ROCK ISLAND, Ill. — Drive by 15th Avenue Christian Church in Rock Island on Tuesday nights, and you'll hear a choir of bells.
The RiverBend Bronze handbell ensemble is hard at work preparing for its annual spring concerts. The group is made up of 20 people from all over the Quad Cities area. Together, they play more than 300 different bells and chimes.
"If you have a piano, and you have one person playing the piano, they play all the notes," member Tricia Fueling said. "But with bells, think of everyone only having two to four notes of the piano and having 20 different pianos next to each other and everyone was responsible for their two little notes. But you have to make it still sound like on person and one instrument."
Everyone has to audition to become part of the group. It was formed nine years ago.
"The bell choir director at Augustana had kids that were graduating out that wanted to keep playing," said Gail Glockhoff-Long, who's one of the original members. "We didn't have a community audition, high-level group in the area, so he got together some of his Augie grads and they brought some friends and we auditioned and put the group together."
Both women describe it as a team sport that requires a lot of cooperation with one another. To prepare for the spring concerts, the group started rehearsals in January and has put in nearly 40 hours together.
"The most challenging part of hand ringing is putting is altogether and making it sound like one instrument," said Director John Klopp. "Some of the people up on the higher bells are ringing four in hand, so they actually have two bells in each and going in different directions. There's different techniques for dampening the bell to get different sounds, so it's a bit involved, especially at this level."
Fueling started playing handbells in 2012 with her mother-in-law at her church in Geneseo. She's been in RiverBend Bronze since 2014 and enjoys the higher-level challenge of it. Sometimes she even travels around the country to play with different people.
"I like the visual aspect of bells," she said. "Of course, it's wonderful music, we play a lot of fun stuff, but being able to see it, and you can see the rise and the fall of the melody lines, and when it gets louder, your bells are higher and when it's softer, your bells are down lower."
"It's kind of visceral," Glockhoff-Long said. "When you play and you see the audience is just totally overwhelmed by the visual and the sound that we can make, and we finish, and there's a dead silence. Because they just, they're overwhelmed by the music."
While learning to play together is a challenge, Fueling said actually playing handbells isn't super hard.
"Anyone can play bells," she said. "It seems kind of intimidating when you see a group of 20 people get up on stage and perform, but my basic is, if you can hold ice cream cones, and you can count to four, you can play handbells."
RiverBend Bronze puts on four concerts throughout the year. Two are in December around the holidays and two are in the Spring. The concerts are free to attend on Saturday, April 22 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Moline, and Saturday, April 29 at Wesley United Methodist Church in Muscatine.
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