Church Bells - What A Beautiful Sound

I remember listening to the church bells when I was growing up. I was a pretty lonely kid without a lot of friends. I remember sitting in my room for hours at a time, reading, staring out the window, or doing puzzles while other kids played outside. The church bells were my only connection to the outdoors during those long summer afternoons, and the ringing would come to me from all over the city.

I lived in a multidenominational town, so there was at least one church tower with bells every half a mile. All of these carillon church bells together created a powerful feeling on Sundays. Sometimes, you would hear every church bell in the city chiming at once, creating a crazy cacophony that was awe inspiring, but dissonant. Other times, when the wind would be blowing in one direction at a moderate pace, you would only hear the tune from one or two churches. The church tower with bells to the east was particularly loud, and when the atmospheric conditions were just right it was the only thing you could hear at the noontime hour.

I have been a musician for most of my life, but I never really thought about the sound of churchbells until I actually got to take a look at one of the carillon systems close up.  It was actually a very modern one, completely computer-controlled and attached to a keyboard that would automatically ring the church bells in the preprogrammed sequence. To tell you the truth, no one even needed to attend to it. It even had its own backup power supply so, if the electricity went off, the church bells could still ring out.

Listening to this up close was awe-inspiring. I knew that a church bell was loud, but I had never heard how loud it could be from inside the bell tower. The sound is absolutely deafening and profound. It rang for much longer than I had thought it would. Although the sound died out enough to not be audible outside after about 20 seconds, the church bell tower would be alive with the after tone of the bells for several minutes afterwards. It was this slow, meditative die-off that inspired me to put my own hand bells in my music. Although they can not capture the full power of church bells, they can be used to give a taste of the profound, lingering feel they have.