and is there in an unstable equilibrium with the opening upwards . An escapement attached to the axis is now supported on a sliding block on the yoke and holds the bell in this position. When all the bells have ringed, the ringing can begin.
To ring his bell, the bell ringer directs it back over the dead center with a short pull on the rope, whereupon it performs a full turn under its own weight and remains upside down on the other side with the escapement on the sliding stick. The clapper strikes the bell body and sounds the bell exactly once. This action is called "Handzug" (handstroke) . So that the bell can turn slightly over the dead center from both sides, the sliding block is mounted so that it can be moved between two stops. After the hand pull, the bell rope is wrapped much further around the wheel than before, the sally is now above the bell's head. With the next pull, the process is reversed, the bell rings again and returns to its starting position: the so-called "retreat" (backstroke) .
An interval of double length is inserted between the last bell in the retreat and the following first bell in the manual pull. Otherwise, the bells will ring immediately one after the other. The frequency of the ringing is therefore relatively high. A bell that is not too heavy can be struck about 30 times a minute. Correspondingly, ringing six bells once takes about two seconds, which corresponds to an interval of a third of a second between the strikes. The smoothest possible sequence of the individual strokes is a measure of the good interaction of a bell team and is referred to as good striking .
Handbells
There are two different techniques for ringing alternating handbells. The first one basically imitates the ringing of church bells: striking the bell upwards corresponds to pulling by hand, striking downwards to retreating. If there is no special training for the church bells, one person can also operate several bells.
Alternatively, the bells are laid out on a table in descending pitch from right to left. In this episode, each bell ringer strikes the pair of bells in front of him once on each pass. The changes result from swapping the corresponding bells when placing them back; this way the bells can always be rung in the same order from right to left.
Basics
Traditionally, the bells are numbered in descending order. The soprano bell (English treble ) is designated with 1, the second highest with 2 and so on. The highest number corresponds to the deep bass bell, which is called tenor in the chime .
The simple by ringing of bells in descending order is round ( round ). Usually one or more rounds form the beginning and end of the actual bell ringing. Each of the changes following the introductory round is a real permutation of bells, that is, each bell is rung exactly once with each change; In addition, the order of the bells must not be repeated until the end with no change.
These rules are implemented in two different ways: In the so-called call change ringing , a pair of bells is named at each change at the call of the leading bell ringer, which swaps places. When method ringing the changes follow a foregone conclusion given scheme, a method ( method ).
The crowning glory of the alternating ringing is when all possible permutations of the bells are rung in a so-called extent in a row. When bells ring, there are ( n factorial ) possible permutations, a number that increases rapidly with the number of bells involved. With six bells there are 720 possible permutations, with seven there are 5,040 and with twelve already 479,001,600.
Cycle ( peal ) originally meant an extent of seven bells, so it comprised 5,040 changes. With more than seven bells an extent can hardly be carried out - it took over 30 years to ring the 479,001,600 changes of a twelve- bell chime - so that in this case ringing with at least 5,000 changes represents a cycle. If there are fewer than seven bells, a sequence of at least 5,040 changes is required for the same title. Below this limit one speaks of a sentence ( touch ).
Methods
nomenclature
The naming of the methods, such as B. Plain Bob Minor , Kent Treble Bob Major follows the scheme [name] [class] [ring type]. The type of ringing ( minor , major , ...) denotes the number of bells that are involved in the method. It is not to be equated with the size of the bells, often a "smaller" method is rung with the upper bells, in which one lets the lower bells ring at their fixed position. The class ( Bob , ...) indicates the peculiarity of the construction ( Bob = shear step), according to which the method can be classified. After all, as individual names one likes to find places (Kent, London, ...) or simply the inventor of the method (Stedman, Annable's London, ...).
| Involved bells | Possible changes | Ring type |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Singles | |
| 4th | Minimus | |
| 5 | Doubles | |
| 6th | Minor | |
| 7th | Triples | |
| 8th | major | |
| 9 | Caters | |
| 10 | Royal | |
| 11 | Cinques | |
| 12 | Maximus |
If there are more than twelve bells involved, the odd ringing types are named according to the number of possible transpositions ( sextuples , septuples etc.), the even ringing types according to the number of bells involved (as in Bristol Surprise Sixteen ). With less than four bells which is simple Hunt ( plain hunt ) is the only rule-compliant method.
notation
Usually a method is noted in a matrix in which each line corresponds to a change. In order to be able to more easily understand the "path" of a bell in this scheme, it is often marked in color. One speaks therefore of the blue line of a bell.
