About our Perpetual Motion Concert

In February of this year, Bells of the Bluffs had the opportunity to perform at the Big Turn Music Festival in Red Wing, MN. Big Turn is a two day event that has over 200 musical venues performing almost constantly at over 20 venues in town. While most of the musical performers are smaller pop/rock bands, we were one of the largest groups besides the Sheldon Brass that performed.

One of my visions has been to put together a rock type concert with music that has been written/arranged for handbells. We had performed some music like this intermittently at our concerts in the past. Some of the music was in our files and some brand new to us.

Besides the bells I wanted a back up band with guitar, bass guitar, percussion, organ, singer, piccolo player and dancer to be a part of this. Some of the music had parts already written but some we had to add our own ideas and aspects of performance.

I wanted a program with no talking in between pieces but we all know that bell ringers have to reset from one piece to the next. After experimenting with various things, we finally landed on instrumental and dancer transitions between pieces and as we rehearsed, the ideas evolved. Some of these you may hear on the videos….Some worked….some could have used a bit more work and refinement but overall we felt it worked well.

One piece called Perpetuo Mobile arr. by Arnold Sherman evolved as the theme of the concert. I researched the idea of Perpetual Motion and it stuck as our theme.

There was only one piece of talking by me after our first piece explaining what people will hear and away we went. We were allotted 45 minutes for our program and we performed NINE pieces in exactly that amount of time!!