While the choral tradition of the Orthodox liturgy represents one major manifestation of religious art in Russia, another, less understood form of national music is the pealing of bells. The great bells that announce the beginning of the Divine Liturgy and summon believers are a necessary part of every Orthodox church. Russian chroniclers mention church bells from the very beginnings of Christianity in the country, in 988. Within fifty years there were impressive sets of bells in Kiev's Desyatinnaya Church, in Novgorod's Cathedral of St. Sophia, and in the major churches in Vladimir.
The first bells made in Russia itself were cast in Kiev in the mid-thirteenth century, and within a hundred years there were large bell-casting firms in Moscow. It was also in Moscow that the world's largest bell, the "Tsar Kolokol," or "Tsar of Bells" (weighing nearly two hundred tons), was cast in 1735. By the sixteenth century, the four hundred churches of Moscow alone had an estimated total of more than 5,000 bells, which could be heard over an area of a hundred square miles. This overlapping, hypnotic tintinnabulation produced a stunning aural image of the trumpets of the Last Day, and of the coming Deification of the world.
Protection from Evil
Just as icons were paraded to offer protection in times of war and to ward off the evils of plague, fire, and drought, so bells were pealed to summon the power of God against these forces. A bell's reverberant voice spread a shield of sanctification as far as the sound was heard. The overlapping sonorities, passing from town to city to countryside, wove an invisible mantle of prayer and protection over all of Russia.
Russian Orthodox churches usually have a consort of bells that differ in size, sound, and function. There are festival bells, Sunday bells, small ornamental bells, and everyday bells. The many-tiered Russian bell tower, or zvonnitsa, attached to some of the more magnificent churches--with onion-shaped domes connoting tongues of fire above a profusion of bells--parallels the iconostasis, or icon screen, inside the church. These tower bells are arranged in a strict hierarchical order, as are the figures on the iconostasis.
Unlike the bells of Western Europe, which through a process of evolution reached their ideal form in the mid-seventeenth century in Holland, traditional Russian bells are not tuned. The effect is quite unlike a Western-style carillon. As the Russian bell ensembles do not play distinguishable melodies or harmonies, the mesmerizing effect of clashing, superimposed strata of sound was produced by intricate rhythmic repetition. Russian bells are often very large, heavier than their Western counterparts, and, by virtue of the way they are pealed, often produce a greater sonority and resonance than do bells of the West. Western bells are generally rung by swinging the bell to meet its free standing clapper. Russian bells, however, are usually immobile and are sounded by the metal clapper being pulled by a rope to strike the bell's sound-bow on the inner surface. This allows more exact timing and also makes possible a variety of shadings and intensities that could not otherwise be achieved.
Two general types of bell-ringing can be distinguished:
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