Commissions · est. 1721
Commission a bell
The foundry accepts commissions as it always has: by letter. What follows is what a bell asks of you, and what it asks of us.
I — What you bring
A place, an occasion, a name.
Every bell in the register began as a letter, and every letter we have kept carries the same freight. A place: the tower, the gable, the courtyard where the bell will hang — because a bell is tuned for the air it must speak into, and a harbour fog and a valley frost do not carry a voice the same way. An occasion: what the bell is for, the hour it must keep, the door it must open or close. A bell cast without an office falls silent within a generation; a bell cast for one rings past the people who commissioned her.
And a name — which is to say, an inscription. The line cast into the waist is yours to give: a dedication, a memorial, a sentence you want said in bronze for as long as the tower stands. We set it in the founder’s face, in capitals, in Latin if you wish it, as we set AD PRECES VOCO VIVOS on the Angelus in 1739. Write the line as you would have it read aloud. It will be.
II — What the foundry determines
The note is chosen. The rest is consequence.
You may ask for a note. You may not ask for a small bell with a deep one. The strike note fixes the bell’s weight and diameter by law — not ours, the bronze’s: to sound an octave lower, a bell must roughly double her width and take on some eight times the metal. Magna speaks at G2 and needed 17,150 kilograms of bronze to say so; the Lark, octaves above her at G5, needed 34. Between those two lies everything this house can cast, and the note you choose tells us, within a few parts in a hundred, what you have asked us to pour.
The profile — the curve of the wall from crown to sound bow — is not invented for the occasion. It is scaled from the house curve, drawn for Prima in 1721 and corrected by ten generations since, the one line this foundry actually owns. And when the casting has cooled, the bell goes to the lathe once, mouth up, and the five partials — hum, prime, tierce, quint, nominal — are each brought to their places, the tierce a minor third above the strike, where the bronze wants it.
III — The terms
Cast once, tuned once, hung for good.
The terms have not changed since Prima, and they are few. A bell is cast once. If the pour fails in the pit, the failure is ours: the metal is broken, remelted, and poured again at our cost, and no bell leaves this house with a fault we can hear. But a bell that has spoken is never recast. Whatever is cast from her metal afterward is a different bell, and we do not put a voice into the fire to fetch out a better one.
She is tuned once, at the lathe, and never touched by a cutting tool again; what she is on that day, she will be for as long as she hangs. We choose the casting day — by the weather, the state of the furnace, and the temper of the melt, not by the calendar. Bronze will not be hurried, and we will not hurry it. Delivery follows the tower’s rhythm: the bell is hung when the frame is ready and the season is right, and not before. We have waited two years to hang a bell. The bell did not mind.
IV — The letter
Write to the foundry