Marcus Vergette's tide bells sound the alarm for rising sea levels
Sculptor and musician Marcus Vergette discusses new album Tintinnabulation and his work casting bells for beaches and coastal regions of the UK, where they are rung by the rising tide
Marcus Vergette is a sculptor and musician with a passion for bells and a resumé like no other. He lives on a farm in Devon which he maintains for the benefit of rare butterflies, is currently working on a project recording ant stridulation, and moonlights as a jazz bassist with some of the biggest names in the UK.
When his farm was caught up in the foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001, Vergette was presented with an opportunity. Emerging from their rural lockdown, he was taken up into the tower of the local parish church where he encountered three bells, from 1440, 1460, and 1520. Fascinated by their potential both as sounding and sculptural devices, he took a trip to Whitechapel Foundry to see the casting and tuning of a bell for himself. Interested in their harmonic potential, he began researching and developing his own moulds using an engineering software developed by the US military, and has been making crenelated bells ever since.
For many years Vergette has been working on a series called Time and Tide, in which bells are installed on beaches and coastal regions around Britain, rung by the approaching waves at high tide. A simple but powerful metaphor that sounds the alarm of rising sea levels, there are now eleven Time and Tide bells located across the country from the Outer Hebrides to the south of Cornwall, each existing as a democratic artwork owned by the local community.
[In London, there is a bell on the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf, which I recorded at high tide and you can listen to below.]
When pianist and composer Matthew Bourne encouraged Vergette to make an album using some of this material, he was initially hesitant. But locked down once more during Covid, with 11 freshly cast bells in his back yard, Vergette began assembling a record that would become Tintinnabulation. Featuring three long-form compositions, the album collages sounds from these bells with Vergette’s archive of field recordings and instrumental improvisation.
The title track ‘Tintinnabulation’, which means a ringing or tinkling sound, explores the idea of a world with and without birds. In ‘Ferry’, a small group of instrumentalists respond musically to a projected film of the Torpoint Ferry in Cornwall. But it is on ‘Wax and Wane’ that the Time & Tide bells come to the fore, threaded into the fabric of the composition. Released earlier this year via Nonclassical, Tintinnabulation has blossomed into a series of live performances in concert halls (such as the Barbican) and night clubs across the country.
On a rare visit to London to play at jazz club Ronnie Scotts, Vergette joined me for a coffee in Exmouth Market to share his enthusiasm for bells and explain how they can encourage a more attuned listening to the world around us.
What was it that first interested you about bells when you encountered them in your local church?
I looked at bells and I thought here's a communication device - a static object that can say multiple things. It's the same bell that rings at weddings and at funerals, it's how you contextualise it that gives it its meaning. A bell is a thing that everyone understands, everyone has a story or a facet that they can relate to, and it had sound. Bringing sound and objects together is something I'd tried to explore in different ways before but never quite satisfactorily enough.
How did you begin to incorporate these ideas into your sculptural work?
Because I'm like the local artist, my neighbours asked me to make something to commemorate all the hardship of foot-and-mouth. The thing that annoyed me was that you had to be in the church to ring the bell, so I decided to make a bell that would be on the side of the road that any person could ring for any reason whatsoever. And that proved to be very interesting, because there's been an accumulation of laws through the centuries that make a democratic bell very difficult to do, because bells are a symbol of power. Big Ben rings the news and gives the authority to it. This relationship to power was the final key. I thought, here's this object that can say all these different things and is related in all these different ways. It was like an epiphany, and I’ve been making ever since then.
Can you ever get away from the sonic connotations of the bell as something tied to power and religion?
I'm definitely trying to get away from that. These bells don’t sound like church bells, so before people experience it, that is always a problem, because that's most people's point of reference. They're one of the oldest resonant object forms that people have ever made. They're right there back there with stone axes. I am not in any way spiritual but there is something spiritual about them. It works a magic, it's unbelievable. You just watch people's faces, as soon as they hear this metal thing ring. And it's not the strike, it's the sustain that is most interesting.
In what sense?
I've got a huge archive of field recordings, going right back to cassette, Super 8, mini disc, Walkmans, Discmans. It's always sounded like music to me. I find all that immensely satisfying, and very much a part of the idea with the bell is that people think it's the strike. It goes bang, and they listen for that. But then the sustain comes, and they're just listening, they're not thinking about it, they're just listening to the sustain. And as the sustain diminishes, they suddenly hear the sound of the world coming up again, and pretty soon they're just listening to the world, without making a judgement about it, without thinking. They're just listening.
