For Whom The Bell Tolls

Every Sunday at 1 p.m., the Lowell House bell tower erupts in cacophony, as the Lowell House Society of Russian Bell-Ringers plays a series of traditional peals, contemporary melodies, and original improvisational pieces on the set of 17 Russian Orthodox bells that are audible across campus. Although understanding the history and methodology behind Harvard’s bell-ringing tradition helps illuminate this niche art form, the bells are also physically beautiful as pieces of art themselves. This photo essay illuminates the appearance and arrangement of the bells up close, giving a glimpse of what goes on in the bell tower during a typical Sunday ringing.

The Lowell bell tower consists of a main lower platform, as well as an upper platform called a belfry. Ringers on the belfry play the melody and chime bells, while the lower platform serves as an access point to the large “Mother Earth” bell, the stomper bells, and a viewing area to watch the ringers play.

Often, a ringer stands in the southeast corner of the lower platform at the only point within sight of all ringers on the belfry, stomper area, and Mother Earth section of the tower. This ringer conducts the others and signals when to start and stop a peal.

Writing a column about bell-ringing is, in a way, a hopeless endeavor. The experience is like taking a photocopy of a photocopy — the product takes you further from the art at hand, the lived experience. How can I convey in writing what the vibration of the bell feels like up there in the tower, what it feels like as the breeze off the Charles River numbs your fingers while you tap away at wires that physically connect bell-ringer to bell, and what it feels like to struggle with your fellow ringers to honor your inherited place in a centuries-old tradition without ever really knowing the people you inherited it from? I’m writing this column because I’d like to try.

The history of the Lowell Bells is fairly well-documented already, with articles and information on the Lowell House website and even published in the New Yorker. However, what I’m interested in documenting is not the bells themselves, but rather the process and experience of bell-ringing. I’ve been a Lowell Bell-Ringer for over a year now, ringing each week and participating in the bell exchange trip to Estonia and Finland to learn from traditional ringers. In that time, I’ve slowly fallen in love with the practice and principles of bell-ringing, while simultaneously understanding how strange and discordant the tradition might seem from the outside.

It’s painfully easy to get someone to hear the bells — just exist within a half-mile radius of the bell tower on Sundays at 1pm and you can’t escape it — yet very difficult to describe what’s going on inside the tower. In fact, it’s near-impossible to convey what being a true bell-ringer actually feels like.