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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

Bell ringing is English?? I grew up in England and assumed all churches everywhere did it. I guess I just never noticed its absence in the USA, despite living here for over 20 years.

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93% of the rings of 6 bells or more which are rung for English style change ringing are in England. Source: https://dove.cccbr.org.uk/

Change ringing is a branch of Group Theory and is mentioned in Knuth. The Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm for efficiently generating permutations was published in the early 1960s, but has been known about by change ringers since the 1600s. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinhaus%E2%80%93Johnson%E2%8...

Not bell ringing - change ringing. Most places they play a tune on them; our ringers work out mathematical permutations instead.

Edit: ...and I should add: Sayers was quite reactionary, preternaturally English, and writing in the 1930s, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it wasn't true that change ringing was uniquely English.

Apparently change ringing, or something similar, is practiced in Verona. But otherwise it seems unique to the UK, or UK influenced cultures.

Interesting, but the wikipedia article states that "they play slowly moving tunes, not the continuous change ringing of the English tradition"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronese_bell_ringing

So unless you have another reference...? (You did say "something similar" to be fair)

Here you go: https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/articles/basic-tuition/ita...

There are a fair few videos on YouTube as well.

That link (like the Wikipedia article) is talking about the mechanism by which the bell is rung, not what is rung out on them i.e. they are not ringing the changes.

It's got compositions on the page, a link to a PDF with compositions in it and a link to the Veronese ringing association which has many more examples - if you can read Italian.

Ah, I stand corrected. I couldn't listen to the examples last night so I have egg on my face this morning :)

I hadn't completely checked it either FWIW so worth asking the question.

It does sound slightly different as they use chords.

… and writing a detective story rather than a non-fiction book.

The reality is that someone writing in Harper's in 2025 and using a Dorothy L. Sayers Peter Wimsey story from 1934 as a supporting source is presenting a hopelessly outdated and fictional picture of the world and is going to come up for starters against the Australia and New Zealand Association of Bellringers, founded in 1962.

* https://anzab.org.au

There is some change ringing in the USA, just not very much of it. There are towers around.. https://www.nagcr.org/towers-and-bands

There's even a few change ringing towers dotted around parts of Africa, Australia, some of Europe. Just few and far between.

But when compared to England, where practically every town can be relied upon to have at least a 6 bell tower where change ringing can happen, it's no comparison.

My college (Sewanee: The University of the South) is one of the few places in the US with a change ringing tower. It definitely fit the Anglophilic vibe of the place. It was always lovely to hear.

Apparently, I now live in one of the other places where there is a tower (Carmel, IN), but I’ve never heard changes rung on it. It doesn’t appear from the website that it has any local players, which is too bad.

Very few churches in the American suburbs have bells, and most have replaced them with speakers playing recorded bells if they have anything at all :(

A surprising number have bells or refurbished their bell towers in the last 20 years - but many are more gong than bell as the bell is hit with a powered solenoid.

Hand-rung bells do still exist and get installed; offhand I know of one new installation and three old.

This might be two ways of saying the same thing, but I wonder if it’s less about culture and more about having a lot more big-giant-bell-era churches. Not that you implied your observation is about culture. I’m doing that.

Many of those big bells in other cultures are on fixed mountings (in a carillon, for instance). The idea of mounting the bell on a rotating wheel - which imposes limits on what music can be played due to the rotational inertia of the wheel, therefore leading to a unique style of composition - is distinctively English.

Specifically, it’s a subculture that emerged in the Church of England in particular - other churches in England built with big bells - Baptist, Methodist, Catholic and so on - are not built with the kind of bells that do this kind of ringing.

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