Francesc Llop: "Soon someone will report a local festival and they will ban it"

Head bowed and covered by a hat and hands on the bell ropes. Francesc Llop sees his profession in the gesture of his profile picture: when the rest of us mortals hear a sound, we lift our heads; a bell ringer, on the other hand, lowers his. The sound may announce a passing bell. The anthropologist and manager of the website campaners.com also explains the reason for his hat: it is well known that pigeons have an acquired taste for bell towers.

What is a bell ringer for?

— Bells, like all heritage, are useless, in the sense that they do not generate money. But the effort of ringing them improves people's lives. We bell ringers build the emotions of the community.

How?

— The bell-ringer reinforces what is happening. At the Valencia Cathedral, we perform exactly the same peal for the feast of the Virgin Mary as we do for a funeral. But since the context changes, the emotion does too. On the day of the funeral, when Maria, the large bell, rings, people say: "How sad." On the day of the feast, however, they say: "How joyful."

Before, the bells marked the rhythm of the city.

— And they had names that explained everything. The Awakening played in the morning. The Fishmonger, on the days when meat could not be eaten. And when it grew dark, they played the closing of the walls. We continue to play it every night.

Why do I want to hear the hours if I can know that it is 18:06?

— Because sound has been a part of the city for centuries. When you hear the Micalet, which is our hour bell, you are listening to the same music as in 1540. How can we stop this?

There are neighbors who complain about the noise.

— A bell makes no noise. Anthropologists have long explained that noise is always what others make. There are occasional cases of people with insomnia or some illness, of course. But usually, the one bothered by the bell at night is someone who has just arrived. The Micalet has been ringing since the 15th century. If it bothers you, perhaps you should not have bought the house under the bell tower.

I do not know if all judges would agree with it.

— Soon someone will report a local festival and they will ban it. In Valencia we have protected ourselves: the manual ringing of the cathedral is an Intangible Cultural Asset of Interest, and that allows us to ring at any time. Every time we ring, we build the most ephemeral of monuments, a monument of sound.

Why don't they have party chimes every day?

— A bell-ringer of ours who has already left us used to say that silence is also part of the ringing. And of the celebration. If every day is a celebration, there is no celebration. In some villages, on feast days they would not wind the bell tower clocks: they said that on those days time did not run.

Changing traditional holidays…

— If you do things as always, you are boring; if you change them, you destroy tradition. Everyone says “it has been done like this all their life”, but “all their life” is often three years. A bell-ringer from the Giralda told me: “A mistake repeated for three years is tradition”.

When does it arrive at the bells?

— At seventeen. My father was a local scholar, one of those who can argue with you for a lifetime about whether it is called salgantana or sargantana. He used to take us to see fallas workshops, pyrotechnicians, bell towers. One day he took me to meet some bell ringers. Afterwards, he was very sorry that I went back: they were considered very low-class people.

A tip?

— At Christmas, the newspapers used to joke: this year even the bell ringer has come to ask for the Christmas tip. They were the last of the community.

What were these bell ringers like?

— The last ones I met, in 1968, only came up to play if you paid them fifteen pesetas. It was not the end of a tradition, it was the degradation of a trade. In ten years they disappeared, and in Valencia almost everything was mechanized.

What made things change again?

— The Seville Expo, in 1992. I was working at the Generalitat as an anthropologist and they asked me for ideas for the Valencian pavilion. I proposed bringing bells from before 1492. Since a bell always sounds the same, it was the music that Columbus might have heard. They brought six of them. When you take things out of their context, people look at them in a different way.

After so many years, were they not out of tune?

— No. A bell sounds the same until it cracks. It loses one or two hundredths of a semitone per century, and an expert ear does not notice the difference until it loses fifteen or twenty.

What does it feel like at the top of a bell tower?

— In a concert, you are here and the instruments are there. Up in the bell tower, you are inside the instrument. The tower is like the body of a guitar, and the bells, the strings. There are days when there are few of us in the bell tower and we do what we can. But we express ourselves through the bells, and during a festival, we are the voice of the cathedral and of the entire city.

What does a bell have that no other instrument has?

— It is the oldest music of the people. When I was in my mother's womb I already heard it, and the day I go into the earth I will continue to hear it. Even though I am in no hurry at all.

Do you pull the bell or does the bell pull you?

— You don't know the pleasure of stopping a 2,500-kilo bell at 75 years old. It's a feeling of harmony and power. Like riding a big motorcycle.