I took last Friday off from work and spent the weekend with my “handbell peeps” (I can’t believe I just said that) at Spring Ring 2008 in Cincinnati, Ohio. We left Friday during the day and didn’t get home until around midnight Sunday morning.
Handbell festivals like this are sponsored by the American Guild of English Handbell Ringers (AGEHR) and by the “area” or region where it’s located. The typical agenda is an opening concert, followed by a brief rehearsal. Then on the following day rehearsals and class sessions alternating in the morning and again in the afternoon. Then a final runthru and a concert that’s free and open to the public. Then everyone packs up and goes home. (The concert this year was very well publicized and I was told had almost 800 in attendance.)
Most festivals involve groups coming and playing some music all together. The “mass ring” music is usually not too difficult, so every can do it. Then there is some other music broken up by category. You have to choose whether you’re “Tin Level” (easier) or “Copper Level” (medium). There’s also a “Bronze Level,” but there aren’t too many groups that can play at that level, so that kind of music is usually reserved for separate festivals and events.
While the Tins are rehearsing, the Coppers are attending a class session (or browsing the vendors or taking a nap), and then the two groups switch. The clinician/director for the weekend was Hart Morris, who is a highly respected handbell composer & director. He’s known for writing rhythmically challenging pieces that use percussion creatively. He’s also a clinician with a great sense of humor and infinite patience! He kept everyone excited and happy throughout the weekend; even when he had to correct people (sometimes multiple times), he did it with a sense of humor that buoyed people’s spirits despite having to be corrected. As a ginormous ensemble (over 700 ringers this weekend), we improved a TON in just a couple rehearsals, thanks to Hart’s excellent direction and people skills. In this area, it was probably the most enjoyable handbell festival I’ve been to.
During Saturday’s afternoon classes, one of the sessions was called “Bronze Feud.” It involved people arriving in teams of four (unless you were just there to observe and cheer on your favorite team) and having to figure out how to play some music given to you. Our team, “Team Van” (named after the fact that our team also had carpooled to Cincinnati together) included Becky, Michelle, Karen, and me (in picture order below). We thought that it was going to involve actual music, but it was really just some figures put together by the people running the game. For example, the first round was a descending G major scale in eighth notes. The first thing you had to do was figure out how your team was going to play it and the second thing was to get through it as many times as possible in THIRTY SECONDS. That’s what really changed the dynamic (pardon the pun). They also did give some points for “style.” Our team felt rather dominant until a team of high schoolers got up there and just WHIPPED through it. We could see right then that they would be our major competitors. 
There were four rounds, which got progressively harder, and I think there were 13 teams total. We were SECOND, which meant we didn’t have much time to prepare. For the second round, we were FIRST and it moved on from there. We actually thought it worked out pretty well for us, since we had to go very early on the first two and then were at the end for the next two, which were harder. That gave us a chance to watch other groups and talk through any potential difficulties we saw. It helped that for the third round the high schoolers got a couple of bells mixed up early in and never fixed it. That meant nobody played it right after that mixup. It was still close, but we had some STYLE in the last round. So even though it was difficult and hardly any groups got through it at all, the gyros we did each time on the final whole note pushed us into first place.
Even though the prizes were Burger King crowns with “gems” glued on and little foam pins of “First Place” ribbons, we were walking pretty tall that afternoon. It’s more about ego and bragging rights than it is prizes, anyway, right? 
“It’s good to be da king!”
Na