The following example shows part of the blue line of the fifth bell in a simple hunt with six bells. The path of the soprano bell is marked in red here.
1 234 5 6
2 1 436 5
24 1 63 5
426 1 5 3
462 5 1 3
64 5 23 1
6 5 432 1
5 634 1 2
5 36 1 42
3 5 1 624
3 1 5 264
1 32 5 46
1 234 5 6
The simple hunt is one of the simplest methods: each bell moves in a given direction with each change of a place, stops once in the outer position and then moves on in the opposite direction; a process which, in its notation, leads to a kind of cable pattern. The pattern or the blue lines have to be mastered by heart by the bell ringer, as physical aids - such as cheat sheets - are generally not allowed when ringing the bell.
Mathematical Aspects
The alternating ringing is not only a clear application example for the mathematical discipline of group theory , the mathematical analysis also offers an elegant way to understand the structure and thus to prove the correctness of a method. If one relied on pure counting and comparing, it would be no small challenge to prove that none of the 5,000 or more changes in a cycle occurs twice.
The starting point of the consideration is the observation that the changes can be identified with the elements of a permutation group . Methods are - as the name suggests - not an arbitrary sequence of changes, but are structured according to a specific pattern. If this pattern of a method can be identified with a corresponding pattern of a permutation group, then precise knowledge of the structure of the group allows an equally precise description of the structure of the method.
Basic concepts
Two consecutive permutations of n bells obviously form such a permutation again. A set in which a combination of two of its elements results in one element of the set is - to put it somewhat simply - called in the mathematics group . The set of permutations of n objects forms the symmetric group of n elements, in short . Leaving the order of the objects unchanged also represents a permutation; this identical mapping is the so-called neutral element e of the group.
A group is subdivided by its subgroups : subsets which, taken separately, form a group. The number of elements in a subgroup is always a factor of the total number of group elements. The quotient is called the index of the subgroup. The index indicates the number of secondary classes into which the group is broken down by the subgroup. For example, if you find a subgroup with six elements in a group that consists of 24 elements, you can think of the whole group as being made up of four “copies” of the subgroup.
Example: Plain Bob Minimus
| Plain Bob Minimus | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 234 | 1 342 | 1 423 |
| 2 1 43 | 3 1 24 | 4 1 32 |
| 24 1 3 | 32 1 4 | 43 1 2 |
| 423 1 | 234 1 | 342 1 |
| 432 1 | 243 1 | 324 1 |
| 34 1 2 | 42 1 3 | 23 1 4 |
| 3 1 42 | 4 1 23 | 2 1 34 |
| 1 324 | 1 432 | 1 243 |
| 1 234 | ||
Plain Bob Minimus comprises 24 changes as the extent of four bells. These correspond to the elements of the group . If one denotes the permutation that swaps the outer pairs of the series and the transposition of the middle pair with b , the first eight changes of Plain Bob Minimus result from the alternating application of a and b ( following the neutral element e ) , so
- .
Applying b again would bring you back to the original round prematurely. It is therefore continued by a third permutation c , which swaps the last two bells. The next change then corresponds to (ab) ³ac and if you add w = (ab) ³ac to the abbreviation , you get the second third of Plain Bob Minimus from the permutations
and the last third - after another application of c - off
- .
The background is that the two permutations a and b create a subgroup of , the dihedral group , which consists of the first-mentioned eight elements. The three parts of Plain Bob Minimus can be identified with the three minor classes , and the subgroup .
