Some bells hang from animals or in towers, some rest on the ground, some are held in the hand. All share the defining characteristic that it is the edge or rim that vibrates most strongly. This is why they can be hung from their vertex, rest on it, or be held by a handle at it, without spoiling the sound.Gongs, on the other hand, while also vessels in the sense that if laid down flat on their face they would hold water, behave very differently, for they vibrate most strongly at the vertex or center, and they can, without degrading the sound, be hung from their rim or rest on it, as they do in the gamelan.
Bells are instruments of high antiquity. We can see small cast bells, presumably of bronze, attached to horses in Mesopotamian reliefs, and we have many small Roman bells in our museums. In China, they were casting bronze bells with such precision in the fifth century BC that they could design each bell to provide two specified pitches, depending on where they were struck. Not that bronze bells were new in China at that period—their history goes back at least a thousand years earlier, and bronze was preceded by other materials such as pottery in the Neolithic period of 3000–2000 BC. The origin of the bell may be far older than that. Harry Shorto suggested that the prototype was the slit drum, for these, as we shall see in interlude F, come in all sizes, from giant, six- to ten-foot-diameter hollowed trees, to those small enough to hold in the hand. He cited the long-accepted principle that the large and clumsy artifact leads to the small and neat one, and we still have many examples of wooden bells, often cattle bells, hollowed out exactly like slit drums but with swinging clappers inside.
There was a huge variety of types and shapes of bell in ancient China, some used, as everywhere else, for animals and so forth and for signaling, but many for use in musical chimes. Most of the animal bells were clapper bells, an object hanging inside the bell to strike its side when it was swung, whereas all the musical ones were struck with mallets by the players. Many of these last were narrow and pointedly oval in section. A bell that is round in section has a sustained sound, as we hear from our church towers, whereas a bell with an oval cross-section has a short sound and this is preferred for a musical chime because otherwise notes overlap each other and the melody is confused. This is a detail that is still unrecognized by the designers of our carillons.
It is clear also that Chinese bell-founders knew how to tune the overtones of bells before the eighth century BC, more than two thousand years before that art was discovered in Europe. As with all idiophonic instruments, the overtones of bells are naturally inharmonic, which is why the sound sometimes seems to jangle. The overtones can be brought into harmonic relationships to avoid such jangles by adjusting the thickness of the metal at strategic points. This can be done in the casting or, more accurately, by filing or scraping the metal after it has been cast. Evidence for both methods can be seen in ancient Chinese bells, but the process was not discovered in Europe until the seventeenth century, when Jacob van Eyck, the carillonneur of Utrecht, worked with the Hémony brothers, who were bell-founders, first in Lorraine and then in Zutphen and Ghent.
The carillon is our most important version of the musical chime of bells, with anything up to fifty or more bells. We have medieval illustrations from the twelfth century onward of people striking a row of bells, anything from three to a dozen or more, normally with ordinary carpenters’ hammers. By the seventeenth century, these had developed into much larger sets, usually hung in a church or town hall tower. They were played either from a mechanical barrel, set with pins to control which bell was struck when the barrel rotated, or by a player with a form of keyboard. The keyboard was similar to that of the harpsichord or organ, but with round rods for the keys, which were struck by the player’s fist, each key controlling a tracker wire leading to one of the bells. The use of carillons has now spread around the world, and both methods of playing them are used—the barrel, or some modern computerized equivalent, to play hymns or other tunes at certain times of day, and the keyboard for recitals by a carillonneur.
This is not the only way that bells are played in towers. In Russia and some other places, one player controls a network of tracker wires with hands and feet, almost like a spider in the center of a web, as highly skilled an art as that of a carillonneur. In others, bells are simply swung or chimed to mark the time or as a summons to church. Swinging moves the bell so that a clapper strikes its sides as the bell swings; chiming, as with carillons, moves the clapper to strike the bell. A peculiarly English custom, now also heard elsewhere, is change-ringing, where each bell is numbered and the ringers permute the order of these numbers in highly complex patterns that are devised as a purely mathematical exercise. Some changes continue for many hours before the bells finally return in their courses to their starting point. It can be a matter of great triumph for a team of ringers to complete a peal that may, for example, on eight bells, involve 40,320 changes.
Kalimba, Mbira, Sansa, or Sanza
