Meet the man behind the songs of St Mary’s Cathedral bells
The bells of St Mary’s Cathedral sound out as the song of the city and the man who rings them has it down to a fine art.
NSW
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High above the rooftops of Sydney is where Murray-Luke Peard makes his music.
It is the sound of the mood of the city, the song of St Mary’s Cathedral, where he is tower captain leading the nation’s oldest team of bell ringers.
The bells mark out the time of the day and call the congregation to mass. They are joyous, mournful or reflective and for many they are a symbol of comfort.
“People see them as something they can rely on,” Mr Peard, 40, said.
Just don’t call him a campanologist and forget the jokes about the fictional hunchback bell ringer of Notre Dame, Quasimodo.
“You can always tell when someone isn’t really that familiar with bell ringing when they use the word campanologist,” Mr Peard said.
For the uneducated, a campanologist is someone who studies bells, not necessarily someone who rings them. “We don’t call ourselves that,” he said.
On the ground the 40-year-old is an IT expert at the University of Sydney.
Up in the air at the top of the 135 tightly-wound steps of the cathedral’s Cardinal’s Tower, he is an expert in one of the world’s oldest arts. Steeped in history, the bells of St Mary’s were cast at the same Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London as Big Ben.
But Mr Peard sees similarities in both of his jobs through mathematics.
“The mathematical nature of bell ringing tends to appeal to people with a logical background as well as with a musical background,” Mr Peard, who also sings in the cathedral choir, said.
It’s a mental exercise as much as a physical exercise. Mathematicians have put the total number of sequences which could possibly be played across 12 bells at a staggering 479,001,600 — which would take over 30 years to complete. St Mary’s has 12 bells and each sequence has to be finished before the next can begin.
It is where the term “ringing the changes” comes from.
Mr Peard wasn’t always a fan of bells. He admits going to Paris at the age of 20 and skipping the Notre Dame Cathedral. What drew him to the bells was hearing them as he went to church.
The only electronic bell rung at St Mary’s is the Angelus Bell, one of the original bells of the 1882 peal, which is still done daily. Mr Peard said many people are surprised all the other bells — which weigh between 281kg and 1741kg — are rung manually. And it’s all done from memory.
“Pulling down and letting the bell go is part of the trick and you don’t have to pull too hard,” he said. “You might think that the bigger the bell the harder you have to pull but the trick is to make bell do most of the work itself and you just guide it.”
Australia follows the British tradition of hanging the bells upside down so they rotate while they ring unlike in Europe, where they are hung with the bell down, as happens at Notre Dame.