Bells

On Christmas day in the morning, bellringers spit on their hands; they catch hold of the ropes that go up into rimed steeples. "Ding dong," goes the first faint and shaken bell; swallows leap out of the belfry. "Ding, dong," peals the carillon, its notes dropping into the air like stones into water.

The poetry of bell effects has always appealed to composers for the piano. In Borodin's Au Couvent, a bell tolls for 18 measures, silvery, gentle, relentless; Debussy composed an intricately sophisticated pattern for bells in his Japanese Temple Gongs; stern bells crash and roll in Tschaikowsky's 1812 Overture; sleigh bells jingle like hard, gay laughter in his Troika (Op. 37, No. 11); bells happily pious tinkle in the Celeste of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt; the profound and icy-hearted Kremlin bell booms in Rachmaninoff's Prelude (Op. 3, No. 2). Many are the other great composers who have written bell-music.

To play these movements adequately is a difficult technical feat. It requires an attack now crisp as frosty air, now heavy and lingering to catch the humming overtone of a big bell's voice. On Christmas day, in grey cathedral closes, in the belfries of State Houses, many bells will sound that are too heavy to be swayed by any bellringers, no matter how much they caper or warm their fingers. Biggest of all was the great bell of Moscow, cast around 1734, now used as the dome of a chapel. Other big bells are those of Burma, weight, 260,000 Ib.; Peking, 130,000 Ib.; House of Parliament, London, 30,000 Ib.; Montreal Cathedral, 28,560 Ib.; Notre Dame, Paris, 28,672 Ib.; St. Peter's, Rome, 18,600 Ib.; St. Paul's, London, 11,470 lb.