Some change ringing compositions lend themselves especially well to change ringing on handbells. These articles either give specific handbell compositions which we or other contributors have used, or discuss the merits of handbell-specific compositions.
We like the idea of trying to ring Norman Smith's 23-spliced Surprise Major. First rung in 1966, the composition has become a popular challenge. Andrew Craddock's PealBase web site includes statistics on peals of 23-spliced. At the time of writing (26th September 2014) it has been rung 639 times, but only 30 times...
In my previous article, I mentioned this composition of 14-spliced surprise royal by Richard Weeks, which came up in CompLib as a composition that contains Vincula.
The Richard Weeks composition is a cyclic 9-part with no calls, therefore using a link method to achieve the change of coursing...
A long time ago, in 1991, I came up with the method Vincula Surprise Royal (diagram on the right, from CompLib.org). It's Cambridge Major extended to royal by adding two more hunt bells, the 2nd and the 3rd, one coursing ahead of the treble and one coursing after the treble...
Yesterday was the Scottish Handbell Day, which went very well. We rang 8 quarters, which is more than we have managed for quite some time, and there were several good firsts. There were a couple of sessions that I had designated as practice or quarter, because someone was trying a...
Earlier in the year I wrote about a touch called 4, 5, 6, 7, which is a kind of spliced based on stitching together blocks of plain hunting and dodging. I subsequently found out that the idea first came from Christian Peckham as a way of constructing cyclic touches of...
Cyclic spliced is occupying me at the moment. I've just published a video on YouTube to mark the 25th anniversary of the first performance of David Pipe's Cyclic Six Maximus. A couple of weeks ago I had an article in The Ringing World (issue 5923) about cyclic spliced...
At the Glasgow practice last week we had a visit from Chris Field, who rings in Nottingham and is a friend of Peter's from university. He is also a handbell ringer, but he wasn't in Glasgow long enough for us to arrange any handbell ringing. He told me about a...
We recently attempted (unsuccessfully, alas) a peal of Stedman Caters, because Matt, Jess and Julia were all in Glasgow for a tower bell peal. The composition we have usually rung is this 5067 by Matt, but this time he called something different.
5184 Stedman Caters Matthew J L Durham...
Yesterday we went to Penrith and rang a satisfying peal of Kent Maximus. I think I can now give my final word on handbell-friendly compositions, to supplement my article about two-part compositions.
The composition I called was this one by Don Morrison:
5040 Kent Treble Bob Maximus Donald...
We're spending Christmas and New Year in the Washington DC area, visiting Tina's family. Thanks to Tina's presidential blog, our presence was detected by Bryn and Leland Reimer and Myles Dakan, who are all coincidentally spending New Year nearby. They are based in Northampton, Massachusetts, so this was another...