School hopes to revive dying art of bell tolling in Spain

euronews (in English)

A school teaching the art of church bell tolling in Spain has just graduated its first class. Teachers say they hope to prevent the ancient practice from dying out after years of using automated systems.

Transcript

00:00And now yes, ok?

00:12And the hands almost all on the ground, when you do the extravaganza.

00:16And with this you will have...

00:30We have the utopian objective that at each bell there is a bellman.

00:42It is an objective that I know is utopian because in Catalonia there are more than 2,000 bells,

00:47so it will be very difficult to meet.

00:49But if there is a sensitivity towards the bells,

00:53and there are more and more people who know how to play them,

00:57well, we will have more bellmen around Catalonia,

01:00and it will be easier for us, on the one hand, to maintain the material heritage,

01:04on the other hand, to recover this immaterial part of the bells,

01:08and on the other hand, we can also achieve that the bells,

01:13although they are not a means of communication, because we already have others much more effective,

01:18but they are a means of communication that reaches everyone within a local community

01:24and can help to unite this community in specific moments,

01:28whether they are moments of grief, when there is a deceased, or also moments of celebration.

01:32They mark these rituals that we also need.

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