[BELL RINGING]
I need to oil these bearings about every month or so.
These have old-style plain bearings,
so it's just a post that holds the bell in place and rotates.
Modern bells would have ball bearings.
And they go a lot smoother and don't require the maintenance.
They make the bells a lot easier to ring.
But that should do it for a while.
[BELL RINGING]
Change ringing started in England
in about the 17th century.
They discovered a way to have the bells move
in a full circle.
That full-circle ringing is what leads
to change ringing, it's combination of slightly
physical activity, a lot of mental activity,
and a lot of working together.
Each step isn't really a difficult one to figure out.
But you cannot let your mind wander,
and you have to stick with it.
But I enjoy that part of it very much.
I was drawn to change ringing because
of my interest in music.
I'm studying music and computer science.
The bells provide an interesting combination of music and math
that I found appealing.
I really like the patterns that go into it
and how the patterns can manifest themselves musically.
[BELLS RINGING]
It takes a couple seconds for the bell
to swing all the way around.
So you can't ring normal music.
What you can do, though, is you have a set of bells,
and they ring one after the other.
So you can kind of have a continuous ribbon of sound.
And that gets kind of boring if-- you can't just
have the same order.
So the English said, well, let's spice things up.
What if we have a pair of bells switch places?
And every single time the bells ring, every two seconds,
they're going to ring in a different order.
Change ringing involves ringing a set of tuned bells
in a series of permutations called changes.
And the way it would go is all the bells would ring.
And then the order would change.
And that would be a new permutation.
Every row is every second and a half, or so.
So there's a small, concise set of rules
that somebody would remember.
And that will generate up to hours of unique permutations.
When somebody's ringing, they're focusing
on the path of their bell and making
it fit in with everybody else.
The people here are learning to control the bell
and starting to dabble in change ringing just a little bit.
So they don't know how glorious it is.
And I do.
And I'm trying lead them to that glory.
I was interested in how they did it.
It intrigued the heck out of me.
But I couldn't figure it out.
Ultimately, I decided the only way
I was going to figure it out was to learn it.
And Chicago has the closest bell tower.
I can't say I was real excited about driving, basically
seven hours every Saturday, but I've
been doing it every week since the beginning of the year.
There's only about, I think, 50 or so
change ringing bell towers in the US.
There's several on the East Coast.
And there are three in the Midwest.
Mitchell Tower is a replica of Magdalen Tower in Oxford,
England, so the bell tower here is strong enough
to house the bells, which isn't a given for most towers.
The bells were dedicated in 1908.
The bells are a memorial to Alice Freeman
Palmer, who was the first dean of women
here at the university.
I've been ringing here since about 1985.
And my kids ring and my wife.
I met my wife through ringing.
Somehow change ringing really leads to deep friendships.
It's that you're depending on each other
and trusting each other.
It has something that extends beyond change ringing
that I think is very meaningful.
It's a very close-knit community, a very good change
from my study at UChicago.
[BELLS RINGING]
Is it an art form?
People ask me if it's music.
And I don't know how to answer that.
I mean, it's just a beautiful sound.
Some people have said it isn't music.
But it is.
It's an unusual kind of music.
And it's kind of mathematical.
It's open for debate whether it's music, whether it's art.
[BELLS RINGING]