Instruments - Part 28

 Bells

You may not think of bells as musical instruments, but they can be.  This engraving, produced shortly after Columbus discovered the New World in 1492, depicts Columbus meeting natives who are fascinated by the sound that bells are making.

The bells that are heard most often are church bells, but they can't play a tune if there are only one or two of them.  These are in Greece.

An unidentified bell.  This may also be a church bell in Greece.

This bell sits atop the Carlsberg Bryghus (Brewery) in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Perhaps the most famous bell ringer was Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  This depiction is from a site devoted to Rule 34: if it exists, there's porn about it.

This statue is called Carillonneur, but technically he's a bell ringer, not a carillonneur.  A  carillon is not played by pulling on ropes.

This is how a carillon is played.  This is a clip of Joey Brink, the carillonneur at the University of Chicago, playing a portion of Pachelbel's Canon.  A carillon has 23 or more bells (this one has 72), and it is played from a keyboard that consists of levers that the carillonneur pushes with his hands and pedals played with the feet, all mechanically connected via wires to pull the clappers of the bells.  (Sorry he's not naked; I couldn't find any pictures of naked carillonneurs.)

However, I did find a naked carillon protester.  In 2006 at the University of the Philippines, a group of students held a protest against Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez's statement that the university had become a "breeding ground of destabilizers and naked runners."  (See my post here about the university's annual naked run.)  Of course they protested naked.

One student is holding a sign saying "Save the carillon, let the bells ring" in support of a project to restore the carillon at the university.

Here's a rear view of the protesters.

We end with another form of musical bells.  Handbells are small hand-held bells played by a group of players, one per bell, who ring the bells in sequence to play a tune.  This is a Christmas handbells video that I found on the Geography blog.