Mary Gilliland, four bells in hand, directs the Acadia Hand Bell Choir.

The Acadia Hand Bell Choir rehearses for performances coming up on April 23, 6 p.m., at Birch Bay Village in Bar Harbor, and April 30 at Sonogee.

 There’s a gentle grace to the way the members of the Acadia Hand Bell Choir swing their instruments.
The lustrous bronze bells are held mouth up, grasped by a handle attached to the crown. For rehearsal purposes, the players, who wear white gloves, stand facing each other from behind long tables arranged in a U, with the choir’s director, Mary Gilliland, at the head. Each table is set with oblong cushions that look like miniature mattresses, where the bells can safely sit, and custom-made wooden music stands. For performances, the cushions wear red covers, and the players change into their best pair of white gloves.
Gilliland selects a song called “A New Day Is Coming.”
“Ready?” she says. “One and two and three.”
The room fills with an enveloping sound that is reminiscent of glory-on-high church hymns, although this is a re-purposed pop song. Each bell is perfectly tuned to produce a single note. Each player is responsible for two notes of the scale, and two octaves of each note. The sheet music, in a sense, choreographs them. The choir as a whole is like a single instrument. The group compares with another type of instrumentalist, a pianist, who sits down and depresses keys that sound the tuned strings. By contrast, the musical staff is divided, pitch by pitch, among members of the handbell choir; they are, in a sense, the keys who release notes from the tuned bells.
 The release is a subtle kind of dance. The shoulder slightly rotates forward, the forearm is upraised, the wrist bends, the upper torso flows in an elliptical arc forward and then back. The clapper strikes the casting of the bell. The tone of the bell resonates in its proper moment, decaying until it stops naturally or until the ringer damps the bell, blending in musical ambience.
“The bell is full of water and you don’t want to spill the water, otherwise you spill the music out of the water,” one member of the choir explains of the image they use to help grasp the motion. “The music goes around the rim. So you don’t want to turn the music out. And if you keep the bell moving, there’s a lot of technique in the wrist.”
During a recent rehearsal in the parish house of the Somesville Union Meeting House, a visitor is enthusiastically greeted by the choir and instantly invited to join the group.
Several members of the group say that handbells are a great instrument for beginners. One doesn’t have to be experienced to join the choir. It does help to be able to read music, but even that isn’t necessary.
Little dots of various colors, on the sheet music before many of the players, correspond to the notes to be played by each.
“If I happen to lose my place, it’s easier to find where I am,” says one player.
Barbara Entzminger  plays the highest bells of the choir’s four octaves. She’s like a kettle drummer in an orchestra – not a lot of notes happening here, but she’s all the more attentive to the music.
“You have to be in the right place, so even if you have very little to do, you have to be with it,” she says.
The choir owns four octaves  of bells, and also has a three-octave suite of melody chimes. The bells are made by Schulmerich, a company in Pennsylvania that is the oldest manufacturer of handbells in the United States and is one of only a handful of handbell manufacturers in the world. The company’s website cites modern-day features such as its polymer handles, electro-accoustical testing, micro-adjustable tension control, nylon bearings, ergonomic handguards, and a choice between its trademarked Select-A-Strike and Quick-Adjust clappers.
Despite the high-tech specs, the type of instrument used for performance, called an English handbell, goes back centuries. And the use of bells in general harks back thousands of  years in some parts of the world.
The English handbell, a performance instrument, compares with the old-fashioned bell that might have been used, for example, to ring in a maid to serve dinner. The latter has a clapper that swings freely in any direction. The clapper on an English handbell is on a hinge and moves back and forth in a single direction; a spring holds the clapper away from the casing after the strike to allow the bell to ring freely. The shaft of the clapper is rigid, so the flared bell may be held with its mouth facing upward.
Melody chimes are shaped like square tubes and are also rung by hand. They are easier to play, says Gilliland, and are sometimes found as a beginning instrument in schools.
Gilliland – along with Thayer Fanazick and Dotty Kay Stillman – is one of the founders of the Acadia Hand Bell Choir. Gail Reiber joined early on.
“I  think it’s a beautiful sound,” Gilliland says of the instrument. “I love the clear tone. And what I really like is the fact that you don’t have to have a whole lot of talent to make beautiful music.”
