The Bells of Russia: History and Technology

by Edward V. Williams

Overview

This generously illustrated book records the story of Russia's bells—the thousands of awe inspiring instruments that gave voice to the visual splendors of Russian Orthodoxy and to the political aspirations of the tsars.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639260
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #58
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Bells of Russia

History and Technology

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By Edward V. Williams

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09131-0

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CHAPTER 1

Voices of Ancient Trumpets

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In Leningrad on the granite embankment of Vasilevsky Island opposite the Academy of Arts, two Egyptian sphinxes flank a landing stage whose steps descend into the Neva (figure 1). Brought to St. Petersburg from Thebes in the spring of 1832, this pair of sphinxes had guarded the entrance to a temple that Amenhotep III had built near the Nile at the beginning of the fourteenth century B.C. Beneath the desert sun, these syenite creatures had once heard the bellowing of royal trumpets. Then, after more than three millennia in Egypt, they reached St. Petersburg during the final century of the old regime, and in their new home in the snows of northern Bussia they met the rhythmic music from St. Isaac's untuned bells across the river. The prehistory of Bussian bell ringing begins in Egypt with the crafting and blowing of metal trumpets, essentially in the presence of the Leningrad sphinxes.

Ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome

Among the "wonderful things" brought to light in 1922 with the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen (d. mid-fourteenth-century B.C.) were two trumpets, a silver one and a slightly shorter copper or bronze instrument, both with some gold overlay (figure 2). A third trumpet of bronze from Boman Egypt is preserved in the Louvre. These three trumpets, together with certain idiophones, are the only ancient Egyptian instruments still capable of reproducing their original sound.

Hickmann has described the timbre of the two trumpets from the tomb of Tutankhamen as "raucous and powerful, particularly in their low sounds." Plutarch remarked circa A. D. 120 that residents in the Egyptian towns of Busiris and Lycopolis had already ceased to use the trumpet (salpinx, or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) in their rites because it made "a noise like an ass," an animal regarded as a demonic beast because of its resemblance to the god Typhon. The apparent braying noises emitted from these relatively short ancient trumpets may have resulted from the fairly high pitch of their ground tone and from the restricted number of notes available above this pitch.

In the ancient world end-blown metal trumpets served as military instruments but were also sounded in certain ceremonies and rituals of a sacred or semisacred nature. The straight Egyptian trumpet or šnb occurs so frequently in a military context in Egyptian art beginning with the New Kingdom (1567-1085 B.C.) that there can be no doubt that it was used for signaling during battle. An early representation of the šnb appears circa 1480 B.C. on a relief from the Temple of Hatshepsut at Thebes (figure 3), showing a trumpeter leading a procession of soldiers at a festival during her reign. In another example, also from Thebes, a trumpeter, possibly sounding cadence on the šnb, faces a file of six armed soldiers and an officer.

Evidence for the use of trumpets in Egyptian rites of worship is less abundant. Despite engraved figures of the gods Rê-'Horakhti, Amon-Rê', and Ptah on the lotus-shaped bells of the two trumpets from Tutankhamen's tomb, Howard Carter believed that these instruments had functioned in a military capacity. Each of the three Egyptian deities, Carter maintained, probably served as tutelary patron of a legion in the imperial Egyptian army. Several scenes from Dynasties IV, V, and VI, however, show trumpeters standing in boats and may represent a ceremonial use of the trumpet in barques for the dead as early as the third millennium B.C. Stronger evidence for the trumpet's role in the cult of the dead during the Roman period in Egypt is found in a painting on an Egyptian coffin from A.D. 212, which shows a trumpeter sounding his instrument before Osiris (figure 4). Furthermore, Eustathius, Archbishop of Thessaloniki (fl. A.D. 1175), ascribes the invention of the trumpet to Osiris and reports its use in rites associated with worship of this god.

To what extent the silver trumpets of the ancient Hebrews were modeled on Egyptian instruments is still not certain, but their length and form as well as their manufacture from leaves of silver are features common to the trumpets of both peoples. The earliest mention of trumpets as instruments of convocation appears in Numbers 10:1 and 2, where God commanded Moses on Sinai to make two trumpets (hazozeroth), each from a whole sheet of silver. A detailed description of the silver Hebrew trumpet appears in Josephus, who reports that it was "little less than a cubit" (17 to 21 inches) in length and that it had a straight, narrow tube terminating in a bell flare. The well-known relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome (after A.D. 81) shows a late rendering of a pair of hazozeroth, which, together with other sacred objects, was removed from the Temple when Jerusalem fell to the Romans in A.D. 70 (figure 5). But the two straight trumpets carved on the Arch of Titus are closer in appearance to the long Roman tuba than to ancient Egyptian prototypes. It is possible that the sculptor of Ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome this relief never had seen hazozeroth himself and carved into this panel on the Arch of Titus the form and shape of the tubae he had known in Rome.

