Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Part 2

Oops, I really veered off the subject there, but I’m not sorry at all.

This here post is about the loudspeakers on top of Jefferson City’s First Presbyterian Church, uptown on the corner of Madison and McCarty. It’s a stately brick building, built in the late 1920s, and the congregation is one of Jeff City’s oldest (it dates back to the 1830s).

The Presbyterians have an electronic carillon system: Bell-like sounds that blast out of loudspeakers, based on preprogrammed digital renditions of “favorite” hymns.

Are these your favorite hymns? If not, too bad for you, because they play for about fifteen minutes three times a day: 8 a.m., noon, and 4 p.m. They play one, two, or three verses of four or five different hymns. They change the hymn selections every month or so—to keep the town from rioting, I suspect.

At times it seems endless; just when one hymn ends, and you think the ordeal is over, another one whirrs into gear.

Here’s where I have problems with it: they do songs that would never have been played on normal (manually operated) bells, because they’re hymn tunes (not traditional bell chime tunes) with chords and diatonic and even chromatic tones or accidentals, and the songs involve many notes and chords in succession. To play these on traditional bells, you’d need dozens of differently keyed bells (like a handbell choir—and don’t get me started on them). And perhaps worst, with the sustain of the chime notes, the various tones run together and create dissonance. To my ear, anyway.

Imagine if a piano player kept the sustain pedal depressed through a whole song: Tonal mush.

One of the things that makes the “Big Ben” tune work for bells is that it’s all basically one chord, so there’s little dissonance when the tones overlap. Only four bells (notes) are needed.

Plus, I think as you get farther away from the Presbyterians’ loudspeakers, the wind and distance take a toll on the sound quality (pun intended). So when that church first started broadcasting their hymns this way, I usually bristled when I heard the system launch into what I knew would be fifteen whole minutes of dissonant hometown holiness.

Okay: Now I’m going to turn it all around, though, and tell you that although I used to gripe about how the Presbyterians and their loud system are drowning out the “traditional” dingers of the Catholics . . . I’m starting to kinda like them.

(Does this mean I’m starting to fit in, here in Jefferson City? Gads.)

But here is what happened: Because I work at home and leave the windows open, because I go outside a lot, I’m finding that like people from a hundred years ago, I’m using those bells to regulate my day. I’m a freelancer; I quit wearing a watch a few months ago.

So I hear the bells and think, “Wow, it’s time for me to get out of bed.” I hear them at noon and trot downstairs to fix myself a sandwich. I hear them at four and start thinking about kicking back in a lawn chair with an O’Doull’s.

And sure, I know all those tunes—they’re standard hymns. And I find them getting stuck in my head. I find myself humming “Come Ye Thankful People Come” and “Faith of Our Fathers.” I don’t think it’s making me a holier person, but the measured tempos and step-by-step chord progressions seem somehow to mirror the emerging pattern of these freelance days, superimposing the idea of structure where I so badly need it.

And so I’m finding it a welcome companion these days.

Even if the sustain of the tones leads to weird dissonances. Even if the sound comes from loudspeakers instead of real bells. This is the twenty-first century, after all; some stuff is going to have to change in order to stay the same.

Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong Bong

Hah! Now I’m virtually assured that people Googling on marijuana paraphernalia (“bongs”) will locate my site and be sorely disappointed to find that this post’s subject is . . . church music. But I’m ready for the annoyed comments. In fact, I think it will be funny.

But let me back up a bit. This is a very bongy town. And by that, I mean ding-dongy: There’s always a bell ringing someplace. From our house we can hear bells from the Cole County Courthouse, St. Peter Catholic Church, and Central United Church of Christ. And then there are the dingers of the Presbyterians, which are not, strictly speaking, bells but a carillon system that plays out of loudspeakers.

Let me back up a little bit more. (Sorry this is so disorganized. Call up some editor and complain.) See, not long after Grandma passed away, I found myself sitting alone in the backyard of her house (our house now), looking at her flowerbeds, hearing the birds chirp, and feeling, quite sharply, the passage of time.

And then the bells rang. It was St. Peter’s. They must have some really old bells—yeah, real bells—and they always do the “Westminster Chimes” melody, which uses four pitches: a first (tonic), a second, a third, and a fifth. The fifth is the lowest tone. You know this tune—it’s the same thing Big Ben uses in London.

And I started thinking about how long those bells must have chimed in this town. I reflected on how my grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides heard those and other bells and regulated their lives by the chimes.

Bells ringing: time to get up.
Bells ringing: time to be at work.
Bells ringing: time to break for lunch.
Bells ringing: time to knock off for the day and get some dinner.

Such bells served an important public service. I sat there on the bench and dialed back to a time I never knew, a time when there weren’t three clocks in every room, before you had a cell phone, a wrist watch, and a clock on the dashboard, all telling you the time.

A time when a pocket watch was a piece of fine jewelry, each adult allotted maybe one, and a clock on the mantel a valuable heirloom. Not everyone had watches, and these clock towers kept the whole town regulated.

It was an interesting thing, to listen to the bells with that perspective.

But here is something funny and quirky about the St. Peter’s bells: the low note is flat. Waaaay flat. Like almost a half step. And it sounds reeeeeaaalllly lame. And it should! A flatted fifth (diminished fifth, a.k.a. an augmented fourth) played against the tonic creates a huge dissonance (like a C and an F# played together).

It sounds so dissonant that early music theorists referred to this interval (a tritone—the span of three whole tones) as the “devil’s interval,” “the devil in music.”

So of course, I find myself chuckling when I hear that flat bell, and I think of how medieval (Catholic) composers and music theorists eschewed this “scary,” “evil,” and “diabolical” interval. There’s some debate about whether or not musicians were actually excommunicated for performing this interval.

I just think it’s funny when I hear that flat bell: “Bong, bong, bong, buuuung . . .” The Catholic devil’s tritone wafting over the heart of the city makes me think of how the overly religious types have moved on over the centuries to find their devils elsewhere, like in households where same-gender couples are living in “Til death do us part” committed relationships and wanting the same legal recognitions, rights, and responsibilities as those in heterosexual unions. And when they finally accept that as normal, like the flatted fifth, they’ll just move on to some other devil or scapegoat.