"The Bells In Spain Speak Once Again", Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading in my Lancaster Newspaper about "The Bells in Spain speak again!"  Story has a subtitle which reads..."As students learn an ancient lost language used in ringing church bells."  Got me thinking about when I was a choirboy at St. James Episcopal Church in downtown Lancaster and sang in the church choir.  The organist and choir director was a gentleman named Frank McConnell.  Fantastic musician as well as choir director!  He would allow me to turn pages from time to time when he was giving recitals at St. James.  I was also allowed to climb the church steeple from inside, just to see how the bells were attached inside the steeple.  My guess is that my dad was one of Mr. McConnell's good friends and we even invited Mr. McConnell to supper from time to time, ........so I was allowed to climb the steeple from within.  Well, my story today is about the students who learned an ancient lost language that was used in the ringing of the church bells.  Story took place in Joanetes, Spain.  Began with .... Xavier Pallás, who plants his feet on the belfry floor, grips the rope, and with one tug fills the lush Spanish Valley below with the reverberating peal of a church bell.  Clang-clong! CLANG-CLONG!  The swinging bronze bell resonates with each strike of the clapper, filling the small stone tower with an undulating hum.  Once Pallás finishes his peals, silence returns to the tower, giving the valley's soundscape back to the bird songs and rooster crows.  Pallás and his 18 students at the Fall d'en Bas School of Bell Ringers are trying to resuscitate the art of tolling - and communicating - by hand.  If played with the know-how, the sounding of church bells in various sequences, tones and rhythms can signal the time for rejoicing or mourning and when to run to the aid of a neighbor in need.  "For centuries, the tolling of church bells was our most important communication method," said Pallas, standing inside the belfry that doubles as his classroom.  "Machines cannot reproduce the richness of the sounds that we used to hear so there has been a simplification and unification of bell ringing.  The language has been lost little by little until now, when we are finally recognizing its worth."  A physically demanding job that required long hours and complete dedication, to be a bell-ringer was to be a human clock and the public loudspeaker.  While manual church bell ringing has persisted in Eastern Orthodox countries, it has largely been replaced by bell ringing systems in Western Europe.  Pallás' research included the 12th century Saint Romà church in Joanetes, a tiny village about two hours north of Barcelona, where Pallàs has spent the past 10 months teaching the inaugural class one Saturday a month.  "Since the last generation of bell-ringers had died off, the only thing to do was to train new ones in how to toll the bells.  And, that's where the idea of the school was born," Pallàs said.  The bell-ringing course, officially recognized by the ISCREB theology school in Barcelona, finished last week with a demonstration by the class.  All drawn to the allure of the banging bells, the students were men and women with diverse professional backgrounds ranging from engineering to teaching.  One was in his 20s; several were retirees.  Roser Sauri jumped at the chance to reconnect with her childhood by recovering and playing the chiming sequence that had sounded in her grandfather's village when he was baptized.  "The bells formed a part of my life," said Sauri, who now works in artificial intelligence.  She missed their constancy while studying for her computing doctorate in Boston, where she heard none.  The students took turns tolling sequences for everyone from calls to Easter Mass, bad weather warnings, help for fighting a fire to orders for the village militia.  They also could tell workers to get back to reaping wheat, or housewives when the fresh fish was coming to market and even how much it cost.  Many of the ringers wore earplugs or headphones to muffle the deafening peals.  The students tolled a gamut of death announcements that could specify gender and social class.  Juan Charles Osuna and two others tolled for the death of a woman.  That meant swinging the largest bell, at 945 pounds.  It still had a clapper secured in the traditional method of using a dried skin of an ox penis.  Osuna, who paints church murals, also performed a complex sequence with all four of belfry's bells that required him to sit in a chair with ropes looped around his hands and feet.  

Sitting in a chair with ropes looped around both feet and hands,
Juan Carles Osuna, a student of the Fall d'en Bas School of Bell Ringers,
performs playing all four bronze bells at the church bell tower of the 120th-century
Sant Romá Church, at the village of Joanetes, about two hours north of Barcelona, Spain.

"Whew!  It's an emotional experience.  You feel your blood pumping.  You feel the strength, and how you are communicating with everyone in earshot," he said.  "For me it is an honor, it's a way to honor both humans and God."  But, for me...it was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.