For whom the bell tolls
Jul. 19th, 2008 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athenaWell, my August job has disappeared (the double bill of a revived Gianni Schicchi and Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges.) The conductor has sadly been ill and in hospital, so they've had to postpone. A shame-- I was looking forward to being a china cup and a dragonfly...
Last night, however, I did collect a few shiny beer tokens for singing Haydn's Nelson Mass in the Palace of Westminster. I thought of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monochrome_girl amid the Pugin splendour. We entered, though, via Westminster Hall, which is splendour of another sort: stark and solemn (except for the gloriously trippy medieval wooden angels looking down from the eaves). I almost lost the rest of the choir because I stopped to read the plaques in the floor that said things like "In this place Sir Thomas More was condemned to death."
In my search for links on the Houses of Parliament, I was intrigued to read that Big Ben [the low-pitched bell that strikes the hour in the Parliament clock tower, for non-UKites] gets its weirdly out-of-tune sound from the fact that it cracked in 1879. Normally when that happens, the bell goes back to the foundry to be recast, but with Big Ben they just patched it up and drilled a couple of holes to stop the crack from spreading-- which is why its tone, originally a low F, sounds about a quarter-tone down. To my ear, the pitch actually appears to bend slightly downwards as the stroke resonates-- butjustpolina, with her perfect pitch, can probably describe it more accurately.
(I've just had lunch with my soprano friend Rosie, who already knew about the crack in Big Ben. Maybe it's one of those things you have to be British to know.)
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where Big Ben was made, also cast the bells of the National Cathedral in Washington DC. I spent my high school years sneaking around the Cathedral's forbidden zones, and I remember vividly the climb to the top of the bell tower: you went up a staircase past first the carillon, then the ringing chamber, then a thick concrete ceiling, and finally the bells themselves in the top part of the tower. The windows there have the kind of shutters which let sound out but no daylight in, so you had to stop for a while to let your eyes get used to the dark before going on up the rickety spiral staircase among the bells. I always felt a certain fear in that chamber full of massive bells, most of them bigger than I was: what if one of them rang? What if they all suddenly started ringing? Would my eardrums explode?
I'm also kind of unnerved by the thought of being inside a clocktower. Clockwork reminds me of mortality, and it also has this kind of inexorability to it: the way it mercilessly chops each second off of Eternity, methodically shortening your life with every tick. Surrounded by clockwork bigger than I am, I might be OK or I might freak the hell out. Maybe I'll have to go and see Big Ben up close sometime, just to see what happens.
Meanwhile, I'm very happy to hear bells in the ordinary way. Reading up on bells made me think of Great Tom, the largest bell in Oxford, which strikes the hour from Christ Church College. (It has a pub named after it, and songs about it, and everything.) "There should really be a list of all the bells in Britain with names," I thought as I struggled to unglue my eyes from the screen. And lo, there is. I love the internet.
Last night, however, I did collect a few shiny beer tokens for singing Haydn's Nelson Mass in the Palace of Westminster. I thought of
monochrome_girl amid the Pugin splendour. We entered, though, via Westminster Hall, which is splendour of another sort: stark and solemn (except for the gloriously trippy medieval wooden angels looking down from the eaves). I almost lost the rest of the choir because I stopped to read the plaques in the floor that said things like "In this place Sir Thomas More was condemned to death."
In my search for links on the Houses of Parliament, I was intrigued to read that Big Ben [the low-pitched bell that strikes the hour in the Parliament clock tower, for non-UKites] gets its weirdly out-of-tune sound from the fact that it cracked in 1879. Normally when that happens, the bell goes back to the foundry to be recast, but with Big Ben they just patched it up and drilled a couple of holes to stop the crack from spreading-- which is why its tone, originally a low F, sounds about a quarter-tone down. To my ear, the pitch actually appears to bend slightly downwards as the stroke resonates-- but
justpolina, with her perfect pitch, can probably describe it more accurately.(I've just had lunch with my soprano friend Rosie, who already knew about the crack in Big Ben. Maybe it's one of those things you have to be British to know.)
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where Big Ben was made, also cast the bells of the National Cathedral in Washington DC. I spent my high school years sneaking around the Cathedral's forbidden zones, and I remember vividly the climb to the top of the bell tower: you went up a staircase past first the carillon, then the ringing chamber, then a thick concrete ceiling, and finally the bells themselves in the top part of the tower. The windows there have the kind of shutters which let sound out but no daylight in, so you had to stop for a while to let your eyes get used to the dark before going on up the rickety spiral staircase among the bells. I always felt a certain fear in that chamber full of massive bells, most of them bigger than I was: what if one of them rang? What if they all suddenly started ringing? Would my eardrums explode?
I'm also kind of unnerved by the thought of being inside a clocktower. Clockwork reminds me of mortality, and it also has this kind of inexorability to it: the way it mercilessly chops each second off of Eternity, methodically shortening your life with every tick. Surrounded by clockwork bigger than I am, I might be OK or I might freak the hell out. Maybe I'll have to go and see Big Ben up close sometime, just to see what happens.
Meanwhile, I'm very happy to hear bells in the ordinary way. Reading up on bells made me think of Great Tom, the largest bell in Oxford, which strikes the hour from Christ Church College. (It has a pub named after it, and songs about it, and everything.) "There should really be a list of all the bells in Britain with names," I thought as I struggled to unglue my eyes from the screen. And lo, there is. I love the internet.