A revolution in English bell ringing
14 comments
·September 20, 2025dcminter
Sayers, mentioned here in passing, wrote probably the only detective story explicitly called out (as an introduction to change ringing) in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (a mighty 20 volume encyclopaedia).
So if you like old detective stories and this article tickled your interest, perhaps give "The Nine Tailors" a whirl.
Waterluvian
> composers tend to base their methods in mathematical principles such as group theory
I know many composers were and are very in tune with the mathematics of music. But the “tend to” makes me wonder: were most of them in tune, or is it that pleasant sounding music will inevitably display mathematical patterns?
zeristor
Did someone say Bells on Sunday?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh
Which normally segues into the Shipping Forecast
riazrizvi
Bell ringing is English?? I grew up in England and assumed all churches everywhere did it. I guess I just never noticed its absence in the USA, despite living here for over 20 years.
crustycoder
93% of the rings of 6 bells or more which are rung for English style change ringing are in England. Source: https://dove.cccbr.org.uk/
Change ringing is a branch of Group Theory and is mentioned in Knuth. The Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm for efficiently generating permutations was published in the early 1960s, but has been known about by change ringers since the 1600s. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinhaus%E2%80%93Johnson%E2%8...
ElliotH
There is some change ringing in the USA, just not very much of it. There are towers around.. https://www.nagcr.org/towers-and-bands
There's even a few change ringing towers dotted around parts of Africa, Australia, some of Europe. Just few and far between.
But when compared to England, where practically every town can be relied upon to have at least a 6 bell tower where change ringing can happen, it's no comparison.
dcminter
Not bell ringing - change ringing. Most places they play a tune on them; our ringers work out mathematical permutations instead.
Edit: ...and I should add: Sayers was quite reactionary, preternaturally English, and writing in the 1930s, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it wasn't true that change ringing was uniquely English.
JdeBP
… and writing a detective story rather than a non-fiction book.
The reality is that someone writing in Harper's in 2025 and using a Dorothy L. Sayers Peter Wimsey story from 1934 as a supporting source is presenting a hopelessly outdated and fictional picture of the world and is going to come up for starters against the Australia and New Zealand Association of Bellringers, founded in 1962.
ajb
Apparently change ringing, or something similar, is practiced in Verona. But otherwise it seems unique to the UK, or UK influenced cultures.
Waterluvian
This might be two ways of saying the same thing, but I wonder if it’s less about culture and more about having a lot more big-giant-bell-era churches. Not that you implied your observation is about culture. I’m doing that.
tesseract
Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.
gorgoiler
I was in England when HM QE II died. It was a rare opportunity to hear quite a lot of change ringing, notable not least because many of the bells were fully muffled in mourning of the monarch.
I love seeing a change ringing article on HN, especially with well labelled diagrams!
The move to a framework system where we can all ring what we like and just describe it within an agreed upon nomenclature is a great improvement rather than the legacy Decisions. Having strict rules always seemed quite dated to me - the ringing police after all do not show up if you ring a "banned" performance. But agreeing on names makes communication possible - a good role for a central body.
Jump changes are fun too, but I don't think I agree with the article that allowing them has really led to a revolution. The top performances on BellBoard are of commonly rung non-jump methods. In fact I don't think I've seen a jump method be featured at all. Philip himself doesn't seemed to have published a performance of "Jump" anything since 2013. For many I think it remains an interesting novelty.