[r-t] New Grandsire [was Old methods]

[King, Peter R]

How far are people really prepared to go with this? Would you allow two bells to strike together, or syncopation (these might be a problem for judges of striking competitions whereby a typical Sunday morning hack through plain bob doubles is actually a perfectly struck course of "crunch bob doubles"). Do you require all the bells to strike in each row? Why can't the treble set his/her bell, go off for a pint and then join in twice as fast as everyone else for the rest of the time. In fact I have rung numerous peals of John Cages' composition "5040 silence" (usually in my sleep). What about other "rules", like retaining bells in hand for hand bell peals or not ringing from manuscript. Of course absolutely everything is possible and, as alluded to above this is analogous to what has happened in modern music (& the arts in general). Is there anything that you would define as being essential to change ringing, an absolute minimum below which you would not go? eg all bells must ring the same number of times, all the rows must be different - on 6 if you allowed chords or syncopation then you wouldn't be restricted to 720 changes. Personally I suspect that no one would want to do these things - but you only have to go to Tate Modern to see how far some will go in pursuit of their art. Perhaps PJE is the Damien Hirst of the change ringing world!


-----Original Message-----
From: ringing-theory-bounces at bellringers.net on behalf of Philip Earis
Sent: Fri 7/18/2008 2:21 PM
To: ringing-theory at bellringers.net
Subject: Re: [r-t] New Grandsire [was Old methods]
 
Matthew:
"If you can ring 4 consecutive blows then why not 6? why not 8? why not
12? why not 50? I personally don't particularly see a need for more than
4 or 6 at most, but I am guessing that you would never be happy with any
limit, and similarly with jump changes, if you can move 2 places, why
not 3? why not just move to any place in the change? It would be
impossible on bells of any weight, but on mini-rings or handbells you
could do it. Being able to ring any changes in any order? Is that the
way forward?"

Exactly! I think the message might be getting through.  All of these
constraints are arbitrary, so why not simply remove them all.  

My "framework" is that I don't think any decisions should put a "value
judgement" on any method - ie "this is better than that". Of course I
have my own views on different methods, but I don't try to impose them
by suggesting that things I don't like should fall foul of the official
"Decisions". 

Mine is not the radical view - it's the few in charge of the methods
committee and the CC that have the (unpalatable) radical views. They are
the ones who are happy to toss around words like "deprecate" in official
Decisions.

Some people are afraid of change. It's like protectionism versus free
trade. North Korea vs free markets. Live & let live.


Matthew again:
"Both of these examples are relating far more to compositions than to
the actual methods, to most ringers there is no real difference between
ringing a multi-extent block and ringing multiple individual extents"

Hmm.  The two can be surprisingly similar. Both were examples of CC
Decisions / pronouncements that, when liberalised, have led to good new
things.


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