John Lynham, May 2020, with apologies/thanks to Jorge Luis Borges ‘The Aleph’
Bell Ringers Stone
A wet-behind-the ears new boy at St Olaf’s Grammar School for Boys, I was entranced at our first assembly by an octet of older boys on the stage in the ancient assembly hall ringing handbells. The tune was new to me – Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes – but I marvelled how each boy came in at precisely the right time with his individual note. Of course I had no idea then that, ten years later, I would be writing an M.Phil thesis on the poetry of Ben Jonson, the author of the poem set to that tune; nor that, some years after that, I would be singing in a school choir in St Mary’s church Hendon, performing Fauré’s sublime Requiem scored for brass band – another musical curiosity.
This got me wondering about handbells, and if more ambitious scorings might be possible – say, Beethoven’s Für Elise, or Bach’s famous Chaconne for solo violin BWV1004. Clearly a larger number of players than eight would be needed, and some dexterity of wrist-movement. But given the extraordinary virtuosity of violinists such as David Oistrakh and Anne Sophie-Mutter, or cellists like Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich, I felt sure that, given a sufficient degree of talent and no doubt arduous training, the dream that was slowly taking shape in my head might be achievable.
My college owed me a sabbatical, so I resolved to cash in the shares in De Beers Consolidated Mines inherited from my late great aunt Trilby and travel the globe, seeking out that talent wherever it might be. The Royal Northern College of Music kept me waiting in a draughty vestibule for three hours, until eventually I was informed by the offhand receptionist that handbells were not on the syllabus. The Royal College of Music in South Kensington politely showed me the door. I flew to New York; at the Juilliard they laughed in my face. The Los Angeles College of Music principal, biting his lip, said he’d be willing to look at any score – perhaps one for Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand? Of course, I’m not a composer, I’m an academic. In the interests of science I realised it was time to turn my back on the West and its narrow, exclusivist thinking.
Visits to Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing produced similar negative responses. But as I was leaving a small but world-renowned conservatoire in Hohhot, a short bespectacled student rushed up behind me and grabbed my arm. “Tuva,” she panted. “Go to Tuva. And when I looked blank: “You’ve heard of their throat-singing?”
I had.
“They can do that with bells too. Split harmonics, frequencies that only dogs and bats can hear, multidimensional harmonies.” I drew back. She looked a little unhinged, and indeed spittle was forming in the corner of her mouth. “Go!” she repeated, eyes blazing; then dashed back up the corridor.
I boarded a flight to Irkutsk, and from there took a repurposed Tupolev transport plane to Kyzyl, where I spent an unsettled night fighting the bedbugs in the Leninsky Hotel. At breakfast over a bitterly sweet coffee I pressed the hotelier for information. By good fortune he was, like me, a keen amateur of all things Euterpean, but his bushy eyebrows arched in anxiety.
“You have a long, long, travel to make, my friend. Many go… Many do not return.”
I snorted at this old-world melodrama and slid him a dollar bill.
“Perhaps you could show me on the map?”
Shaking his head, he pulled out a yellowing almanac, found a map and with a cracked fingernail traced a route, up the Yenisei river, then striking across barren hill country to Mongun-Tayga, the highest point in that godforsaken land. “But you will need this, my friend.” And he lifted a chain hanging round his neck, from which hung a heavy, intricately engraved silver crucifix. “ Now go. Go with God.”
Settling my bill (a little too generously) I left the hotel and at a few paces’ distance found a bustling bazaar where I was able to furnish myself with boots, several layers of thick woollen clothing, and enough yak’s cheese and kumis to keep me going for a few days at least. My plentiful supply of dollars eased my path; and tedious it would be to relate the journey on the river launch, the shepherd-guided trek over the foothills, the bivouacking under the stars with only a dwindling fire to keep the circling vultures at bay. Suffice it to say that, after ten days of frozen nights and burning hot noons, desperately hungry and stumbling on with my pitiful last few thimblefuls of strength, I at last caught sight of majestic Mongun-Tayga, its slopes flecked with snow, its summit lost in the clouds.
