An Unforeseen Hazard of Continuing Education

I am the worst ringer in my hand bell choir. This is not because I’m tone deaf or mentally subnormal. It’s because I never learned to read sheet music.

Until I started ringing, my only encounter with sheet music happened in grade school. A teacher, whose name and face are long forgotten, although the memory of her wooden ruler still stimulates synaptic traffic, drew five lines on the board, then scribbled dots on the lines and sang doh-ray-me-fa-so-la-tee-doh.  Being something of a musical prodigy, doh-ray-me was hardly a challenge for me.  I’d been singing along with Hank Williams and Fats Domino on the radio ever since I discovered my vocal chords. I only had to hear a tune once to remember it, so didn’t pay any more attention to music lessons. While I waited for my classmates to figure out the tune (so I could hear it) I drew ponies on the fly leaf of the song book. (They were a particular passion of mine between the ages of seven and nine, when I finally sat on one and the infatuation died. )

Through the remainder of grade school, including five years in the school choir and a one year stint with a city-wide children’s chorus, no one ever discovered my shameful secret.  I learned to play guitar by listening to records. The doh-ray-me method enjoyed a short comeback as a way to record melody lines for the songs I wrote, provoking gales of laughter from the studio musicians who worked on my demo tapes.  Other than this blow to my ego, I survived sixty years as a musical illiterate with no ill effects.

Then, about a year ago, my friend Wen tricked me into joining a beginners hand bell choir by assuring me the ability to read sheet music was not a prerequisite. She didn’t lie. Wen’s a very honest person. Strictly speaking, it not necessary to read sheet music to join a hand bell choir. It is only necessary if you want to ring the damn things.

At first I wasn’t at too much of a disadvantage, even though everyone else in the group was either a choralist or pianist or some other kind of ‘ist for whom musical literacy is a requirement. Hand bell sheet music is not the same as regular sheet music. For one thing, the dots (the technical term for these is notes) are written in configurations regular dots don’t normally assume. For another, all kinds of odd notations have been invented to document bell-related techniques for different ways to ring and stop ringing (technical term: damping). It was a learning curve for everyone and my illiteracy went relatively unremarked in the general kafuffle of matching new notations to new physical skills. It was further obscured by Terry, the choir director, who wisely concentrated his training efforts on those more likely to benefit from them.

I noticed that the big bells rang fewer times, so staked out my turf at the low end of the bell table. Initially, this seemed like a mistake, because it turned out there were two sets of lines (technical term: staffs) and my bells were on the lower one (technical term: bass staff) where the doh-ray-me method doesn’t work. I was forced to learn the names of my notes – G and A – and what they looked like on the page.

As time passed, my decision to stake out the big bells bore fruit. With only two fairly infrequent notes to worry about, I gradually began to acquire a dim understanding of things like time signatures, note values, sharps and flats, rests and repeats, and the all-important frowny-dot,  which means look at the conductor.  I was still the worst ringer in the group, but  the gap never widened much.

Then, last week, Terry handed out sheet music for a song I’d never heard before. It was in 6/8 time, which I’d no idea how to count; had two page turns, which are not easy when both hands are full of bells; and worst of all, there were G’s and A’s in every bar. I panicked.  Ignoring Terry’s general walkthrough of the piece, I concentrated on my two precious notes, reading through each bar slowly and carefully.  Just as I was starting to relax, Terry moved Wen, who had been playing the station on my right, to a different location.  This meant I had to move up to Wen’s station. Before I could even get started panicking, Terry counted us in.

In 1990, a psychologist named (slightly redundantly) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  published a book entitled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I read it a few years later during the pursuit-of-happiness phase of therapy. To oversimplify, and with apologies to Mihaly, a sense of extreme well-being is experienced when people are performing a challenging task at a high level of concentration with a definite goal and getting immediate feedback. At these times, a person becomes part of the task rather than standing outside it. They have a sense of control without striving for control. Their sense of self disappears, their sense of time alters, and they are in a state of flow. There was some pooh-poohing about the validity of this theory at the time. Today, I am pleased to announce, based on personal experience: flow absolutely exists.

I picked up my two new bells. I got the first bar right, mostly by accident, since I wasn’t sure which bell was in which hand. I got the second bar right, boosting my confidence. Suddenly, my universe collapsed into the B and C dots on the page. I couldn’t hear the other ringers anymore. My hips started rocking with the one-and-ah  two-and-ah rhythm of 6/8 time. I stopped ringing the bells and became the bells, sounding out in an eternal, joyous now. I don’t remember turning the pages, but I must have, because I didn’t miss a beat. At the end of the piece, when we got to the frowny-dot over the last note, I looked at Terry and held my B-bell aloft like an Olympian bearing the eternal flame.

The outside me just smiled. The inside me was higher than Alan Watts on a research grant. This euphoria lasted right up until I realized I had – finally - learned to read sheet music.

Now what excuse will I use for being the worst ringer in my hand bell choir?