"Master Class Day On The Chime"
September 4, 2004

              On September 4, 2004 23 chimers and chimes admirers gathered at St. George's Anglican Church in Oshawa, Ontario to attend a "Master Class" conducted by Gordon Slater, the Dominion Carillonneur. The day (Or weekend, for some of us!) was organized by the St. George's Chimers Guild. The chimers came from Ontario and the northeastern United States. St. George's has a lovely 15 bell Whitechapel chime that was installed in 1924 when the church was built. It is played from a Verdin carillon clavier type chimestand dating from a 1980's renovation of the chime.
             The attending chimers were organized into groups of four or five; each group was allotted time to allow each chimer to play for Gordon and have his/her playing critiqued and suggestions made for improvements. Gordon's comments were also broadcast via radio to the participants gathered in front of the church. It was a very well organized day with much companionship and great meals!
             Bruce Pond, a chimer at a 19 bell chime at St. John's Anglican in Peterborough, made notes of Gordon's comments during the course of the day. There is a lot of food for thought in them!

1)  Think of your audience and how to keep them interested.  You are raining music down on them largely uninvited. Make it worth their while listening rather than turning off and going for a hamburger.

2) Do not sight-read at the chime stand: respect your audience, many of whom may be unwilling
         listeners.

3) Practise with piano or other keyboard; use 2 index fingers.

4) As in all music, use dynamics to keep it interesting.

5) Try arching the phrases, start quietly, build and subside.

6) Balance the melody and accompaniment - make sure the listener isn't guessing which is which.

7) On crescendo increase the melody before the accompaniment.

8) On decrescendo diminish the accompaniment before the melody.

9) Practise playing two notes precisely together, one loudly and one softly ? ?This is a life?s work.?

10) Melody alone works well on bells, but, as in all music, keep the rhythm.

11) Play pieces in as many keys as are possible on your instrument.

12) Minor tunes sound good on bells because of a bell's harmonic series.

13) Avoid the bell arrangement trap, i.e., habitually making the tune the highest voice.
        Remember, descending 4 semitones doubles the bell weight; so lower notes are louder and longer.
        The melody is usually hidden when accompanied by lower bells, so try inverting the melody and
         accompaniment, i.e. put the melody on the bottom.

14) During long melody notes, fill in with harmony notes (of higher pitch) to give tone and interest.

15) On a carillon clavier type chimestand:

16) Don?t smack the batons/handles. You will injure yourself quickly if you do.

17) Move your hand quickly through the air and then push the baton/handle;
         this will minimize the impact and give you control.

18) To achieve quiet sounds, pre-depress the baton/handle most of the way down,
                and then press to sound the bell.

19) Take your hands off the baton/handle once the note is sounded.

20) Don?t rest your hand with the baton/handle down.

21) Avoid crossing your hands unnecessarily.

22) Take rings and jewellery off before playing.

23) Mark notation on the music score as to which hand to use for various notes or passages.

24) Use up-stems on the music score for notes played by the right hand, use down-stems for left hand.

25) Recopy music to put more music on one page. Eliminate redundant notes that are not played;
          don?t just ignore them.

26) All bell instruments are different: rehearsal on a new instrument is essential.

27) Don?t cheat the long notes: count (give each note or rest its full value).

28) Train false starts out of yourself: keep on playing. This is public music.

              The chain is completed!! The ongoing project of building 117 feet of brand new drive chain for the Westminster Quarters end of our E. Howard #3 Chiming Clock (see "Chain Project") was successfully completed this past spring. The new chain took about 160 hours of work, with another 40 hours spent planning , sourcing a supplier of links and rivets and installing the finished product. Because the new chain has only minimal slack between links, there are more links available to pass around the sprocket on the clock for the same travel of the weight. This has given about half a day more time for the quarters - about 109 more links available to drive the quarters each week. The chain links also fit the sprocket very well. A much safer arrangement!

