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Post by jk on May 13, 2021 6:54:39 GMT -5
I had one of these going at Smiley in a section where I don't post anymore. That topic was solely devoted to church bells. This one should be broader, I feel, and include bells in music of all kinds, from The Willows to Wuorinen. All the same, it kicks off with the sound of the bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on 14 April 2019, mere hours before the onset of the dreadful conflagration that devastated much of the building: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris
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Post by jk on May 14, 2021 12:07:57 GMT -5
Speaking of The Willows, here they are with the original and less commercially successful version of "Church Bells May Ring", featuring the 16-year-old Neil Sedaka on overdubbed chimes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Willows_(group)
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Post by jk on May 16, 2021 8:59:24 GMT -5
Here's a strangely compelling record by Sammy Davis Jr., which made him soar in my opinion at the time (although the swinging likes of "Back In Your Own Back Yard" has always been a guilty pleasure of mine). "The Shelter Of Your Arms" took him into the US top twenty in 1964. What a fabulous arrangement, including the deft use of chimes:
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Post by jk on May 21, 2021 3:37:15 GMT -5
Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), of Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera fame, may have been the first composer to actually score for tubular bells in the symphony orchestra, rather than just indicate when they are to sound. At least that's how I understand it [ here). This image comes from a century-old book about orchestration (by Cecil Forsyth) that is not without its eccentricities. I used to own it years ago and lo and behold * here* is the entire first edition online!
The passage reproduced above is actually the very start of this ninety-minute work (the bells can be heard again later during the first seven minutes): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Legend_(cantata)
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Post by jk on May 24, 2021 15:43:33 GMT -5
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Post by jk on Jun 3, 2021 16:52:24 GMT -5
If the title track of Kate Bush's fantastic 1989 album The Sensual World begins with a joyful peal of bells...
...John Lennon's iconic "Mother" has an altogether more lugubrious start:
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Post by jk on Jun 7, 2021 15:57:16 GMT -5
This 1925 recording by Bruno Walter and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is of the "Transformation Music" from Act One of Parsifal, Richard Wagner's last completed opera. The solemn tolling of four bells (often rendered electronically these days -- not a nice sound) is first heard here at 3:00: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsifal
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Post by lonelysummer on Jun 17, 2021 19:45:35 GMT -5
No one's posted Phil Ochs' "The Bells"? The song that introduced me to the word tintinnabulation.
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Post by jk on Jun 24, 2021 16:19:28 GMT -5
No one's posted Phil Ochs' "The Bells"? The song that introduced me to the word tintinnabulation. Well let's do it right now (the word in question is at 2:51). Thanks, LS -- Ochs is a fascinating if tragic figure: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Ochs
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Post by jk on Jun 26, 2021 10:48:20 GMT -5
Phil Ochs is not the only musician to have set Edgar Allan Poe's poem. Sergei Rachmaninov describes his 1913 work The Bells as a "choral symphony" for soloists, choir and large orchestra. The poet Konstantin Balmont made a free translation into Russian of the poem for the occasion. This passage from the work's wiki page is curious enough to require reproducing in full (with a lone tweak by jk): "In the foreword to 'Verses and Versions' by Vladimir Nabokov, the author seems to suggest that Rachmaninoff had, many years after composing the work, asked him to translate the Russian text into English, which [implies] that Rachmaninoff was unaware the poem was originally written in English by Edgar Allan Poe. Nabokov seems to have been unaware that Rachmaninoff did, in fact, have an English translation of Balmont's Russian translation performed, by Fanny S. Copeland, in preparation for the 1920 publication by A. Gutheil. The necessity of performing an English translation of Balmont's text (as opposed to reverting to Poe's original) can be easily explained: given that Rachmaninoff's setting of Balmont is just as free as Balmont's translation of Poe, Poe's original text is highly incongruous with Rachmaninoff's musical setting. Rachmaninoff was unquestionably aware that the poem was authored by Poe and translated by Balmont, for he made these attributions in a letter to Marietta Shaginyan announcing the completion of the work." This 1961 version of The Bells ( Kolokola), recorded in what was then the Soviet Union, is sung by Yelizaveta Shumskaya (soprano), Mikhail Dovenman (tenor) and Alexei Bolshakov (baritone) with the Russian Republican Capelle and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, all under the direction of Kiril Kondrashin: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bells_(symphony)
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Post by jk on Jun 28, 2021 7:39:22 GMT -5
This work is performed by its composer Lee Hinkle. The YouTube blurb is worth reproducing in full:
"Fear of Music: Bow Bells for solo orchestra chimes and soundscape was composed by Dr. Lee Hinkle in 2014 and received its world premiere performance in May 2014.