The group came together in the late 1970s, after Gilliland learned to play with the Hancock Union Church and Dotty and David Stillman were inspired by a choir at a church event. “We  thought it would be great to have our own choir,” Gilliland said, “So a bunch of us from the  Mount Desert Larger Parish got together and figured out ways to make enough money to buy the first two octaves of the bells.”
Originally, she said, the players were members of five churches, in Somesville, Northeast Harbor, Seal Harbor, Town Hill and Otter Creek. Eventually, the Somesville church agreed to provide the choir with a permanent place to practice and to house the bells.
“We play in church for them three or four times a year,  to thank them for letting us do that,” Gilliland said.
But the choir is an independent entity. Players come from as far as Ellsworth, and they can belong to any church, or no church at all. The choir raises its own money, mostly by collecting bottles and cans. A couple of years ago, they held a special fundraiser because they had to get the bells refurbished.
“People were extremely generous,” she said.
The group started out with two octaves.
“Then somebody who heard us play donated a third octave,” she said. “We’re a four-octave bell choir now. They go up to eight or nine octaves, and those bells are huge and tiny. Right now we’re lucky to have a full choir. We have 14 people.”
The choir plays both secular and sacred music, doesn’t charge a fee but accepts donations, and loves to be asked to perform, Gilliland said. They once played for Senator Olympia Snowe and her husband Governor McKearnan. Some years, they’ve played in the holiday parades in Ellsworth, and one spring at the bandstand in Bar Harbor.
“We play at nursing homes and schools,” she said. “We play at the Ellsworth library every year at Christmas time – that’s a big one. And it’s a lot of fun to be picking out music for the different seasons.”
Most handbell choirs are connected to churches.
“We’re the renegades,” she said. “And I think that’s why some people like it, because we can do any type of music we want to.”
In recent years, the group realized that audiences were curious about the instrument itself, so they started doing demonstrations during the concerts.
Long-time choir member Margot Martin became the unofficial historian who researched the subject on the web and came up with quite a lot of material to share with audiences.
“Bells go back a long, long way in society,” Martin said. “They were used for summoning  people, or for alerting people. At one point, in the Middle Ages, bells were considered holy and sacred. They were actually baptized and dedicated, they were so revered.”
Bells first became a candidate as a musical instrument in the early 18th century, when tuned handbells were developed by brothers Robert and William Cor in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, England. The brothers developed the small bells as practice instruments for ringers who “rang the peal” in bell towers. By the 17th century, most English villages had a church, and many had an assortment of large bells, housed in a tower and operated by pulling on ropes. The ringing of the peal, said Martin, was based on an algorithm that demanded rigorous practice. The resulting “music” was not exactly a melody, but a chiming, she said. Done incorrectly, it can be a cacophony.
Ringing the bells in different orders was called “change ringing.” The sound traveled quite a distance, and the  noise, during practices, could be horrendous.
The Cor brothers’ handheld bells allowed the change ringers to practice the peals quietly, saving the neighbors’ ears, she said. The change ringers could also practice somewhere warm, instead of in the cold, drafty towers.
The United States got its first real earful of handbell music through circus showman P.T. Barnum, who spotted a handbell ensemble in 1850 while traveling in England. He brought the group to the  U.S., renamed it the Swiss Bell Ringers and had it perform with his show as a novelty act.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the instrument gained American practitioners, thanks to Margaret Shurcliff of Boston. When Shurcliff was visiting England, she was presented with a set of handbells by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the first makers of what had become known as English handbells. She founded the Beacon Hill Ringers, the first handbell group in the U.S. and now the oldest such choir in the country. In 1937, she formed the New England Guild of English Handbells, later to become the American Guild of English Handbells.
In the 1940s, handbell ringing moved into America’s church setting.
“Churches began adding handbells to their music ministries, and that’s where a lot of music written specifically for churches began,” Martin said.
Today, she said, the repertoire comprises plenty of both secular and religious music. There are countless choirs in the U.S. Sometimes they get together and stage “spring rings” and similar events.
When you think about it, Martin said, bells – or perhaps their digitized equivalent these days; think cars when the headlights are left on after the engine is shut off – are part of daily life.“The origin of the doorbell is from the fact that they once believed that spirits hung around outside the door, and if you rang a bell it chased them away,” she said. “You take bells for granted, but they’re part of history.”