The Tang War: How Handbell America Split Over a Fingertip of Brass

The world

Picture a long padded table and twelve pairs of white-gloved hands. A handbell choir divides a keyboard’s worth of notes among its ringers, so no one person plays the melody; each holds a few bells and sounds them only on cue. That constraint is the whole difficulty. A ringer must place a note inside a moving texture, count long stretches of rest, and then damp the bell against the body to silence it the instant its job is done.[2] A late damp smears the chord, and everyone in the room can hear whose it was.

The instrument reached America as a rehearsal trick. English change ringers, who sound tower bells in mathematical permutations rather than tunes, kept tuned handbell sets to practice those patterns indoors without waking the parish; a single ordered sequence is a method, and a marathon performance of thousands of them is a peal.[8] American groups took the same bells toward tune ringing, playing recognizable melody and harmony.[7] The pivot has a founder, and some lore attached to her. Margaret Shurcliff of Boston is remembered as the first American woman to ring a full peal of tower bells in England, after which she was presented with an octave of handbells from London’s Whitechapel foundry.[6] She started the Beacon Hill Ringers, and in 1954 her circle organized the first American festival and the guild that is now Handbell Musicians of America.[5]

Prestige here is quiet and technical. It goes to clean damping, to a steady count through many empty measures, and to the multi-bell techniques that let one ringer cover more of the scale. Four-in-hand means holding two bells in one hand and sounding each independently, and the Shelley is one such grip.[2] Beyond it lie showpiece articulations with their own names: martellato, a staccato strike of the bell down onto the padded table; mallet, tapping a resting bell with a stick; LV, or let-vibrate, a note held to bloom; and the singing bell, coaxed into a sustained tone by circling a wooden dowel around its rim.[2] Letting a bell ring on past its cue, undamped, is the gauche tell of a novice.

The calendar is built on gathering. Choirs travel to Area festivals for massed ringing, in which hundreds of ringers read the same score at once, and the church year pins the busy seasons to Christmas and Easter.[7] The governing body is deliberately an umbrella rather than a referee. Handbell Musicians of America was the American Guild of English Handbell Ringers until it was renamed in 2010, and it still splits the country into twelve Areas.[9] It sets certification and technique standards, and leaves the bronze to the market.

The bells are the reason the scene has a price ladder rather than a shelf. Each is cast in bronze and then tuned by shaving metal from the inside until its overtones line up, and a choir needs the whole graduated set to play in any key.[3] Gloves protect the finish, foam pads line the tables, and mallets and binders round out the kit. A standard three-octave set of thirty-seven bells runs about the price of a car, and the largest sets climb well past six figures.[4]

The schism

The war began inside the larger of the two companies. Schulmerich, of Sellersville, Pennsylvania, was the first and biggest American handbell maker, and Jake Malta was the chief engineer who led its first handbell line.[1] A change in management soured things, and Malta left. He did not leave the problem behind. His daughter later described a living room taken over by drafting tables, and a library of bell books read cover to cover.[1]

Malta’s obsession had a target: the tang, the small brass nub at the crown of a handbell where the handle bolts on. He was convinced that removing it produced a purer tone with fewer stray overtones.[1] In 1973 he founded Malmark to build tangless bells, and he set up shop in Bucks County, a short drive down the road from his former employer.[10] Two rival foundries now stood in the same corner of Pennsylvania, each certain its bronze was the true one.[3]

Escalation came through advertising and then lawyers. A 1976 Schulmerich ad needled the “tangless bell” as a gimmick, Malmark sued, and the companies settled on a truce that barred them from comparing products by name.[1] Salespeople learned to fight in code, saying things like “our handle is not hollow” and letting the customer finish the thought. A separate patent fight over a clapper mechanism ground on for years; Schulmerich engineers even built a robotic ringer to test whether the tang made a bell louder, and measured a difference of only “a percent or two.” One dispute reached the door of the Supreme Court, which declined to take it.[1]

The rift ran down into the choirs. Ringers came to identify by brand, and Malmark’s people still remember being told, a little coldly, “we’re Schulmerich ringers.” Cease-and-desist letters catalogued the whispers each side accused the other of spreading, from broken handles to bells that would not polish.[1] Malta eventually won a judgment of about two million dollars, most of which, by the tellings, he plowed back into handbell education. The feud lasted more than thirty years.

Two bronze bells from rival foundries will ring a chord in perfect tune. The rift was never in the metal.

Peace arrived with a new generation and a single sentence. In 2012, at an industry meeting in Cincinnati, Jonathan Goldstein, who had bought Schulmerich, found Malmark’s new leader Tim Schuback and told him, “The enemy is the 300 million people out there who don’t ring handbells.”[1] Longtime staff described the relief as a weight lifting off their chests. Today a choir can mix both brands on one table without anyone flinching.

What it reveals

The Bell Wars show how authenticity gets engineered into an object. There was no musical stake in the tang, and the robotic ringer settled even the loudness claim. Yet the nub became a proxy for the whole question of what a real handbell is, and a purchase became a profession of faith.[1] Once a ringer could say “we’re Schulmerich ringers,” the brand was no longer a supplier but an identity, and identities do not lose arguments about a percent or two of volume.[3]

The material culture did the hardening. A handbell set costs as much as a car and lasts for decades, so a choir’s brand choice is close to permanent, and the war was really fought in slow, expensive purchasing decisions that locked congregations into a camp for a generation.[4] The price ladder was the trench. This is why the fight could smolder for thirty years without a visible front, since it lived in equipment budgets rather than in any single battle.[1]

It is tempting to file this with the format wars, the VHS-and-Betamax standoffs where a technical difference calcifies into tribal loyalty and lock-in keeps the camps apart. The rhyme is real, and it is where the story most resembles bigger ones. But the analogy breaks on a hard fact: the bells were never incompatible. Betamax could not play in a VHS deck, while a Malmark and a Schulmerich bell tuned to the same note ring a clean chord together, which is exactly what mixed choirs now do.[8] The incompatibility was social, not technical, an agreement to treat interchangeable objects as if they were rivals. Notably, the guild itself never split; the umbrella held, and the schism stayed among the vendors and the partisans they made, which is why the truce needed only a change of heart, not a change of standard.[1]