"I have always been fascinated by the power of music; and more specifically the power music can have over the brain.
"I had the idea for this piece when I read Dr. Oliver Sach's book Musicophilia. In the book, Dr. Sach's describes case studies of patients who suffer from strange medical afflictions related to music. One set of stories stuck with me when he described an affliction some of his patients had suffered from called 'Fear of Music.'
"One of the patients who suffered from Fear of Music was an elderly gentleman. Every evening at exactly the same time he experienced a serious uncontrollable seizure. It took doctors quite some time to figure out what was causing the seizure, but they soon figured out that he had been listening to the BBC news broadcast every evening at the time of his seizure and the sounds of that broadcast had been causing his seizure.
"The broadcast began with a recording of the famous 'Bow Bells' from the church St Mary le-Bow in London, England. (The term 'Cockney' actually refers specifically to the group of people who live in London within earshot of the Bow Bells.) Upon realizing what was causing his affliction, his doctors took him to the church St Mary le-Bow to see if they could recreate the situation that was causing his seizure, however, the sound of the bells in real life did not cause a seizure: it was only the pre-recorded sound of the Bow Bells that caused his affliction. I was so flabbergasted by this story that I took to writing this piece Fear of Music: Bow Bells for solo orchestra chimes and soundscape.
"Fear of Music: Bow Bells explores the orchestra chimes in an unusual fashion. Aside from the fact that orchestra chimes are seldom considered a solo instrument, I thought it would be interesting to see what I could do with them that would not only showcase the instrument but also find some new sounds that the chimes could produce. This exploration of sounds concludes at the end of the piece as I recreate as best as possible the sound of the Bow Bells on the orchestra chimes. My live playing is then slowly taken over by the prerecorded sound of the Bow Bells to close the piece."
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Post by jk on Jul 8, 2021 16:14:23 GMT -5
Heard this today at the DIY shop and just knew it belonged in this topic. This is "Penny Lane" in the version first heard on the radio before they tweaked the ending (I remember being non-plussed by that change at the time). In this case, it's a handbell overdubbed by Ringo (6 notes at 1:06 and 4 at 2:10): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Lane
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Post by boogieboarder on Jul 9, 2021 2:04:13 GMT -5
What about those overwhelming out-of-time bells at the end of The Beach Boys "I Do?"
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Post by jk on Jul 9, 2021 7:02:45 GMT -5
What about those overwhelming out-of-time bells at the end of The Beach Boys "I Do?" "Frankie, you forgot 'Here Comes The Bride'!" ( Unsurpassed Masters, Vol. 4, if my memory serves me right) Yes indeed, one of my favourite bonus tracks on the twofers. Here's another super BB track with a more subtle use of tubular bells:
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Post by jk on Jul 12, 2021 8:53:31 GMT -5
Hector Berlioz in the fifth movement of his Symphonie fantastique (1830) stipulates two individual church-style bells in C and G, a tradition that has been upheld to this day. Here they enter just before the three-minute mark. Turn up the volume as the movement starts very quietly. Sir Colin Davis, Berlioz specialist numero uno, conducts the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest: And now, a jk anecdote: In almost all the scores I've seen of the work, the single stroke on the suspended cymbal (played with a sponge-wrapped mallet) in the very last bar is added literally as an afterthought, in a single-bar, single-line bracket below the double basses. When we heard the work live in our local concert hall recently, that cymbal was located away from the other instruments. The percussionist entrusted with this duty left his post at the last moment and leapt across to play the all-important note. What a wonderfully graphic way to illustrate Berlioz's afterthought. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonie_fantastique
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Post by boogieboarder on Jul 16, 2021 22:38:11 GMT -5
“Ring-a-Ding-Ding” by Frank Sinatra.
