Harper’s has a piece about the controversy in England over the new rules for bell ringing.
When I was a young man, I once sat outside with my brother and listened to the bells of a church in the Cotswolds.
If there are five bells in the tower, and you start in order — 1,2,3,4,5 — how many different possibilities are there? How many sequences could the ringers go through without repeating themselves? How long would that take?
As I sat, listening, I slowly became aware of the subtle changes in the sequences. I sensed a pattern. I started to anticipate the next note and was pleased when I heard the expected note. Is that what music is?
Bells are an ingredient of place in England. Villages, parishes in cities and university towns are places in peculiar ways. Bells are a part of those peculiar ways. I left England with a lifelong interest in bells.
In earlier times, the bells celebrated coronations and national victories. They also delivered the news. Here’s a bell ringer, speaking in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield:
The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, “Hullo, a death?” Then the years of the dead person’s age would be tolled and if they went on speaking, “seventy-one, seventy-two …” people would say, “Well, they had a good innings!” But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty, a hush would come over the fields.
• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 87.
Veronique Greenwood, “A Change of Tune: a revolution in English bell ringing”; Harper’s, October 2025. It’s here:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/10/a-change-of-tune-veronique-greenwood-bell-ringing/
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