              On a different note, the time-keeping abilities of the clock have proven to be exemplary. The clock runs 12 hours a day, as the "pendulum trap" captures the pendulum at one end of its travel every night around 8:45 and releases it the next morning exactly 12 hours later. At least it is supposed to be "exactly" 12 hours later, but the "trap" is controlled by a $200 electronic timer that not only gains time, but gains it at different rates depending on the ambient temperature! During the summer it can gain as much as 5 minutes a week. This gradually slows to about 2 1/2 minutes a week gain in the dead of winter. Because the timer gain only affects the tower clock at night when the pendulum is captured, the clock has to lose half of the week's gain of the timer each week to run accurately. Confused yet? It gets better! In order to be able to set the clock at any hour during the day you have to know what the week's gain of the timer is and use the handy compensation table drawn up just for that purpose to add or subtract a correction factor depending on the hour of the day. I picked 11 am as the daily standard for setting the clock. Consequently, the clock is a little fast prior to 11:00 and gradually loses time through the rest of the day. By 8:00 that night it might be as much as 17 seconds slow in the summer, but only 8 or 9 seconds slow in January. Fun, eh? The upshot is that the clock has to be regulated with a delicate touch to keep it "on the advertised". The best part is - IT CAN BE!! Since summer, it has never been more than 10 or 15 seconds off after a week of running, and there have been a number of weeks where it has kept time to 1 or 2 seconds.
               Don't ever let anyone tell you that the century-old clock in your tower can't run with great accuracy. With a little effort it can! However, it is well worth keeping records each week of regulating changes, temperature changes and anything else that could affect the running performance. It would be interesting to find out how accurately our clock could run if it wasn't always fighting the wretched time-keeping capabilities of the "trap's" modern electronic timer!

              Last July I was most fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to Ithaca, N.Y. where I met up with Bob Feldman at the McGraw Tower, home to the 21 bell Cornell Chimes. When I started chiming at St. James' Church again in 1996 (I had played from 1970 to 1974) the Cornell Chimes website was one of the first that I found when I started surfing the net. It was (and is!) a great site; the chimesmasters were enthusiastic, kept the website updated and interesting, played really neat music, had recorded chimes CD's that you could order, and (best of all for me) played on Meneely & Co. (West Troy) bells.
             Visiting Cornell and the Chimes is a wonderful experience. I was able to put in a lot of time on the practice stand, went out to dinner with Bob, Jennifer (Chimes Advisor) and some of the chimesmasters, watched Jennifer and Head Chimesmaster Lisa Ngai play "Hoe Down" - listening to it on a CD is nothing like experiencing it in person! - and talked bells, listened to bells, attended all the bell concerts each day and started going a little deaf from all the ringing! Only temporarily, fortunately. I was really lucky to also play the chime itself. It is a revelation to play a virtually new, well-setup chimestand with well tuned bells. And 21 foot pedals! I had built a rough, but dimensionally correct, practice stand in my garage two weeks before, and had managed to memorize two & a half pieces - I discovered that I could either watch my hands, or watch the music, but not both! So I got a lot of mileage out of those 2.5 tunes and thoroughly broke the "Three-Week Rule". Sorry... but it sure was fun.
              Many thanks to Marisa, Bob and the Chimesmasters for all the hospitality.

Horace Gladding

                      Edmund Horace Gladding was Chimer at St. James' from 1940 to 1951. Brother-in-law to Ernest House, who chimed from 1920 to 1960, Horace stepped in as Chimer when Ernie was transferred by the C.N.R. to Montreal during WWII to work in a munitions plant. Horace Gladding was an accomplished musician; he played clarinet in the C.N.R. band and was a first violinist in the Stratford Civic Orchestra. He is the only Chimer who seems to have recognised that the chime could be more than a simple single-note instrument and he left music in our files to prove it. Not only did he arrange a number of classical pieces and hymns - Chopin's "Prelude In D", Bach's "Ava Maria", "All Through The Night" (with descant) - he also penned a couple of his own compositions: "The Gladding Changes" and "The E.H.G. Chimes". These are a pair of change-like pieces, the sort that sound better the faster you can play them! Mr. Gladding's sons can remember him working on them on the piano at home, and they urged him to to put his own name on them, along with the date - February 1941.
                 When Ernest House returned to Stratford (and the Bells of St. James) in 1945 Horace was appointed Joint Chimer along with Ernie. At the annual Vestry Meeting in 1946 it was announced that the two men would alternate each month playing the bells. For this they received the princely sum of $6.25 monthly. Horace and Ernie continued to share duties on the chime until 1951, when Horace moved away from Stratford.
                 After retiring from the furniture industry in 1965 Horace kept active building and finishing end tables, built a grandfather clock (including the clock mechanism), was an avid reader and enjoyed difficult cross-word puzzles & cryptograms. He passed away in 1985, at the age of 90, proving yet again that chiming and longevity seem to go hand in hand.