Evocation of bells in music.

[Guido]

Bells appear literally and programmatically in many many scores, and I was just curious to see if we could list them here with any success. I'm more interested when a composer has used other instruments to evoke bells ringing, than use of actual bells, but both are fine!

Here's what I came up with with from my itunes library:

Barber - Le clocher chante from his french song cycle, Mélodies Passagères op.27. A lovely song, with the main chord closely related to one that Ravel uses in his La Vallee Des Cloches. Also Church bell at night from the Hermit Songs op.29 which is a beautiful little example of scene painting with the bare minimum of notes and maximum economy of gesture.

Ives - Those Evening Bells - an early song, and one of the best before he found his true voice.

Ravel - La Vallee Des Cloches from Miroirs. Ravel in his most purely beautiful and subtle mode, which is about as beautiful and subtle as you can be! There's also Entre-Cloches from Sites Auriclaires for two pianos.

Debussy - Cloches A Travers Les Feuilles from Images 2ieme serié. Another wonderful piece.

Bach - The Prelude from the Sixth suite for solo cello - not explicitly stated by the composer, but as clearly an evocation of bells as any of the others mentioned here. There is a DVD in which Rostropovich tells us of a dream he had of two churches, one distant, one near, with their bells pealing and how it relates to this movement (I have never heard it played better by anyone else).

Messiaen - cloches d'angoisse et larmes d'adieu from his 8 preludes - quite Debussian, though clearly Messiaen. Not my favourite Messiaen opus this, though this piece is lovely.

Langgaard - Bells Pealing: Look! He Comes from Music of the Spheres.

Ottevanger - Evening Bell- Birds Circle from Through the Year. I best not comment (I'll leave it to the composer!) other than to say I really like this one and find it very touching.

Rachmaninov's The Bells I have only heard once a couple of year ago, but I don't remember any actual immitations of the sound of bells in the score. I might be wrong though, as I say, it was ages ago that I heard it!




Part's Tintinnabulum style obviously has to do with bells on one level, but I'm not sure I can think of an instance in which he is deliberately referring to or trying to evoke the sounds of a bell. The Cantus for Benjamin Britten contains a prominant part for a bell.

Any others?

[DavidRoss]

My favorite are the tubular bells in Sibelius's 4th.  All too many conductors use the little tinkly glockenspiel instead of the glocken specified by Sibelius.  Blomstedt and Bernstein are two of the notable ones who get it right.

[Novi]

Rachmaninoff Prelude #1 op. 3/2 "The Bells of Moscow"

Mahler 3 (part V)

[Benji]

Bells appear literally and programmatically in many many scores, and I was just curious to see if we could list them here with any success. I'm more interested when a composer has used other instruments to evoke bells ringing, than use of actual bells, but both are fine!

Any others?

Here's an example where they are both suggested and actually used.

[mp3=200,20,0,left]
http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/2/5/2307936/00.%2011.%20Four%20sea%20Interludes%20-%20Sunday%20Morning.mp3[/mp3]

Sunday Morning, from Britten's Peter Grimes.

[mp3=200,20,0,left]
http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/2/5/2307936/11.%20English%20Dances%2C%20Op.33%20No.1%20-%20Allegro%20non%20troppo.mp3[/mp3]

...and the same effect used by Malcolm Arnold in his English Dance, No.1 from Op.33. Though there is no specific programmatic reference here, in my imagination it is a joyful dance, perhaps at a wedding.

My favorite are the tubular bells in Sibelius's 4th.  All too many conductors use the little tinkly glockenspiel instead of the glocken specified by Sibelius.  Blomstedt and Bernstein are two of the notable ones who get it right.

I'm with you about the use of tubular bells - I feel the glocks trivialise the music a little. But then i've heard conflicting reports about what Sibelius actually wanted. Last thing I read suggested the glocks were what he preferred to be used.

[DavidRoss]

I'm with you about the use of tubular bells - I feel the glocks trivialise the music a little. But then i've heard conflicting reports about what Sibelius actually wanted. Last thing I read suggested the glocks were what he preferred to be used.

Well, glocken (tubular bells) is what he wrote in the score, glocken is what he used when he conducted the premiere, glocken is what he told Ormandy he wanted when he visited Finland (and which Ormandy used in his recording of the 4th), and glocken is what sounds right--whereas glockenspiel, as you noted, trivializes the music a bit. 

