It takes men to operate the symphony orchestra's latest acquisition, a set of church bells. Real church bells like the ones we hear on Sunday mornings from church towers. In the Concert Hall, they just turn the other way round.
They have the bottom up, so to speak, and are placed on a wooden base. You strike the inside of them - at the top, where the bell is widest - with a wooden mallet, which in itself requires a lot of arm strength to operate. Depending on the tone of the bell, the mallets alone weigh between three and nine kilos each.
There is therefore no question of one man operating a whole battery of bells, as we see with drum or timpani sets. Or the tubular bells that they replace in selected pieces of music, for that matter. The new bells are big, they're heavy, so if there are more than two bells in use, it takes more than one man to play them.
The first time they were used was in Mahler's 9th at the start of the season in September with the orchestra's chief conductor Fabio Luisi conducting. There were three bells on stage and two men to operate them.
Nor should there be many more bells in play at the same time. The podiums simply can't support that, and lifting them into place is a major challenge, even with the use of lifting equipment.It has long been a dream of the orchestra to have a set of real bells. Thanks to a large donation from the Friends of the orchestra and a contribution from the orchestra's own association, it was possible to ask a Dutch company to manufacture a set for the DR Symphony Orchestra. They've done it before, the Dutch. There is a set at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
A church bell can last 4-600 years, but here it's the weather and wind that wear it down. As well as the somewhat more frequent use than the bells in the Concert Hall. So it's guaranteed that no one in generations to come will realise how little even the most avid musicians will be able to wear them out.
In early October, two of the five bells delivered so far were on stage in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (Listen to them on P2, for example at 02:24:08). Specifically, a ”G” and a ”C”. So how do you make the two notes as church bells? You make a mould consisting of sand and wax, a so-called ”false” bell. Into this you pour an alloy consisting of 80 per cent copper and 20 per cent tin. Heated to 1100 degrees centigrade. When the bell has cooled, you can get a first impression of how it sounds, but it needs some fine tuning. In addition to the human ear, electronics can also help in the process of grinding the bell by machine and then manually to get the correct pitch, timbre, core tone and overtone. The bells can be tuned in both major and minor keys. We will return to the process of making the bells in a later article. And to the experience the musicians in the orchestra's percussion group gain with them.
A big difference to almost all other musical instruments is that they can't be stopped.
Mahler is probably the composer who has written the most works that utilise church bells (symphonies 3, 6, 7 and, as mentioned, 9). But also in Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, in Britten's War Requiem and not least in the often played Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, the church bells come into their own and create a completely different atmosphere than with tubular bells.