Handbells - Music

The curious idea of contributing a commissioned piece to the Area XII 2004 Silent Auction (actually, auctions because we had duplicate conferences in Ontario, CA and Honolulu, HI that summer) crossed my mind. I bounced the concept off Bill and Lee Waggener, and they said, first, that they'd never heard of something like this being done; second, "Go for it!"; and third, "I hope they have you write a symphony!" The third thought, of course, was because larger works generate larger commissions, and that would have meant that Area XII would get a larger benefit since I was donating the commission fees.

Nothing much happened at the Ontario conference until Sunday afternoon, when Norma Rose, the auction coordinator, came up and excitedly said, "We got a bid!" Bev had felt led by the Holy Spirit to take a chance on an unknown composer, and her bid was the winner.

The stipulations in the commission agreement were interesting: An original composition for two combined choirs, one of five octaves, and one of three octaves, with complementary rather than "optionalized" (a la most of our mass ring music) parts. Bev's bid was at a level that guaranteed a minimum of 2.5 minutes of performance time.

At this point, the ideas have to start flowing, and so after awhile, I settled on writing a three-movement piece, one for each generation of Bev's family. The themes, perhaps, were the most difficult to invent since they were to be conjured up out of thin air, but they came together pretty well once I selected the key signatures.

Writing for combined choirs in complementary parts is more difficult in some ways, and easier in others. You have to determine how to use the duplicated pitches, but you also have the luxuries of writing faster repeated notes, and of using simultaneous techniques (e.g. ring and martellato). It's a different way of thinking with respect to handbell composition.

"Triptych" rapidly stretched beyond the original 2.5-minute specification. The first section, "Air", is a more or less "normal" handbell piece. It would have been sufficient to fulfill the time requirement by itself, but since I still had the other two themes in hand, I chose to overdeliver "a bit". "Fugue" became a fusion of JS Bach's Baroque stylings with a Spanish rhythm undercurrent (one of you experts out there will have to tell me exactly which dance it is...), and is the shortest, but most intense of the three movements. The final movement, "Song", follows the influence of Russ Freeman and the Rippingtons (yes, believe it or not!), and contains a bit of experimentation in stopped, unpitched techniques. The total playing time came out to about ten minutes...

And so "Triptych" was ready to be mailed on December 23, 2004. I decided to send it Express Mail so it would arrive on Christmas Eve (a week before the deadline!), and watched the USPS site for delivery confirmation all day - and it didn't arrive. God had a better plan: It turns out that some of the dedicated Post Office carriers give up a part of their Christmas Day to keep Express Mail going - and so one of them walked up to the Bissells' front door on Christmas morning!

The premiere hasn't yet been scheduled, but I'm hoping for sometime in 2005. More news to come...