Posts about attempting to ring Roddy Horton's famously difficult composition, and some strategies for acquiring the right skills.
The top peal on BellBoard at the moment is up-and-coming youngster Michael Shaw calling Horton's Four on handbells, for his first peal as conductor. From 3-4. This is really impressive - very well done, Michael.
When we rang Horton's Four with the Albany Quadrant band, I summarised the handbell performances...
Scottish Association
Glasgow
1 Albany Quadrant
Saturday, 13 May 2017 in 2h43 (15C)
5024 Spliced Surprise Major (4m)
1344 Glasgow; 1248 London; 1216 Bristol, Belfast; 113 c.o.m.; a.t.w.
1-2 Angela H Deakin
3-4 Tina R Stoecklin
5-6 Jonathan S Frye
7-8 Simon J Gay (C)
We finally did...
2016 is an easy year for date touches, as it's a multiple of 32, so it's possible to ring a whole number of leads of Surprise Major. Not only that, but the number of leads is 63 = 9 x 7, so it's 9 full courses. For example, (W 3H)...
We are half way through a Horton's Four weekend - we attempted the peal this morning, and we're going for it again tomorrow afternoon. So what happened? After a short false start, we rang quite decently for two hours, right up to the beginning of the split tenors section. Then...
We are still working on Horton's Four, but I won't have anything new to say about ringing it until we eventually score. Meanwhile, here are some thoughts about how I learn and call a difficult composition of spliced. I hope that readers who are better conductors will comment from their...
To return to our Horton's Four project, we decided to ring a quarter of each method individually. I have written several articles about handbell-friendly compositions, but Horton's Four is an extreme example of ringing an ordinary composition (actually its difficulty makes it far from ordinary) on handbells, so I decided...
Regular observers of the goings-on at 1 Albany Quadrant might have noticed that we have been working on Horton's Four (London, Bristol, Glasgow and Belfast), following a successful peal in the tower in December. From seeming impossible at first, it is gradually starting to feel more manageable, although we still find...
If I had delayed my previous post by one week, I would have been able to end the post on a higher note (see Getting to grips with Horton's 4).
After not quite getting a quarter of Horton's 4 in the days immediately following our successful tower bell peal...
Since completing our 8-spliced project last June, we have turned our attention to another spliced challenge - that of ringing Horton's 4 (Glasgow, Bristol, Belfast, London) in hand. Well. After some detours into other little projects and the odd handbell day.
The impetus to get started was provided by the...