Sonos is working on a new DVD

Sonos Handbell Ensemble is working on a new DVD. We got partial funding from an arts supporter in Japan & are now actively fund-raising to get the rest of the money.

As part of our proposal to the supporter, we created a demo video of me, Jason, Missy, and Jukka playing Jim's arrangement of the Japanese folk song "Sakura". He created this arrangement so that it could be played in the lobby during our tours of Japan - the audience LOVES this! - so it uses no tables.

Jim is really into combining contrasting elements - this one uses a simple Change Ringing motive interlaced with the "Sakura" melody. The Change Ringing motive is in the "handle clicks" - we really are hitting the bell casting with the handle of another bell. It creates a sound similar to mallets, but more ethereal, IMO.

He's also into combining movement with music - there's a lot of movement involved in playing bells, of course, and Jim likes to make use of that. His composition "Sonics", which appears on our "Space Between the Notes" video, is all about the movement.

This video was made on Monday, Oct 1, 2007. The 5 of us (the quartet plus Jim) met at a recording studio in Oakland that morning & spent a couple of hours laying down the audio track. Then we headed down to Hakone Gardens in Saratoga and "bell-synced" to the audio track, which was played on my little boom box. Our video editor (Eric Thiermann of The Impact Media Group in Santa Cruz) went away and gave us this video a few days later.

As I said, it's just a demo not a final product, but if this is a taste of things to come, our video is going to be AWESOME!!





Jan 29 UPDATE - Wow! I posted that video to YouTube last night & by this morning it had had 2,141 views!! The video itself has an "honor" listed - "#90 - Most Viewed (Today) - Music" and my account has a tag saying "#24 - Most Viewed (Today) - Musicians". I, of course, have screenshots!




Jan 29 - 2nd UPDATE: This Wikipedia article talks about the song & it's history & gives an English translation of the lyrics.