It all started several years ago, when Jonathan Frye and Angela Deakin asked if we were interested in forming a handbell band, including teaching Angela to ring handbells. We had been trying and failing to do just this for many years (for reasons far too boring to go into), so we said ‘YES’.
(Really, it all started when Mike Clay began some regular handbell practices with some of the students in Edinburgh and various other handbell ringers in the area, including Jonathan. One day our schedules will mesh enough to all ring together – but in handbell ringing, patience is everything.)
Our journey from those first beginnings to where we are now has been both fun and interesting. Also, we learned a lot about teaching handbells to people at various levels of ability. Through it all we have discussed theories of how people learn, best methods of learning (we don’t always agree), and how to transfer some of this expertise into the bell tower.
The blogs below are about that journey, our progress and the progress of other bands by guest authors. They describe the ups and downs as they happen, as honestly as we can.
This is the second post in a short series on conducting techniques that I find useful for handbell ringing.
What I mean by "local conducting" is seeing which piece of work a bell is doing, and using that information to remind its ringer of the next work, if he or she...
This article is the first in a short series about the techniques that I try to use when conducting on handbells. Here I am distinguishing between calling, meaning putting in the bobs and changes of method, and conducting, meaning also checking the correctness of the ringing and trying to correct mistakes when...
If I had delayed my previous post by one week, I would have been able to end the post on a higher note (see Getting to grips with Horton's 4).
After not quite getting a quarter of Horton's 4 in the days immediately following our successful tower bell peal...
We have been working on 12-bell ringing on and off for a while. Our first quarter of Maximus was back in 2010, with a particularly handbell-friendly composition splicing Kent and Kent Little Bob. In 2012 we rang a quarter of Kent on one of the Scottish Handbell Days. After that...
We have been working on our current project, a peal of 8-spliced, for a while. We rang our first quarter in November 2012, and since then we've rung several more quarters, and lost a peal a few times. We find it difficult to get together for peal attempts, so we...
Last week started well on Sunday with a quarter of Primrose in the tower, and continued well on Monday with a date touch of 8-spliced. The date touch was a textbook operation: we sat down, started ringing, continued until the end, and stopped. Some of the leads of London...
We haven't reported on any of our ringing since the handbell day, so here's a quick summary of what we have been up to.
On Saturday we had another successful Scottish Handbell Day, which Tina will write about soon. On Sunday we had a session of trying to make progress with our 8-spliced project. As we have been out of practice over the summer, rather than going for a peal we decided to ring...
I have managed to squeeze another handbell ringing session into our already packed schedule. One of our ringers in Glasgow, Iain, has returned to ringing in his retirement after learning to handle at Inveraray a long time ago and then spending many years working abroad. He is keen on trying...