The bell, with its analogous and direct sound, is to me like a voice. A human voice lasts a human life time. This bell’s voice has sounded close to five hundred years.
In 2003 the Tenor bell was lifted away from Scraptoft Church, taken down. It did not match the standard pitch that had been established as the received sound. It was consequently set on the ground, and by that determined act it lost its voice completely. The clapper was removed as if one’s tongue or vocal cords had been cut off. The sound was gone. And within a moment the bell became a mere body: a shell of metal and form.
The happiness of a birth and the mourning of a death had been transmitted through the air by this bell
It was now grounded. It’s voice did not fit in with the other bells any more.
The live sound from a bell is pure. No technical support, nor gadget, no recording is needed to experience the sound. Only wind and weather affect it’s direction, trace and volume. No digital perfect pitch is possible. The body is very much a body on it’s own, high up there, somewhere. Thinking about this Tenor, makes me realize that this bell sounded when Shakespeare was writing, when Niccolò Machiavelli was thinking and when Purcell was composing. The same bell’s voice sounded in the New Year in 2000.
It is old. Very old. And even though I found it grounded, it is far from being scrap metal. The form is protected as it has such an age. But it lost it’s position among the others bells because of the specific quality of it’s voice - but a single voice with character is attractive. It is a personal statement. A signature. This does not imply that it is wanted by the crowd of the moment.
Thanks to the support by the people of Scraptoft Church and Leicester Diocese and their eagerness for the bell to make it’s voice heard, the bell is lifted again in Fokestone.
Now the Tenor bell is 15 -20 meter up in the air. The sky is it’s backdrop by the seafront and it’s sound will stand on its own: it is not useless at all.
In June 2011 anyone can ring the bell by pulling and help it sound. Away from the church and the others.
In 2006 I travelled 13 000 km to listen to the sound of a particular bell. It had been placed in the mountain landscape the same year in memory of a man. Getting to the bell and ringing it myself, then listening to it’s voice sounding far into the mountains, made me let him go.
This experience made me look for more voices by other bells. Bells of any age or tone. Coming across this analogous sound, activated by ones arm, was like listening to someone experienced. I searched for single bells and in particular for those which did not work “in harmony” with the others.
Early 2010 I had a 1.5 ton bell be raised above a square in Oslo for a few months only. The Untuned Bellhad been removed from Oslo Town Hall (2000) with the other 48 still being in place. In Finland, a bell I found in a London foundry, viewed as scrap metal, is now part of a permanent installation in memory of Helene Schjerfbeck (1862 -1946). Both, as a woman and as an artist, she was not as one expected her to be at that time, but a brave and focused modernist painter: The Finnish Untuned Bell.
In a way, the Scraptoft Church bell sounds for all of us, as it is so old and at the same time so new. It has enormous life experience: five hundred years under extremely varying conditions. Now it sounds temporary in Folkestone, in the harbor, between two readymade H-steel pillars. The handle is special made for there, at the sea. The bell itself, made of bronze, will never change.
Sound makes us see. The aftersound which we hear, when listening carefully lasts about 50 seconds.
Folkestone, with an edge to another continent, with both back and front to the rest of the world, seems to me a particularly apt place for Out of Tune.