If details on trumpets as cultic instruments in ancient Egypt are meager, account of their ritual use in the encampments on Sinai is clearly set forth in the tenth chapter of Numbers. In fact, four different functions are cited for the hazozeroth Moses fashioned in the wilderness, among them their use as ritual or cultic instruments. Because the musical resources of ancient trumpets were extremely limited, the hazozerah, for calls to assembly, was used both singly and in pairs. This practice established at an early date a precedent for distinguishing signals through contrasts in volume and perhaps in pitch. When two trumpets were sounded together, "all the assembly shall assemble themselves ... at the door of the tabernacle [tent of meeting] of the congregation." If one trumpet was blown, then only the princes or heads of the tribes were summoned.

An alarm signal, sufficiently distinct from the call for assembly, sounded four times for breaking camp and dismantling the Tabernacle. At the first alarm, the eastern quarter of the encampment prepared to move out. When the second, third, and fourth alarms were sounded, the southern, western, and northern quarters followed. These four alarms relied upon a series of commands issued through the temporal spacing of four blasts.

The military role of trumpets in ancient Israel, first stated in Numbers 10:9, is articulated in great detail in the Dead Sea scroll that contains The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, written perhaps in the second half of the first century B.C. But even in their military capacity, trumpets were used principally to remind Hebrew soldiers of the religious nature of warfare. The priestly privilege of blowing trumpets, unequivocally established on Sinai, was maintained over the centuries even on the field of battle, and priests' trumpets bore inscriptions dedicating them to their sacred purpose. Though signals both on silver hazozeroth and on shofaroth (rams' horns) were blown during battle, directions in Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness explicitly state that the former are to be blown by six priests and the latter are to be sounded by the Levites.

In the Tabernacle on Sinai and later in the Temple silver trumpets were sounded on certain days and at prescribed moments during sacrificial rites. In Jerusalem hazozeroth were also blown at the beginning of every month, on solemn days, and on festive occasions, including the coronations of Hebrew kings. Trumpets are specifically mentioned in the Bible at the anointing and crowning of Joash in the ninth century B.C. The Bible further reports 120 priests blowing trumpets during the national rejoicing that accompanied the dedication of Solomon's Temple circa 950 B.C.

In the Temple the silver trumpets were blown during the three breaks in the daily singing of Psalms. At each of these pauses in the psalmody, the priestly trumpeters blew three blasts, and each time the people prostrated themselves. The Talmud preserves a description of the use of trumpets during the sacrificial rites of the Second Temple, which Zorobabel built after the Babylonian Captivity:

The deputy high priest stood on the horn of the altar with the flags in his hand, and two priests on the table of the fat [pieces] with two trumpets in their hands. They blew a teki'ah [prolonged], a teru'ah [staccato] and a teki'ah, and then went and stood by Ben Arza, one on his right hand and one on his left. When he bent down to make the libation the deputy high priest waved the flags and Ben Arza struck the cymbals and the Levites chanted the Psalm. When they came to a pause a teki'ah was blown, and the public prostrated themselves; at every pause there was a tekfah and at every teki'ah a prostration. This was the order of the regular daily sacrifice for the service of the House of our God.

Though both the Greek salpinx and the Roman tuba were primarily used as military instruments, they also participated in religious rites and state ceremonies. When the salpinx was blown in rituals, as it was on occasion, it was called "the sacred trumpet" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). It was a long, straight trumpet, generally of metal, which terminated in a bell ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), the wide mouth of the instrument. A vase painting from the first half of the fifth century B.C. shows a hoplite sounding a salpinx (figure 6). Together with the cornu, lituus, and bucina, the tuba was a Roman instrument of Etruscan origin. Tubae were also blown in Roman cult music, and their players, the tubicines, even enjoyed a privileged position. Twice each spring, the tubae blown in religious, military, and state functions were blessed in a ceremony called tubilustrium.A straight, cylindrical instrument terminating in a bell, the Roman tuba was usually made of bronze sections and measured about 4.33 feet. Recause of the unusual length of both the salpinx and tuba, the players of both often wore a mouth band ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or capistrum). Classical writers have used the Latin words terribilis and rauca to describe the sound of tubae.

Signals blown on ancient trumpets were limited to rhythmic calls on one or two pitches and could be distinguished through pitch and tone — low and full or high and thin. These instruments were therefore generally capable of producing three kinds of signals: (1) a blast at a high dynamic level, (2) a sustained tone of moderate intensity, and (3) a quavering sound produced through rapid alternations of the fundamental and an overblown note. In all probability, early Christian communities in Upper Egypt adopted these three kinds of articulation on the trumpet for their first calls to services.

Early Christian Egypt

During the early fourth century, when Christians were permitted to assemble freely without fear of persecution, St. Pachomius (ca. 290-346) abandoned his eremitical life to embrace and propagate a coenobitical, or communal, monastic ideal. About 320 he committed himself to the new movement at Tabennesis. Numbers of other Egyptian anchorites also renounced their solitary existence in the desert to follow Pachomius and chose a regulated monastic ideal, which called for a structured life of daily worship, work, and communal meals. In the Thebaid along the Nile Pachomius established and supervised no fewer than eleven foundations for his spiritual protégés.

St. Jerome's Latin translation of the fourth-century monastic rule that bears the name of Pachomius contains two passages in which the blowing of a trumpet (tuba) is cited as a summons to the assembly hall.