The two main requirements for changing bells, that no change occurs twice and that no bell may move more than one position forwards or backwards during a change, are checked relatively easily in this way: The uniqueness of the change results from the fact that the Secondary classes of a subgroup form a partition of the entire group, the movement of the bells is given by the three generating permutations a , b and c , all three of which meet the stated condition.
history
Beginnings
Written evidence of the organized ringing of church bells on secular occasions can be found in England from the 15th century. From this time onwards, the constant improvement of bell chairs and associated technical equipment can also be proven. The idea of using a wheel to guide the rope and to transmit power was decisive for the development of the alternating bell. Half a wheel was used for this purpose in the 15th century, but it was not until the second half of the 16th century that the three-quarter wheel was used that allowed a controlled rotation of the bell by 180 degrees.
The centers of development were - if only because of the infrastructure - the cities, above all London , which in 1552 had over 80 churches with peals of three to six bells. The German scholar Paul Hentzner , who was in London in 1598, noted in his travel diary:
"Delectantur quoque valde sonitibus, qui ipsis aures implent, uti explosionibus tormentorum, tympanis et campanarum boatu, ita ut Londini multi qui se inebriaverint turrem unam vel alteram exercitii causa ascendant et per horas aliquot campandis signum dent."
Translated, for example: “They really like loud tones like the crack of guns or the sound of kettledrums and bells. Many Londoners climb up one or the other church tower - after they have had a drink - to ring the bells there for a few hours for the purpose of exercise. ”Hentzner's connection of alternating bells with extensive alcohol consumption may, however, be doubted in this form, probably was he was being kidnapped by his sources.
Early forms of alternating ringing consisted only of the constant repetition of a certain sequence of bells, known are rounds (123456), queens (135246) or tittums (142536), which could be varied by call changes depending on taste .
Methods emerged in the early 17th century. Today's techniques also essentially go back to this time. The first basic textbook "Tintinnalogia, or, the Art of Ringing." By Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman dates back to 1668. Duckworth's review
“But for the Art of Ringing, it is admirable to conceive in how short a time it hath increased, that the very depth of its intricacy is found out; for within these Fifty or Sixty years last past, Changes were not known, or thought possible to be Rang. "
conforms to the dating, which results from other sources.
Organization in guilds
Around 1600 the first independent associations of supporters of young art in the form of guilds emerged in the big cities . The oldest demonstrable was the Company exercising the Arte of Ringing knowne and called by the name of the Schollers of Cheapeside in London , founded in 1603 , other early foundings were the Society of Ringers of St Hugh at Lincoln Cathedral (1612) or the Society of St Stephen's Ringers in Bristol (around 1620).
The city guilds were the driving force behind the enormous boom that the bell ringing experienced from the second half of the 17th century. The constant development and testing of new methods for ever larger chimes was largely driven by competition from respected societies. The authors of the classic textbooks of the following period all came from their ranks. The aforementioned classic Tintinnalogia had already been dedicated by Duckworth to the “Noble Society of Colledge Youths” . This London Society from 1637, which still exists today as the Ancient Society of College Youths, is said to have started the first full cycle on January 7, 1690 in the church of St Sepulcher-without-Newgate in London, according to a copy of a manuscript from 1738, namely with seven Plain Bob Triples bells . However, due to the fact that the sources are not entirely correct and the early date, the correct implementation of the method is questioned. However, the full cycle is recognized, which was rung on May 2, 1715 in the Church of St Peter Mancroft in Norwich and can thus claim the first-child right - at least for the area outside London.
The guilds were not tied to a fixed church, it was practically common to hold guest performances in the near and far area. The large societies were regularly invited to the inauguration of a new or enlarged bell in the surrounding area, where they were able to contribute to the growing popularity of alternating chimes and the spread of the latest methods by demonstrating their skills. The predominant position of the urban - more precisely: the London - guilds remained until the end of the 19th century.
Changing bells as a secular sport
The implementation of the Reformation in England led to a simplification of the liturgy in the middle of the 16th century , according to which bells were only used to a very limited extent at church services. In addition, the loss of power of the church as an institution meant that control over both ecclesiastical and secular resources - and bells had always been used for secular purposes - usually passed completely into the hands of the respective congregations. The following period brought the increased expansion of existing bells, a significant increase in organized ringing on secular festivals and, for the first time, (strict) regulations regarding so-called pleasure ringing .