And that is the real thing that I like about it. Getting people to engage in the present in the moment, because unless you start to listen and look, you don’t know what's around you and you can’t make choices about the bigger things we have to choose about. Whether it's about environment or the community, it all begins with that observation without judgement and really starting to notice what's around you, on every level. And bells can do that.
Speaking of the environment, the Time & Tide project addresses the issue of climate change and rising sea levels directly. How does it work?
This was a choice based on the power issue that we were talking about. I didn’t want these bells to be rung by somebody who had ownership of them. So in raising the money and developing the project, nobody gets to put their name on the bell. I don’t put my name on it, the funders don’t get to put their name on it. The Time and Tide bells are actually a pair of bells, a fourth apart, and that was so there would be a sense of harmonic movement. One facing upwards and one facing downwards, in an hourglass form. In the middle there is a pivot with a bar in it, and the bar extends below the bell so as the sea comes underneath it pushes the bar and that rings the bell.
Some have been installed for several years now. Can you already begin to hear a change in the way they're being rung?
No, I wouldn’t say that, because it's too infinitesimal and the sea varies immensely anyway. What has been revealing is that the energy in the water at each of the locations is distinct to that place, because of the geology of that place and the location of the bell. All the bells sound completely different, because the energy of the water is different in each of the locations.
The bell that's in the Outer Hebrides looks out into the North Atlantic. There's the Arctic out there, but there's nothing else, so the energy just comes in and it's got this clear, fresh, uncomplicated sound. The London bell however is a nightmare. The Thames has got boats and sticks and the walls of the embankment, and so in London there are a million different energies. We had to use something called the Venturi shape, which is basically an hourglass, two cones pulled together. It creates an area of high pressure and an area of low pressure, and that allows the bell to have a space to move into. It was actually the removing of energy that allowed the bell to ring in London.
What do you expect to happen to them? Will they all eventually be washed away?
Different bells again have different stories. I guarantee the bell itself for 25,000 years, but the structures will never last that long. In the very beginning I wanted them built really strongly, but then I thought that was mad because of the carbon footprint, and absurd because even if I built them as strong as I could, they’re going to be gone in 150 years anyway.
I've started using wood and ceramics, so the barnacles can attach themselves to them, and they become a living, welcoming thing to the environment. They’re also made of components. With the big steel structures, if they fail the whole thing goes, but in rethinking how we respond to climate change and the ideas of renewing and reusing, if they’re made of components and one component fails you just take it out and put another one in. And at that point they can go on ad infinitum if people wish to look after them.
Their fates must also be connected to the specific conditions where they are located.
There are three bells which are good examples. We’ve got one on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where the rocks are Lewisian gneiss. They're 4 thousand million years old and they've not even eroded yet. The beaches on Lewis are just crushed seashells and the rocks aren’t going anywhere.
Then we're doing one in Happisburgh in Norfolk, installed on the 9th of July. It's on a wooden sled because it's going to have to be moved every couple of years because if you fixed it, ten years later it'll be 100 meters out to sea. That one has piles that can be driven into the ground to stop it falling over, and then when it is moved, we'll leave those piles behind so there will be these markers going out to sea, showing where it used to be.
And then, because of its geology, Par beach in Cornwall is an accretion beach. At the moment the bell is way out in the sea and gets completely submerged, so much so that it has to have a two-metre thing on the top of it sticking out the water so that a jet ski doesn’t go crashing into it. But then in 150 years it'll be underneath the dunes, because the dunes there are increasing. There are many different stories, because every bit of the coast is different.
It sounds like this project has given you an intimate knowledge of the British coast in its various forms.
I know the coast of Britain very well, and in some senses these differences also influence how people think about things. The east coast is largely man-made and defended. It is low-lying, with sand and clays and small stones, whereas the west coast is mostly rocks, there's a few little beaches here and there, but it's mostly rock. The cultures and their relationships to the sea are very different. I do a little bit of research, but really all you have to do is go and talk to the people who work with the sea, and they tell you everything you need to know straight away.
You can find out more about visiting the Time & Tide bells here and Tintinnabulation here.
Images courtesy of Marcus Vergette and Nonclassical.