Tonight we had a full five octaves of handbells at our rehearsal for the first time ever! It was AWESOME! Not only did we have 13 regular ringers there (with no subs!), but we played some Christmas music that was written for 5-6 octaves. Not 4 octaves, but 5 minimum. The way that tends to work is the harmony goes down to the C4 (in the handbell world, that’s the C in the middle of the bass clef, one octave below middle C) and the octave below that has a bass line, so if you only have 4 octaves and go down to the G3, you’ve got part of a bass line.

Well, tonight was the first night where we’ve had five octaves and people to play them. Ideally we’d have one more person to distribute the bass notes with (we have just two for the full octave, C3-B4), but it was still much better than me doing it all alone. We added an extra table and foam pad, so there was room for all the bells, and it was GREAT!

Tonight we worked long and hard on two songs: “The Twelve Days of Christmas” by Kevin McChesney and “Up on the Housetop” by Arnold Sherman. Two great level-5 Christmas pieces that are fun and challenging, while still being great music. They’re two of our harder pieces that we’re working on for our Christmas season. We’re also going to be doing Sleigh Ride by Robert Ivey and Blue Christmas by Hart Morris. That’s what we’ll be working next week (after we run through the two we did tonight to refresh).

It’s exciting to see how far the Circle City Ringers have come in so short a time. That’s a primary reason why I joined the group, because there was a vision to excel and become a premiere ensemble in the Midwest. We’ve been “organized” for less than two years (we were initially formed less than three years ago) and we’re already playing stuff like Up on the Housetop and Blue Christmas and doing them well. Or will be in a couple weeks. :-) It was impressive to see how far those songs came in one good rehearsal.

Makes you glad to be a part of such a group!