From “Jingle Bells” to the street-corner bell ringers of the Salvation Army, the sound of the Christmas season is bells. But bell ringing has a rich history, integrated into daily and liturgical life year-round. It is a tradition being rediscovered and appreciated by anthropologists, academics, musicians and an increasing number of ordinary people, including many Catholics, the world over.
“Our goal is to ring in the new year,” Paul Ashe, the director of the National Bell Festival, told America.
Mr. Ashe heads the U.S.-based, all-volunteer organization. It was started six years ago to “represent and champion all bells”—from handbells to church bells. According to Mr. Ashe, the United States once boasted some 200 bell foundries where bells of all kinds were cast—a testament to the importance of bells in U.S. life not long ago.
Today, though, only three bell foundries are left in the country, and bell towers are disappearing or falling into disrepair. Many towers get replaced with more modern structures that do not include bells.
New churches, he notes, are also usually built without bells. As a result, very few new bells are being commissioned and the art of creating them is dying off. But bells and bell ringing are traditions he believes worth preserving. Mr. Ashe urges that bells be kept in place even as a church or other building or bell tower changes uses or hands. Each year the National Bell Festival coordinates bell ringing across the world—even Antarctica!—to coincide with midnight on Jan. 1 at the international date line.
The next day begins the National Bell Festival. Starting at 2 p.m. E.S.T. on New Year’s Day, folks who keep or maintain handbells, collectible bells, church bells, historic bells—OK, just about any bell—are invited to let them ring for 20 minutes (or as long as ringers can physically sustain it) to “create a canopy of sound across our nation.”
He said the most notable Catholic church to participate is the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. The resident carillonist, Robert Grogan, performs a recital on the church’s 56-bell carillon instrument housed in the Knights' Tower.
The festival makes a small reminder of a time when bells across much of the world marked not only the hour and quarter hours or announced that Mass would soon begin, but also helped shape the life of the community through which they rang.
“It was a form of communication,” Francesc Llop i Bayo, president of the bell ringers of the Cathedral of Valencia in Spain, says. Bell ringers “were constructing the time and space and civil protection of the community.”
Just how important bells were to their communities is captured in the Spanish proverb, “Las campanas y el pendón, del pueblo son.” In English: “The bells and pendant are the community’s,” signs of and for the local people.
Every bell makes its own unique sound, and every village bell (or bells in some cases) its unique set of tolls. Announcements were numerous and detailed, too.
Mr. Llop i Bayo says there were as many as 30 different tolls used to announce a death, depending on the person’s sex, age, social status and other characteristics. Of the dozens of different tolls that have been in use over centuries in Spain, three of every 100 were calls to Mass. In cities, the distance that a bell could be heard helped designate a neighborhood, Mr. Ashe says.
The toll of the bell also signaled feast days, such as the memorial of a church’s patron saint, Corpus Christi or the Assumption. The heightened ringing on those days marked the entry into the more intense time of the feast day, manifested in the communal celebration.
Keeping the bells ringing required dedication. Bell ringers of the past were paid professionals, Mr. Llop i Bayo says. Usually, in fact, a family participated together in handling the job of bell tolling. Despite the importance of bell tolling to communal life, however, the bell ringer was low on the social ladder. He discovered one bellringer described merely as “a worker who pulls a rope.”
By the Industrial Revolution, this low regard for the profession made it easy to replace human bell ringers with automated systems and recorded tolls. This process accelerated over the 20th century, and the distinct sound of each church or community bell became lost.
“All bells now sounded the same,” Mr. Llop i Bayo says, and the traditional variety of sounds bells could make was forgotten.
“This was considered progress,” Mr. Llop i Bayo says regretfully.
In Spain, most of the country’s bells had been electrified by the 1970s, converting bell ringing by hand, rope and pulley into a hobby, a tradition preserved by a few out of nostalgia or the simple joy of ringing a bell on a community’s feast day.
That ongoing loss of the tradition and skill of bell tolling and ringing prompted people like Mr. Llop i Bayo to become involved as preservationists. Now 73, he first became interested in the tradition at 18. His study of bells led him to anthropology. Bell ringing, he found, encapsulated many aspects of a given culture and proved a good lens through which to study humankind.
