More obscure New Yorkiana

Daniel Wakin has an article in The New York Times about bell ringers in Manhattan:

Twelve people stood in a circle in a tower high above Wall Street. Eyes flitted from side to side, watching, concentrating, as arms rose and fell to a cascading cacophony of bells, bells, bells. One shook her head in disgust over missing a beat. “This is all,” said Dale Winter, the conductor, using the technical phrase to close out a sequence of rings. The clanging inside Trinity Church’s 280-foot bell tower fell silent.
Trinity this week is the focus of the American bell-ringing world. The North American Guild of Change Ringers is holding its annual meeting at the church, which in New York fashion is promoting a mini-festival of classes, ringing performances and private sessions, including a 24-hour marathon beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday (which will take place behind sound-baffling shutters and only if the church can find enough ringers). Public sessions are scheduled for noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday, along with the normal ringing before and after services on Sunday morning.
The meeting is a sign of Trinity’s rapid arrival as a beacon of bell towers: three years ago it installed a set of twelve bells, making it the only church in the nation with that many. Canada and the United States have about 45 functioning bell towers between them. North America’s only other twelve-bell tower is at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto.
“It’s a Michelin three-star,” Dr. James L. Snyder said of the Trinity set. Dr. Snyder, a retired urologist and visiting ringer from Clifton Forge, Virginia, has traveled to bell towers in Britain a dozen times and to others in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.
The quintessentially British art form of change ringing is not the playing of carillons or chimes, in which one person controls all the clappers and can play melodies. In change ringing, each member of a band controls a rope that rings one bell, weighing from several hundred to several thousand pounds. The rope is strung along the groove of an upright wheel. The rope pulls the wheel, it revolves, and the bell— which starts with its bottom pointed upward— turns 360 degrees. Clang.
Simple rope pulling it ain’t. Change ringing is a surprisingly difficult and subtle art that involves a series of coordinated hand movements and a sensitive touch. Ringers time their strokes partly by listening, partly by watching the movement of the ropes around them. A sense of timing is essential because of the one-second gap between the pull of the rope and the sound of the bell.
The “music” consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls. Variations in the order are introduced according to strict rules. About five minutes of ringing is called a touch. A full peal has 5,000 individual sequences. Skillful ringing is like a steady stream of sand; poor ringing clumps up like wet earth.
Ringers must master complicated sequences of rings that are notated with row after row of numbers, like some sort of primitive computer code. One ringer acts as a conductor, giving rudimentary guidance, but change ringing is very much a group effort.
The technique of holding the rope, feeling its tension and moving the hands, is highly evolved, but the simple wheel mechanism allows thousands of pounds of brass to twirl with surprising ease. It is a bit like leading a compliant elephant around on a leash.
Change ringing is an arcane realm, rich in jargon, traditions and deep devotion to an art that dates back to the early seventeenth century. Devotees travel the world to visit church towers with prize sets of bells. They have publications quaintly titled The Clapper and The Ringing World. Ringing sequences have names like Erin Cinques, Little Bob Maximus, and Stedman Caters.
The art is dominated by Anglican and Episcopal churches in the English-speaking world, with Westminster Abbey (ten bells) and St. Paul’s Cathedral (twelve bells) in London having the most renowned bells and ringing traditions. Tim Barnes, who established Trinity’s band and recently resigned as its ringing master, was a band member at St. Paul’s. In fact, many of the participants of the Trinity ringing were British expatriates. Change ringing also tends to attract the mathematically inclined, lawyers, lovers of patterns and codes and, perhaps unsurprisingly, former rowers.
“The most common characteristic is a little bit of eccentricity,” said Gregory Russell, Trinity’s new ringing master and steeple keeper and a systems engineer at IBM. The skill requires physical endurance, the ability to concentrate, and a strong sense of rhythm.
Helping out the students this week was Danielle Morse, a 29-year-old meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who began ringing in the ninth grade. She rings at the Old North Church in Boston, where Paul Revere once rang. She explained the dress code: no skirts or necklaces, which can get caught up in the rope with potentially unpleasant results. Comfortable shoes are a must for peals that can last more than three hours.
Susan Anderson, a registered nurse in her 50s, traveled from Honolulu for the course. She was lured into change ringing three years ago by a couple she met who invited her to visit the tower at the Cathedral Church of St. Andrew there. It has captivated her. “You’re learning an ancient musical art,” she said. “I like things that are connected to history.” The resounding of bells heard by the people around a tower also has a moral satisfaction, she said: “I feel like I’m touching a lot of lives.”
Another tyro of tintinnabulation, Marie Knup— the one who made the face about missing the beat— said that much of the appeal came from meeting people during ringing sessions. Like other ringers, Ms. Knup, 68, a semiretired librarian from Philadelphia, said she had been partly inspired by reading the classic mystery novel Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers, in which the change-ringing bells of a village church are central to the plot.
The history of change ringing at Trinity is murky. Records show that bells existed there at least as far back as the late eighteenth century, but in recent decades they were used as chimes. The original set, connected to the organist’s console, now sits in a chamber above the new change-ringing bells.
In the ringing room, woolen mats on the floor protect the ropes from being worn by the synthetic carpet. Air-conditioning keeps the room cold and dry: moisture causes the ropes to stiffen. Rope-pulling can also be sweaty work.
About 25 volunteers make up the Trinity Ringers, the house band. The brass bells range from 515 pounds to 2,677 pounds and trace a D major scale and four additional notes above. They are named after favorite ringers of the British benefactor, Martin Faulkes, who paid for them.
Trapdoors between the bells and the ringing room and electric shutters over the bell tower windows keep the sound inside for practice sessions, protecting nearby residents. Trinity ringers say the high quality of these bells brings expert bands from abroad, which has helped raise their own skill level.
The band practices weekly and provides rings for weddings and special events, like President Obama’s inauguration, September 11th commemorations, holidays, and the New York Giants’ Super Bowl victory parade.