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Post by jk on Jul 17, 2021 7:53:13 GMT -5
Olivier Messiaen completed his orchestral composition Chronochromie in 1960. In this 1965 recording (the one I bought a year later), Antal Dorati conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Now the penultimate movement, "Epode" has 18 solos strings (12 violins, 4 violas and 2 cellos) playing a chorus of birdsong from all over the world for more than four minutes! The effect when the full orchestra -- bristling with percussion including (yes!) tubular bells -- returns for the "Coda" is overwhelming. (There is a comparable if less radical transition in The Mothers of Invention's "The Little House I Used To Live In".) Easy stuff: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChronochromieDifficult stuff: escholarship.org/content/qt5xw0x3gc/qt5xw0x3gc.pdf
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Post by jk on Apr 3, 2024 16:08:13 GMT -5
This follows up a previous post about the bells used in Wagner's Parsifal: " Parsifal was expressly composed for the stage at Bayreuth and many of the most famous recordings of the opera come from live performances on that stage. In the pre-LP era, Karl Muck conducted excerpts from the opera at Bayreuth. These are still considered some of the best performances of the opera on disc. They also contain the only sound evidence of the bells constructed for the work's premiere, which were melted down for scrap during World War II." [ Source] This monstrosity can be heard in action just after 5:55 -- chills-down-the-spinesville: www.mattnolancustomcymbals.com/blog/?p=106
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Post by jk on Apr 4, 2024 8:06:52 GMT -5
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Post by jk on Apr 5, 2024 4:22:29 GMT -5
Today's dive into things tintinnabular brings us back to good old-fashioned orchestral chimes. My brother and I were very young when we first heard "The Viennese Musical Clock" from Zoltán Kodály's Háry János* suite. We sang along to the main tune with words of our own: "The little bow-wows were". Well it made perfect sense to us at the time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1ry_J%C3%A1nos* Hairy Janus, as my brother derisively called it when I bought the LP years later
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Post by jk on Apr 6, 2024 4:09:30 GMT -5
This follows up a previous post about the bells used in Wagner's Parsifal: " Parsifal was expressly composed for the stage at Bayreuth and many of the most famous recordings of the opera come from live performances on that stage. In the pre-LP era, Karl Muck conducted excerpts from the opera at Bayreuth. These are still considered some of the best performances of the opera on disc. They also contain the only sound evidence of the bells constructed for the work's premiere, which were melted down for scrap during World War II." [ Source] Continuing my investigation of Wagner's self-designed bells, I came across a second picture (click link below): www.alamy.com/two-men-play-the-gralsglocken-grail-bells-an-instrument-from-the-time-of-richard-wagner-image385783344.htmlIt helps clear up the mystery of the pitches of the two "barrels" on the left. So for the C–G–A–E motif, the barrels were played from left to right (see photo above). There seems to be some confusion about the role played by the frame strung with piano strings on the left, which unlike the barrels rises in pitch from left to right (E–G–A–C). It has been suggested that the barrels were not played but were to provide additional reverberation and weigh to the sound coming from the plucked stringed instrument. But that doesn't explain the hammers! Surely this set-up as a whole is analogous to the tic-tac bass, where the two sound sources (in this case strings and barrels) are played simultaneously to get the required effect.
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Post by jk on Apr 12, 2024 3:34:36 GMT -5
Let the Philadelphia Handbell Ensemble serenade you with a Beach Boys Medley:
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Post by jk on Apr 13, 2024 7:56:52 GMT -5
Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov has quite a history. According to commenter GeneralLuigiTBC this video features the composer's Original Version of 1869, which was rejected for production by the Imperial Theatres, and not his Revised Version of 1872 (as designated by the uploader), which received its first performance in 1874 in Saint Petersburg (see the wiki below). The bells and related metal percussion can be heard during the opening two minutes and the closing two minutes of the "Coronation Scene". But please listen to it all to soak up the atmosphere. Thrilling stuff. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Godunov_(opera)
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Post by jk on Apr 16, 2024 15:15:39 GMT -5
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Post by jk on Apr 23, 2024 8:40:53 GMT -5
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