“2021: the year we ring again!” declared music director Adam Waite in his announcement of Montview Ringers’ first practice in eight months. Not only would we ring together, the piece would be an anthem for the Montview@Home Easter service. Even better, we were allowed inside the beautiful sanctuary for practice and recording. The traditional Gaelic hymn Morning Has Broken* was wonderfully suited for an Easter when we are seeing hope, after a year when togetherness was hard to come by and greatly missed. Some adaptations to the times were, of course, necessary. We all wore our masks. Instead of our customary long padded tables where we played side by side, we were properly distanced, with the treble bells on music stands and the lower bells on small tables, everyone about eight feet apart. In the time since our last practice, the bin containing mallets and dowels (for the “singing bell” effect) went missing.  (No, a pencil isn’t an adequate dowel to produce that reverberation.)  Before the recording, the mislaid dowels and mallets were replaced. Most importantly, because the empty sanctuary tended to swallow sound, Adam exhorted us to “ring out!  You can’t ring too loudly!” The video recording was done on March 24, while Lent was still being observed.  For the recording, the somber purple paraments of Lent were exchanged for the gold sunbursts-on-white of the Easter paraments, giving us a glimpse of the light of Easter morning. (*Yes, Cat Stevens recorded this song in the early 1970s, became Yusef Islam a few years later, and is now touring as Yusef/Cat Stevens.) If you want to watch the Montview Ringers perform Morning Has Broken, you can go to Montview.com and find us under Montview@Home, April 4, 2021 about seven minutes in. (Stay for the sermon and get Eastered.)

– Submitted By Ava Navin & Juli Davidson