[sul G]

Bells done well, that's one thing. But it can be too easily abused. In the fourth volume of the otherwise-admirable Spectrum series of piano pieces (each volume featuring a large number of specially-commissioned pieces by all manner of contemporary composers) it seems that every last piece is some kind of bell-evocation! It's almost as if the composers don't have the imagination to do anything else, and it gets a little tedious in the end.

Oh, and that Ottevanger is truly marvellous, Guido, I agree!

[Benji]

Well, glocken (tubular bells) is what he wrote in the score, glocken is what he used when he conducted the premiere, glocken is what he told Ormandy he wanted when he visited Finland (and which Ormandy used in his recording of the 4th), and glocken is what sounds right--whereas glockenspiel, as you noted, trivializes the music a bit. 

Well i'm convinced! 

(But then why are so many conductors using the glockenspiel?)

[Guido]

Bells done well, that's one thing. But it can be too easily abused. In the fourth volume of the otherwise-admirable Spectrum series of piano pieces (each volume featuring a large number of specially-commissioned pieces by all manner of contemporary composers) it seems that every last piece is some kind of bell-evocation! It's almost as if the composers don't have the imagination to do anything else, and it gets a little tedious in the end.

That's a shame. Are any of them worth hearing?

[sul G]

Not enormously

Where was La Cathedrale Engloutie on your list?

[DavidRoss]

Well i'm convinced! 

(But then why are so many conductors using the glockenspiel?)

What I've heard is that someone mistook the word glocken as an abbreviation for glockenspiel and that later editions of the score have it this way.  Also, I need to make a correction for an error.  Ormandy's recording was made in 1954 and he used the glockenspiel, as had already become a common practice.  His visit to Sibelius was during an orchestra tour in 1955, and that's when Sibelius reportedly told him that he wanted tubular bells.  Michael Steinberg discusses some theories about this in The Symphony; according to him, Sibelius wrote "glocken" in the original score, and although he made several revisions in the course of subsequent printings, he never changed this but always kept it "glocken."

BTW, here's an interesting thread on this topic from rcmr posted to a newsgroup by our own former forum member, Michael Shaffer:
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classical.recordings/2006-03/msg04677.html

[Chrone]

Here's one I bet a lot of you don't know: The Chimes of Liberty by Edwin Franco Goldman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULvjzCuCOJs

[vandermolen]

Khachaturian: Symphony No 2 'The Bell'

Viktor Kalabis: Symphony No 2 'Sinfonia Pacis' (the end section evokes bells in a very moving way)

[Benji]

BTW, here's an interesting thread on this topic from rcmr posted to a newsgroup by our own former forum member, Michael Shaffer:
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.music.classical.recordings/2006-03/msg04677.html

That was very interesting, cheers! 

I hadn't noticed that some performances were using more than one type of bell. I'll have to have a listen to Bernstein's account soon.

[sul G]

Well, how come I only just remembered The Bells of Zlonice (Dvorak's First)?

[Holden]

Le Gibet from Gaspard de la Nuit

The Opening of the 2nd Rach PC

La Campanella

The Bells - Rachmaninov (he had a thing about bells)

1812 Overture

[Benji]

Stokowski's reworking of Mussorgsky's Night on Bare mountain makes effective use of chiming bells (I can't recall if R-K's also does (?)). IIRC the original Mussorgsky doesn't contain that whole stretch of 'calm after the storm, demons be gone' music at the end, so perhaps that was all a Rimsky invention.

[sul G]

Oh, the second section of Respighi's Festivals has an extraordinarily fine piece of bell-evocation. Real bells do eventually appear, but before that you'd swear they were already there.

[Benji]

The Opening of the 2nd Rach PC

That never occurred to me, but now you mention it, it makes perfect sense... The power of suggestion!

[sul G]

Stokowski's reworking of Mussorgsky's Night on Bare mountain makes effective use of chiming bells (I can't recall if R-K's also does (?)). IIRC the original Mussorgsky doesn't contain that whole stretch of 'calm after the storm, demons be gone' music at the end, so perhaps that was all a Rimsky invention.

And the original piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition has, in The Great Gate, some wonderfully voiced bell-tones which are among the simplest and best evocations of bells on the instrument I know - it's all down to note selection, not to complex textural effects.

[Benji]

Oh, the second section of Respighi's Festivals has an extraordinarily fine piece of bell-evocation. Real bells do eventually appear, but before that you'd swear they were already there.

Yeah, that really is a beautifully evocative piece. Just listening now!