III. Whenever he hears the voice of the trumpet as a call to assembly, he leaves his cell immediately, meditating on a passage of scripture all the way to the door of the assembly hall.

IX. When the sound of the trumpet announces an assembly during the day, he who arrives late for prayer at that place will in turn be chastised with the previously stated [manner of] rebuke and will remain in the refectory.

In the Greek texts of the second passage published by Roon and Lefort the noun "salpinx" appears. St. Jerome's use of the noun tuba in his translation of the first passage, however, may indicate that the signaling instrument was also designated a salpinx in the Greek source from which he worked, or that he has introduced tuba as the instrument that issued the call to assembly. (The word "salpinx" does not occur in the Greek versions of Roon and Lefort.) In the Latin version of the second passage the noun clangor and the verb increpuerit both suggest the unmusical timbre of the ancient trumpet. The Greek verb [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (shouts; cries) carries a similar connotation. And the choice of words in both the Greek and Latin versions of the rule presents reasonable evidence that the ancient trumpet served the early Christian communities as their first instrument of convocation.

Jerome's use of the noun signum (signal) in more than a half-dozen instances in his translation of Pachomius' rule and his use of tuba only twice should not be taken as evidence that tuba is a mistranslation or an error. Nor should the reference to "beating" or "striking" as a call to prayer in the Greek and Coptic fragments of the rule be understood to rule out trumpets as another means of announcing services. As late as the beginning of the ninth century, Theodore, abbot of the Studion Monastery from 798 to 826, instructed the kanonarch, the cleric who struck the semantron, to "sound forth the wood like a trumpet" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). He suggests in his choice of metaphor the historical precedence of the trumpet and the lingering memory of its calls to services.

A passage from chapter 8 in the Protoevangelium Jacobi says that a trumpet called together the widowers in Palestine (including Joseph) among whom a husband was to be chosen for the twelve-year-old Mary: "And the heralds went forth over all the country round about Judaea, and the trumpet of the Lord ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) sounded and all men ran thereto." On the basis of Harnach's belief that the Protoevangelium Jacobi originated in Egypt, Georg Stuhlfauth finds evidence in this passage for the sounding of trumpets in Christian Egypt as early as the mid-second century. The anonymous author of this apocryphal gospel, he maintains, has probably transferred an early Christian custom of trumpet blowing as a call to assembly in second-century Egypt to an event that allegedly took place in Palestine at the end of the first century B.C.

Though prototypes for trumpets blown in early Christian communities were probably the silver Hebrew hazozeroth, no iconographical sources have survived. Representations of trumpets on a Jewish coin of the Bar Kokhba period and of the tuba and salpinx may be the closest visual information available.

During the fourth century at intervals throughout the day and night, the strident cries of trumpets shattered the quiet within the walled monasteries of Upper Egypt. Trumpet calls woke the inhabitants of these foundations from their sleep and called them from their cells and from their work. The trumpet assembled them several times a week for group instruction — often by Pachomius himself — and for daily prayers in the morning and evening. The trumpet also summoned the devout to the assembly hall for the Eucharist on Saturdays and Sundays and to the two common meals taken each day.

From the bells of these metal instruments came signals that ordered the lives of monks in the Thebaid. But their voices were soon to be replaced in the Christian East by rhythmic calls of another kind — the striking of a mallet on wood.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Bells of Russia by Edward V. Williams. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Illustrations, pg. xi
• Tables, pg. xiii
• Preface, pg. xv
• Acknowledgments, pg. xvii
• Author's Explanatory Notes, pg. xix
• 1. Voices of Ancient Trumpets, pg. 3
• 2. Holy Wood and Holy Iron, pg. 10
• 3. Bells in the Medieval World, pg. 20
• 4. The Rise of Bells in Russia, pg. 31
• 5. Bells in Muscovite Russia, pg. 44
• 6. Bells in Imperial Russia, pg. 57
• 7. Tower Clocks, pg. 69
• 8. Tuned Bells in Imperial Russia, pg. 81
• 9. The Russian Bell: Between Europe and Asia, pg. 97
• 10. The Russian Bell: From The Foundry to the Bell Tower, pg. 114
• 11. The Muscovite Crescendo in Bell Founding, pg. 135
• 12. The Tale of Tsar-Kolokol, pg. 148
• 13. The Last of Russia's Great Bells, pg. 166
• 14. Bronze Avatars of a Religio-Political Ideology, pg. 173
• Appendices, pg. 177
• Notes, pg. 187
• Glossary, pg. 243
• Bibliography, pg. 247
• Index, pg. 259

Editorial Reviews

Williams (Music, University of Kansas, Lawrence) traces the origin of the use of bells to ceremonial trumpets and semantrons in the ancient world. Encyclopedic in detail, this account covers the history of bell construction and use of bells of all types, including carillons, and especially the unique grand Russian instruments. The story offers an unusually broad view of Russian history and the importance of bells in Russian culture. A clearly written, carefully detailed, beautifully illustrated, and fascinating study for the specialist and informed general reader. Timothy J. McGee, Faculty of Music, Univ. of Toronto

Library Journal