Handbell Choirs Make Joyful Noise with Wii Controllers

Posted on October 19, 2010
Filed Under Music | 1 Comment

Repost from: http://firstpresmacomb.spurga.com/

Link to full story and photos: http://firstpresmacomb.spurga.com/?p=191

The congregation of The First Presbyterian Church of Macomb is not foreign to handbell choirs.  There are three of them:

• Knox Bell Choir consisting of 12 bell ringers of Junior/Senior High age;
• Westerminster Choir, most of them in the 5th and 6th grades;
• and the Adult Choir, the Carillon Bell Choir.

The music of all three choirs  has added interest to the worship service for a number of years. Now something new has been added.

Nancy Caldwell is director of the handbell choirs at First Presbyterian Church. At the present time she is directing all three of the choirs.  She has been involved with bell choirs for 24 years and has developed a range of handbell exhibitions that not only pleases herself but keeps her bell ringers faithful to their task.

Nancy’s husband, James Caldwell, professor of music at Western Illinois University, has been making music with computers since 1980.  It was this past May that he read an article in Electronic Musician magazine about using the Nintendo Wii remote game controller with computer music. Curious about how this would work, Jim borrowed a Wii remote from his son-in-law and spent a weekend experimenting. His interest was in the ways physical motion could be captured and used to control music generated within a computer and played through speakers.

Watching him as he explored the sounds and the motions, Nancy noticed that some of the same sounds and gestures, like waving the Wii remote around, reminded her of  handbell music.  She proposed that they work together on a piece for the Knox bell choir. For the new piece, each of the 12 students had a few bells, hand chimes, and a Wii remote.  Caldwell needed two laptop computers to generate the sounds.  Then he had to invent new notations for the players giving them instructions about the various performance techniques.

Nancy began rehearsing the new piece with the bell choir in late September 2009, and they played the piece in the worship service on November 15th.  Throughout the rehearsal process the Caldwells had to modify the piece and the computer programming.  As expected, some of the notation wasn’t clear and had to be changed; the Wiis were so sensitive that they picked up the motion of the bells being set down on the padded tables; the Wiis shut off automatically if they weren’t used for a certain period of time or of they were placed too far away from the computers.

A few days after playing the piece at the worship serviceat the Presbyterian Church, the bell choir played it again on ElectroAcoustic Music Macomb, one of a series of concerts of electronic and computer music that Caldwell has been producing at WIU since 2002.

Not to be outdone, the fifth and sixth graders, after watching the Knox Choir perform with the game controllers and computers, they wanted their choir, the Westminster Choir, to play a piece, too.  So the Caldwells wrote another piece and the Westminster Choir played during the April 25th, 2010 worship service.

Caldwell is quick to give credit to the players. “They were serious and enthusiastic and very willing to try something new.”  The music we made is not typical of what is heard in our church, or anyone’s church, but we certainly made a “joyful noise unto the Lord.”

Many folks have heard of handbells but have little or no knowledge of their history. They actually date back to the 17th century. Handbells are known as percussion instruments.  An individual handbell can be used simply as a signal to catch people’s attention – much as teachers in the early years used the handbell to call the students back into the school building following recess or the lunch hour.  But generally handbells are heard in “tuned” sets.The very first handbells were developed by brothers, Robert and William Cor in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England, between 1696 and 1724.  The Cor brothers first made the bells from hame boxes (a hame box is a device that attaches to the top of a horse collar and contains several bells that ring when the horse moves).  But for some unknown reason, they started “tuning their bells more finely to have an accurate fundamental tone with hinged clappers that produced different overtones.

The English handbell on a hinge moved back and forth in a single direction, unlike the school bell clapper that swung freely in any direction.  There are different characteristics between the English handbell and Dutch handbells depending on the manufacturers that give attention to each bell’s overtones.  Each foundry has a unique formula for emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain harmonic overtones to produce that  unique sound.

A handbell choir or handbell ensemble (founded in the US) is the type used at First Presbyterian. In England the groups are known as Handbell Teams). These groups ring recognizable music with melodies and harmony. The bells generally include all the notes of the chromatic scale (having to do with a divided musical scale within the range if the bell set.)The music for handbell choirs is composed or arranged specifically for the instruments because of their highly resonant sound, the limited note range of a handbell set and the unique pitch-by-pitch division of the staff among the ringers.

The three bell choirs at First Presbyterian practice each week, except in the summer months and participate in the music of worship several Sundays per month.

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