On January 26th 2014 I attended a concert that took place at Doylestown Presbyterian Church in Doylestown. Preforming that day was a group called the Impulse Handbell Ensemble, a group of grade school children from Monmouth county New Jersey. The group, directed by Ryan Guth uses hand bell’s to produce music and instrumentals to popular songs. Ryan Guth has been teaching middle school band for seven years now and owns his own performing arts studio named voice works. On the day I attended the concert, there were 10 compositions preformed with an intermission in between. Some major compositions that were preformed included the hit songs “call me maybe” and “counting stars”. I was quite surprised when I initially saw the program and the songs listed, because it was hard for me to comprehend how a group with bells could produce songs that we are so accustomed to hearing on the radio. Once the concert got started, I enjoyed seeing how all the bells complimented one another by the different sounds they produced. The concert itself was quite entertaining to me. I was really impressed by how 14-year-old kids could play together and be so professional. Another thing I observed was how some of the members of the ensemble played multiple instruments, which was really impressive. From the start the members of the ensemble tried to get the audience involved in the performance. The director after the first couple of songs introduced the students individually. It was a nice way of getting to know the members of the ensemble on a personal level. It was hard to say any one member of the group stood out from the others because they all worked in sync but the one of the members David played multiple bells at the same time.
The audience really seemed to enjoy the music, which was surprising to me. The crowd was older, and I initially thought they would not know many of the songs, but once the music started playing most actually started to sing along. A few compositions that stood out to me were “call me maybe”, “firework”, and “Counting stars”. The genre of these compostions was pop, which was different from some of the more jazz type songs on the program. These pieces were played surprisingly close to how the original song was preformed. David Guth, the composer actually spoke openly about how he came about to choosing one of the songs to play. He said many of the songs are written to be played on hand bells, but once song he had to write on his own.
The most recent song, “ counting stars” was yet to be written for the hand bells. Guth actually joked that some of the royalty money that is usually collected when you buy the prewritten songs should go to him. Once the group started playing the composition, I was really taken back. The piece was well put together and I thought it would have been a difficult song to replicate with bells. The original song has a constant and unique beat and the other bells would over shadow rhythm. This was not the case as the song was played actually very close to the original, which was very surprising. The compositions of “firework” and “ call me maybe” were played also quite well. The audience was singing along to these pieces in tandem with the bells.
These compositions are different from the ones we study in class due to the pace of the beat. These pieces were more up-tempo while the ones we study are slower and have a more constant rhythm. The bell ringers worked in perfect symphony and I didn’t notice any mistakes other than what the composer called a “false start”. He laughed about the mistake, when one student started playing before the rest, but the quickly got back in form and started over.
I actually really enjoyed this concert, which surprised me. I thought going in that the concert was going to be either childish or more geared towards adults. I was pleasantly surprised once I saw the program, and that I could relate to the songs. Once the songs started playing, and were up-tempo I was really engaged in listening to them and my feet started tapping to the beat. I felt that the intermission was a bit unnecessary because the concert was not that long to begin with, although it did break up the concert. I actually recommended to my mom she should research a concert similar to this one because she typically enjoys diferent concerts like these.