Approaching a settlement of yurts, I was puzzled by how quiet it was. No shouts of children at play, no domestic animals, no sounds of sawing or hammering or other honest labour. I ventured further into the village, and was drawn to a sizeable yurt in the centre. Lifting a flap I was amazed to see young and old, men and women gathered in an apparent act of worship. Each was sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, holding a bell of a different size; each was stroking the bell with a small rod made of some crystalline rock: granite or feldspar, quartz or mica or malachite, I couldn’t tell. And, most remarkable, there was total silence – not a sound to disturb the air, in fact the air was thick with a silence…
…that was no longer silent. For my ears were now as it were focussing, tuning in to the silence. I heard the breath of a whisper, a flutter of wings in a wood, the delicate trickle of an underground brook. I heard a gull’s cry, and a kitten’s mew. I heard – I felt – a poppy bud burst and unfurl. I heard the slurping of a piglet at its mother’s teat. I heard curlews cry, chaffinches chatter, jackdaws cackle and the elegant fluting of a nightingale. I heard the stampede of wildebeest on the Serengeti. I heard the roar of a 747 taking off, and the sobs of a mother over a coffin. I heard the bubbles a child blew pop, I heard the Doppler effect of a siren, I heard a thousand glasses break simultaneously. I heard a Japanese girl group warble and Beethoven’s last string quartet hush to a close in a New York salon. I heard Austrian yodellers, and I heard myself laugh. I heard you breathe. I knew all these sounds, all the sounds of the living, breathing world, and infinitely more, sharp, clear, utterly distinct, and yet all blended and interwoven and varied upon in dazzling intricate combinations that had no beginning and no end, that seemed to lift me up to a place where all difference ceased to exist, where all contrarieties are resolved and everything is understood, a place where nothing remains (to apply a visual metaphor to the ineffable) but pure, white light.
The boundaries of my physical body dissolved; the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor of the yurt, an arm cradling my head and someone holding a saucer of fermented mare’s milk to my lips. The musicians (for so I must call them) had all departed, but the crone looking after me – who I later discovered was the community’s wise woman – forbade me to rise, bathing my brow and crooning in that strange guttural tongue of theirs. Later she took me into her home, where I slept for three days. On the fourth day of my recovery a deputation of elders came to visit me. By means of sounds, facial expressions and hand gestures, I was able to assure them of my honest desire to make their music and their singular stone known to the wider world, and obtained their consent. The headman’s daughter even gave me a beginner’s tutorial. The first time I caressed a bell with the little crystalline stick, it gave off a harsh discordant ring. With practice, however, and some guiding handholding from my instructress, I was able to vary the tone, pitch and volume sufficiently to make a recognisable tune. Imagine my delight when, after days of practice with that one bell, I was able to tease out the first ten bars of Bach’s minuet in G major!
When the day came for me to depart, the headman embraced me like a son and insisted I accept a keepsake: a single scintillating rod of that precious stone. I felt a squeeze of disappointment: how with that one small thing could I begin to make the music I dreamed of? And what of the bells? But the headman, divining my thoughts and perhaps even by some witchcraft of that region entering into them, gave me to understand that, with that one rod I could, with practice, replicate the whole world of sound in a single ordinary bell.
Bearing my treasure, I made the journey back down the mountain with a light heart. The river carried me on swiftly to the capital, from where I was able to get on a flight to Irkutsk, and from there fly via Moscow back to London. I resigned my professorship in anthropological musicology and have rented a small cottage not far from Ely where the only sounds are the susurration of fenland breezes, the lapwing’s cry, and the subdued bubbling of eels in the marshes. Colleagues occasionally call to ask if I’m well, and I assure them that I am, perfectly well. In fact, I’m busier than I’ve ever been. I’m preparing for the performance of the century, one which I’m sure will go down in the Royal Albert Hall’s annals, if they should commission me.
Yes, the performance to end all performances: Wagner’s Ring Cycle – four operas, score and libretto, orchestra and singers – for solo handbell.
(1,650 words)
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