Puritanism , which also emerged at this time , was clearly opposed to any kind of pleasure. After a similar initiative failed in 1595 due to the objection of Elizabeth I , the English parliament passed a law in 1643 that forbade various leisure activities on Sundays, including "ringing bells for pleasure" . Even if Puritanism lost its importance again with the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, this temporary ban on alternating bells on the day on which the service takes place probably made a further contribution to its development towards secular sport.
A large number of sporting competitions are documented for the 18th century. Usually an innkeeper, the local landed gentry or a community put out a public competition and donated a rather modest material prize. The competing teams had one or more standardized methods - three sets of 120 for a five-bell bell or two sets of 360 for a bell for six were the rule - to complete as flawlessly as possible, the performance was assessed by a jury. Not infrequently there were duels between rival clubs, often with considerable betting stakes. The challenge here was either to ring a longer peal than the competition or to ring a given peal in a shorter time.
Recent development
In the mid-19th century, under the influence of the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Church saw a new turn to the liturgical tradition. One consequence was the so-called Belfry Reform ( “bell chair reform ” ), which was supposed to restore recognition to the bell ringing and to reintegrate it into church life. In particular, the introduction of associations at the county and diocesan level provided fixed structures. In 1891, the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers was founded as an umbrella organization . Today 67 guilds and associations, mainly from Great Britain and Ireland, but also from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Italy are affiliated to it. The news organ is the weekly newspaper Ringing World , which has been published since 1911 .
The bells of over 5,000 church towers are now available to the English bell ringer. Shorter sentences of a few minutes up to quarter-peals , i.e. quarter cycles that last about three quarters of an hour, can now be heard regularly in England before or after church services or at weddings and similar occasions. The ringing of a full cycle is still a specialty; after all, one assumes around 4,000 cycles that are rung per year. The record for the longest known cycle is held by members of the Ancient Society of College Youths . From May 5th to May 6th, 2007 they rang 72,000 changes in almost exactly 24 hours using six handbells using 100 different Treble Dodging Minor methods. A full extent of eight bells, i.e. 40,320 cycles, has only been rung once on church bells, on July 27, 1963 in Loughborough .
Today, associations or supraregional committees organize regional and national competitions in various disciplines. The most prestigious event is the National Twelve Bell Striking Contest , which takes place annually at different locations.
Alternating rings in literature
The earliest literary mention of the bell ringing is found around 1600 in reports of cavalier tours of German nobles through Europe, the forerunners of today's travel guides. In addition to the quoted Paul Hentzner, who traveled to England in 1598 as the tutor of a Silesian patrician's son, Friedrich Gerschow should also be mentioned as an author , later professor at the University of Greifswald and in 1602 as the companion of Duke Philipp Julius von Pommern-Wolgast in London. Gerschow reports in his diary of a big ringing at almost every church in London and also mentions the sporty character of this event.
In 1799, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg referred to a legend in his declaration of the Hogarthic copperplate engravings that had to do with Richard Whittington . Whittington was Lord Mayor of London in the early 15th century, and legend has it that he was a poor kitchen boy in the household of a wealthy merchant when he was a child. When the boy ran away in a desperate situation, the ringing of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow brought him back on the right path, which was rewarded with wealth, luck and prestige later on. Lichtenberg takes this story as an occasion for a brief excursus on changing bells. His description of the situation in London at the end of the 18th century is remarkable:
"Since you can ring the bells of a parish in England as often as you want, if you pay for it, you can hear them, especially in the eastern parts of the city and in the provincial towns, very often for all sorts of reasons."
Even if Lichtenberg in his further remarks does not seem to like the alternating ringing even in comparison to the German way of ringing bells, he concludes almost in a conciliatory manner:
“The readers will forgive this little debauchery, and kindly also tolerate it as a mere peal, which, however many, like I think the English, may think of it as a jingling, but always here or there may find his Whittington, who picks it up properly. "
Probably the most popular literary work, in which the alternating ringing also plays a central role, is Dorothy L. Sayers ' detective novel The Nine Tailors , published in 1934 , most recently translated into German by Otto Bayer as Der Glockenschlag . The very structure of the book is a metaphorical transfer of the structure of a peal to the progress of the plot. While Sayers has her detective Lord Peter Wimsey solve a mysterious death in an English village and lets the characters step into the foreground and background like the bells in the course of a peal , she gives the reader through descriptions such as the one that rang on New Year's Eve " fifteen thousand and eight hundred and forty bills of exchange Kent Treble Bob Major “ also an introduction to the art of banging bells.
