Brian Dewan is something of a creative maverick: according to
Wikipedia, “an artist who works in many media, including art, music, audio-visual
performances, decorative painting, furniture design, poetry and
musical instrument design.” I’m not sure how this album compares
with his previous releases, but it would appear he is something
of a singer, his songs “contemplate the nature of submission to
authority, and often take the form of a tale, [being] by turns
humoristic and contemplative.”
So far so good. My initial interest
in this album springs from my general interest in bells
and bell ringing, but taking a brief closer look at the
present album shows this release to have little in common
with any traditional performance practice with regard to British
change ringing. In fact, only the title track involves the
bells of Liverpool Cathedral, and I’ll come to that last.
Both Rock of Ages and
Ages and Ages are played on the fascinating Musical
Stones of Skiddaw in Keswick Museum. There is no information
on these or anything else in the single-sheet foldout liner,
but a look on the internet and you’ll find this is an instrument
first created in the 18th century, looking a bit
like a gigantic xylophone. Brian Dewan worked on a number
of pieces for these stones and toured with them, including
a performance at the Liverpool Biennial in 2006. The two versions
of Thomas Hastings’ hymn Rock of Ages here have an
appealingly eccentric sound, the first a clunky duet with
Dewan and Jamie Barnes, the second using a gently abrasive
effect which is almost Aeolian. Nice as these are, I’m not
greatly inspired. The best part of the first is the semitone
mis-tuning of the principal bass note, so the cadence never
resolves and the tonality is distorted in splendid style.
Someone like Stephan Micus however, in his ECM album ‘Music
of Stones’, albeit in an entirely different idiom and on an
entirely different set of instruments, came up with far more
original and durable stuff. While this pair of hymns will
probably appeal to a wider audience I can’t help wishing we’d
been allowed a good deal deeper into some of the wider potential
of this unique instrument. All I could help thinking with
both these arrangements is how similar, in this context, the
theme of ‘Rock of Ages’ is to ‘Meet the Flintstones.’
The opening track Split Staircase
also uses an instrument from the Keswick Museum, the Rock
Harmonicon. This in fact has a bell-like sound, and the piece
has a fine, Japanese Zen meditative quality. The effect is
created with a slow rising scale and variations thereof, alternated
with a little cluster of chimes played almost together, and
allowed to resonate. Like a slow clockwork music-box, this
has the charm of allowing the different colours and individual
textures in tuning; the various beats and overtones of the
chimes to come through.
The main piece is of course the
title track, Ringing
at the Speed of Prayer.
The text from the Innova label site explains the process in
the piece very well: “Each of eight ringers was to
arrive at the bell tower with a number of prayers of their
own choosing; after saying each prayer (which can be any length)
the ringer pulls the rope and sounds the bell, then returns
the bell to its original position. After saying another prayer,
the bell is rung again. This yields a sparse and jagged melody
created not by an author but by Providence. Though the ringers
and their prayers can be neither seen nor heard outside the
tower, it is because of them that the bells can be heard below
intermingling with the sounds of automobiles, airplanes, emergency
vehicles and the chimes of ice-cream trucks, an intermingling
of the public and private, the seen and unseen, the secular
and the sacred.”
This is an intriguing experiment,
but while I am sympathetic with ‘game formula’ composition
and the kind of I Ching and other chance composition ideas
which people like John Cage were using a while ago I remain
to be convinced by this piece. If you are not sure 30 minutes
of more or less random ringing will be your idea of a fun
listen then I can’t really give you much in the way of inspiring
review text to try and persuade you otherwise. The most interesting
aspect of this kind of performance is the coincidental melodic
patterns which arise. A kind of consistency is built-in due
to the limited number of notes available, but there is of
course no thematic development, nor really any sense of beginning,
any musical journey in between, or ending; aside from the
final great chime as a rather predictable conclusion. In fact,
this reminds me more than anything of the times I’ve been
around when bells and their mechanisms are being tested: “bang,
bang, bang...... bang, bang......”, and just when you thing
you are going to get some peace and quiet, “bang, bang, bang,
b-bang.....” ad nauseam.
Although I’ve lived half my
life amidst the European carillon culture, I’m still very
much drawn to the organic musical splendour of British and
specifically English bells. Those in Liverpool Cathedral are
richly sonorous, and although this comes over in the recording
I also found myself asking why the piece had been recorded
or mixed in what sounds like glorious mono. Maybe this was
in order to minimise the incidental noises of jets flying
over, passing ambulances and barking dogs, but for me this
is all part of the fun of this kind of recording. It is notoriously
difficult to make a truly accurate account of this or any
other kind of bell-based event, and experiencing the thing
live makes all the difference – where you can move around
and hear the bells from different perspectives, or just enjoy
the general acoustic landscape as it floods the space around
you. Ringing at the Speed of Prayer is a nice idea,
but for me any spiritual association intended is lost as the
brain seeks to establish patterns but is eternally frustrated.
To my mind something with a bit more musical structure would
have made for a more interesting listen.
Dominy Clements
Brian Dewan with Jamie Barnes*and the Liverpool Cathedral Bell Ringers