In 1988, he helped found Bell ringers of the Cathedral of Valencia, and the group has been hand ringing the cathedral’s bells for special occasions ever since. Valencia’s bell ringers also conduct research into the tradition, which they share on their website. Over the last 36 years, the group has restored much of the canopy of sound that had formerly covered their city.
To hear church bells toll as uniquely as they had in the past was first jarring to contemporary Valenecians, Mr. Llop i Bayo admits. His community of bell-ringing restorationists were regarded as a band of nostalgic eccentrics.
But now the variety of chimes they helped restore has become a deeply appreciated part of the Valencian soundscape. This year, the ringers reintroduced a medieval toll for the Feast of the Assumption, the patronal feast day of the cathedral. Played early in the morning to mark the dawn of the celebration of Mary’s assumption into heaven, the particular toll had not been played for some 400 years, Mr. Llop i Bayo says.
The movement to maintain or restore the tradition of handbell ringing has also gone international. Mr. Llop i Bayo has participated in research in several other countries, including the United States. In Mexico, he helped teach bell ringing to lay people at Catholic churches.
Back in Spain, Xavier Pallas runs the Bell Ringing School of Vall d’en Bas. A musician who took an interest in bells, Mr. Pallas started making an inventory of the bells near his hometown in rural Catalonia, in northeastern Spain.
Besides cataloging the region’s remaining bells, their location and their condition, he learned how to toll them from the old bell ringers. In 2019, he founded the bell-ringing school in the small town of Vall d’en Bas, chosen because the bells of the church there had withstood the test of time.
All four bells not only remained at the church but were also in working condition. Mr. Pallas explains that many church bells in Spain had been melted down during Spain’s civil war and had never been replaced. Many others fell into disrepair as rural communities declined and were abandoned.
Open to 18 students at a time, the program teaches the uninitiated everything they need to know about church bells and ringing them. Over the three-month course, students learn the mechanics of bell towers and bells, their history in Spain and how to ring them according to the traditions of particular regions of Catalonia. The school prepares students to care for the church bells in their own communities and expand the repertoire of tolls played by either recovering tolls that have fallen out of use or creating new ones.
According to both bell experts, written records of historic bell toll patterns can still be found. The archives of many churches may preserve an old calendar that outlines which tolls to play for specific days of the year, according to the liturgical cycle and how to play the church bells. They are not musical scores but read more like a recipe, according to Mr. Llop i Bayo.
Written histories mostly from the 19th century, church records and compilations of local customs made by anthropologists and historians can also shed light on the bell ringing of a particular place. Putting all the pieces of information together allows specific tolls to be recreated. Bell ringing, especially by hand, is not only an act of historical recreation. Bell ringers also compose new tolls, these preservations say.
The belling-ringing courses at the School of Vall d’en Bas have proven so popular there is a waiting list to get in. People from all over Catalonia and even other parts of Spain participate.
Mr. Pallas says the average student is middle-aged and active in their parish. Many are already charged with ringing the bells of their church and want to learn more. Though his school is the only one of its kind in Spain, Mr. Pallas says there are bell-ringer groups all over the country carrying on the tradition.
UNESCO has also recognized the cultural importance of bell ringing, adding the Spanish and Italian techniques for hand-ringing bells to its Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity archive in 2024.
Mr. Ashe insists that bells have a universal and ecumenical aspect. From the pleasure generated by their tone to their functional role in community life, they help pull people together. He hopes the National Bell Festival is an opportunity to recapture the mysterious appeal of bells.
“We encourage bells and bell towers, the world over to ring out and gather folks together, sip some cocoa,” he says. “If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, meet a neighbor and just listen to some beautiful bell ringing and…take some time to appreciate it.”
“There’s a lot that tears us apart,” Mr. Ashe says. But “bell ringing is a kind of universal experience.” In a weary world with fewer opportunities for rejoicing, he suggests bells are one thing that can bring people together in peace.