In Connie Willis ' award-winning science fiction novel Doomsday Book (German: The Years of the Black Death ), the annoying pre-Christmas exercises and appearances by a group of "bell wrestlers" working with handbells form a subordinate storyline, which in ironic contrast to the one at the same time disaster looming in Oxford .
In the episode "Ring Out Your Dead" of the television series Inspector Barnaby , the action revolves around a ringing competition.
In the TV series The Doctor and the Dear Cattle , Tristan Farnon is involved in the local Bell Ringers Association , even if it is more about socializing than about ringing. In the last special episode, Brotherly Love, he made a typical beginner's mistake: he gave his bell so much swing that the escapement broke, the bell rotated several times and Tristan was pulled upwards by the increasingly coiled rope. As a traditional punishment, he then has to pay the drinks for the entire team in the pub.
See also
literature
- Otto Bayer: Small campanology for the uninitiated . In: Sayers: The bells strike . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1978, ISBN 3-499-14547-2 .
- Richard Duckworth, Fabian Stedman: Tintinnalogia, or, the Art of Ringing . London 1668; 2nd edition 1671 by Project Gutenberg .
- Jean Sanderson (Ed.): Change Ringing: The History of an English Art . Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, 1987 ff. (3 volumes), ISBN 0-900271-50-7 .
- Dorothy L. Sayers: The Bells Strike . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1978, ISBN 3-499-14547-2 .
- Ian Stewart : The group theorist of Notre Dame . In: Pentagonia, Andromeda and the combed ball . Elsevier, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-8274-1548-9 .
- Arthur T. White: Fabian Stedman: The First Group Theorist? In: American Mathematical Monthly , 103, 1996, pp. 771-778.
Web links
- Short introduction
- Portal with further links (English)
- Audio samples
- Central Council of Church Bell Ringers (English)
- Ancient Society of College Youths (English)
- National Twelve Bell Striking Contest (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Hentzner: Itinerarium Germaniae, Galliae, Angliae, Italiae . Wagenmann, Nuremberg 1612, § 61. Excerpt (with English translation).
- ^ Duckworth: Tintinnalogia , preliminary remark "Of the Beginning of Changes".
- ^ John C. Eisel: The Development of Change Ringing in the Seventeenth Century . In: Sanderson: Change Ringing . Volume 1, p. 40 ff.
- ^ John C. Eisel: Campanolgia . In: Sanderson: Change Ringing . Volume 1, p. 62 ff.
- ^ Cyril A. Wratten The Growth of Change Ringing . In: Sanderson: Change Ringing . Volume 2, p. 52.
- ^ William T. Cook: The Development of Change Ringing as a Secular Sport . In: Sanderson: Change Ringing . Volume 1, p. 37 f.
- ^ Cyril A. Wratten Trials of Skill . In: Sanderson: Change Ringing . Volume 2, p. 28 ff.
- ↑ Peter Thomas: Sally, the bell ringer and higher mathematics . In: FAZ from December 31, 2001 (also available here )
- ↑ Announcement of the Ringing World .
- ^ Message from the central council of church bell ringers ( Memento from April 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Diary of the cavalier tour of Duke Philipp Julius von Pommern-Wolgast in 1602 and 1603 through Germany, France, England, Italy and Switzerland. (Edition in planning). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ William T. Cook: The Organization of the Exercise in the Seventeenth Century . In: Sanderson: Change Ringing . Volume 1, p. 68
- ^ TH: The History of Sir Richard Whittington. London 1885. (In electronic form, Project Gutenberg , also Richard Whittington in the English language Wikipedia.)
- ^ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Writings and Letters , Volume 3. Edited by Wolfgang Promies. Hanser, Munich 1972. (Licensed edition Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-86150-042-6 .) P. 1004.
- ^ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Writings and Letters , Volume 3. Edited by Wolfgang Promies. Hanser, Munich 1972. (Licensed edition Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-86150-042-6 .) P. 1006.
- ↑ Christmas Special 1990 "Brotherly Love" , from 33:00
