This survey of Orthodox church music is from the perspective of Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev from the Moscow Patriarchate and the history of his culture. He is also an accomplished composer in the tradition of classical European and Russian music. He knows it and can produce it himself. Orthodox Christians in western cultures can also relate to this important tradition of bellringing. Church bells have been a part of not only early Slavic Orthodoxy but also Italian, German, and other European Christian traditions. Byzantium, in fact, was late in accepting church bells because of its association with paganism and their suspicions due to the Schism between the Greeks and Latins. Christians in Italy called the church bells kampan, from the word campus, field.
The Typikon and other services of the Orthodox church mention the use of bells to summon and call Christians to the divine services. The main function of bellringing was to call Christians to worship. It is a percussive instrument that is made from a variety of different materials. European countries such as Italy, Germany and Poland rang church bells by swinging them back and forth. They didn’t take this ringing beyond a call to prayer; they did tend to name their bells like in Russia. But in Russian Orthodoxy, the bells are struck by hand with ropes and strings, and that’s why bells are called bila from the verb biti, to strike. In this way, it is an instrument that can produce tones with many overtones, with a rhythm, and with a tempo that would fit with the mood of the Church’s feasts and fasting periods. Bellringing reached full integration into the Church’s worship beyond a mere summoning or town alarm. It’s a complex and beautiful sacred instrument. The trumpet mentioned and used in the Old Testament is a forerunner to bells in their function and have a vaguely similar conical shape and material, although trumpets are wind instruments.
After the ancient Rus’ and the other Slavs were baptized into Orthodoxy, bells became a “sacred craft.” Many prayers for consecrating bells and their reverence are found in Orthodox prayer books and practice. They have taken bell casting and crafting to the level of sacred art, even more so than the religions of the Far East and Western Europe. Many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, might find this tradition odd or think that physical objects and sounds are unnecessary to our salvation – they are only accidental. But Metropolitan Hilarion mentioned before that music is a part of human nature. Sacred music enlivens the dead members of our body and soul, our noetic senses, and it arouses us to worship the Holy Trinity. It prepares us to worship and enter heartfelt prayer. Worship takes preparation. Since church bells are sacred, they can function also as sacraments. For example, the litanies request, “That it [the sacred bell] may drive away every power, craft, slander of invisible enemies …arouse [the faithful] to observance of the commandments.” The physical world helps us and protects from the invisible warfare. Orthodoxy isn’t an extremist or alarmist religion; it isn’t going to fearmonger people by nature or by unseen spiritual forces, but there is an acknowledgement of these real dangers and it’s dealt with appropriately and effectively through the prayers of the Church, and it’s through the Church’s prayers that the physical world is being saved through “the all-consecrating Spirit” that makes bells holy for worship.
The form of the bells also drives the function. The overtones that are produced by striking the bells has a tremendous effect in conjunction with the prayers of priests in the Orthodox Church and when it is included during the divine services. Our ears hear church bells in a unique way. Each bell has its own arrangement of sounds and tones. There is a dominant tone that is surrounded and cloaked by many overtones that would be considered “dissonant” according to classical musical standards. Each bell has a characteristic that could be described as soft or sharp like each human voice has its own identifiable sound. But like Byzantine neume notation, there isn’t an exact pitch or precision to the sounds, even if they are written into letter notation, it’s only approximated to what is heard. The church bells are not like instruments that have a single pitch nor are they like instruments that have many pitches. The relationship between the main tone and the overtones in addition to the character and rhythm that is appropriate for the mood of the divine service has a powerful effect on worshippers. From Tales of a Moscow Bell Ringer, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote a poem about this experience:
The freezing temperatures nipped. Knocking their boots together to warm their toes, people were growing tired of waiting, when, suddenly and without warning, their waiting was over. It was as if the sky burst open! A thunder-clap … Suddenly a steam of bird’s chirping sounded – the flowing singing of certain unknown large birds in a festal jubilation of bells! A shouting of sounds, bright and shining against the background of the rumbling and booming! Alternating melodies, vying and yielding voices. A flood which gushed forth in streams and inundated the neighborhood …. The bells were like giant birds emitting brass, rumbling peals, golden and silver cries. They strike against the dark blue silver of swallows’ voices, filling the night with an unusual bonfire of melodies.
Like architecture, icons and chanting, bells too were martyred and destroyed by anti-Christian regimes and philosophies. These holy melodies resounded across a cold Russian landscape many years ago and people renewed the spiritual hearts. Church bellringing can be a symbol that we need the consecrated sounds of our world to wake us up, to give us strength to endure, and to pray fully with our heart. Next, Volume IV discusses this topic of worship and the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church.