Westminster Bell Choir

Monday night was the final outing for the bell choir this season. We went to the Westminster Bell Choir concert at a local Lutheran church. This is the largest bell choir in the world – 8 octaves worth plus 6 octaves of chimes, some Welsch hand bells, and lower octaves consisting of both aluminum and traditional bronze bells. The players are all college students at Rider University in New Jersey. Overall, it was a wonderful concert. They demonstrated all kinds of techniques, styles, and showed it’s possible to break a sweat while ringing teeny tiny bells but still keep a smile on your face.

I especially liked that they changed positions between each song so everyone got a chance to play all the different bells and show off their different strengths. There were three guys who manned the back table with the ginormous bells pretty consistently. They really reminded me of the percussion players in an orchestra. They would run back and forth between bells carrying huge mallets. They must have very defined arm muscles as the largest bell weighs almost 20 pounds and they actually do pick them up and ring them. It does take two hands for those ones though.

The selections ranged from slow and peaceful to almost frantic (a la the Hungarian Rhapsody.) They consistently rang two to three bells in each hand, used chimes and bells at the same time, used mallets, table-damping, thumb-damping, shaking, and other techniques I’m not even sure how to describe since I couldn’t figure out how they were getting the bells to make particular sounds.

The conductor was a very approachable woman who entertained the audience between pieces so the choir could rearrange their bells (since not all the bells fit on the tables at one time.) The choir was made up of mostly juniors and seniors with two freshmen thrown in for fun. They were almost all music majors (education, organ performance, and sacred music were the most popular majors) with the exception of one of the guys in the back – he was a Computer Information Systems major. LoL.

The performance was phenomenal and although there are recordings available I would suggest that they videotape a performance since half of the fun is watching them throw bells around and do their outrageous three-bells-to-a-hand ringing. They’re on tour through June in various places including South Dakota and Minnesota. If you ever have the chance to go see them I’d highly recommend it.