Yesterday we rang a quarter of Rhodium Surprise Major (diagram from CompLib.org, above), and as I wrote last time, I will explain why later. It's one of the methods named after chemical elements (I believe they were mostly composed by Tony Cox), so we've rung two of them now, the other being Silver. Only 116 to go! But that's not our project. The method is Bristol above the treble - actually it's completely Bristol except when the treble is in 7-8. Because of the different place bell order though, it doesn't feel so much like a variation of Bristol, and certainly not a trivial variation. We had a couple of lengthy false starts (more than a course in each case) but then got to grips with it and succeeded.

My first thought was to use the same composition as for Springboig, namely five befores and six homes, but it's false to Rhodium. I then found a nice composition with a computer search, and when I put it into CompLib to double-check it, I found that it was in there half a dozen times already for different methods and credited to different composers. Apparently it has been in the Ringing World Diary as a composition of Deva. Here it is.

1280 Rhodium Surprise Major

B  M  W  H   23456
------------------
   -     -   64352
      -      56342
-  -     -   35426
      -      23456
------------------  

The M H W is a block with whole courses between calls, then there's a Before, then a repeat of the M H W block. The coursing orders outside the plain course are 53462, 54632, 46532, 24653, 24536, 25346 which are all on my list of 31 friendly coursing orders. It's nice and musical. It also works for Bristol with a length of 1312, so it's a good one to keep in mind.