There are 24 different lead ends in which bells 6 and 7 are in their home positions. It would be interesting if these could be 24 part ends of a peal composition. Is such a peal possible?

​

Peals on the three lead course plan are often thought of as being 24-parts. A good example is this very old composition. Notationally it is described as a 6-part, but a closer inspection reveals that the A blocks and the B blocks (not to be confused with B-Block!) are in fact parts, and that this is a 24-part with all of the xxxx678 part ends.

 

However, I have decided that peals on the three lead course plan are not 24-parts. They are in fact 120-parts! This is because you get the same pattern of calls every three leads, and you get the same bell fixed for all of the 120 part ends - quite clearly a mathematical group.

 

It would be nice, then, to find a 'real' 24-part. In 2010 I found the following 15-lead block which is mutually true to the 24 xxxx678 part ends:

 

   253746

 - 672453

   647325

 - 536247

 s 275436

 s 462375

 - 534762

 - 275634

 s 642375

 - 536742

 s 725436

   742653

 - 367542

   356274

   325467

​

Needless to say, I was not the first to discover this block! Rob Lee discovered it in 2007, but several other composers have found it independently long before then. Unfortunately it does not extend to a peal length, due to the limited number of places where bobs can be swapped for singles. The most you can get is 8 parts out of 24. You could use 5ths place bobs at certain points to rotate trios of little bells, but that isn't a very satisfying solution, though it does produce a 24-part peal. This is the closest that we can get to a 24-part peal of Grandsire Triples.

​

Composers have used this block for factorized versions of a 24-part, by using extra q-sets of omits to link the blocks together. A well-known example is J. J. Parker's 4-part peal, though I'm fairly certain that I have also seen this composition attributed to A. J. Pitman and B. D. Price. Price also came up with an excellent and elegant 8-part, which is probably the neatest arrangment that utilises this block. The 8-part has to have the repeated section in the first four parts so that all part ends can be attainded. Note that this repeated section is quite close to being palindromic, and also that it includes two shortended versions of the block above side by side, with their xxxx678 lead ends - an excellent and enjoyable part of the composition, which I had the pleasure of ringing in September 2015. 

​

So an authentic 24-part with ordinary calls does not seem to be possible, but you can still do good things with the block above. It also has the added aesthetic feature of all the 120 678s being at backstroke - in contrast to the three lead course peals.

  

​

​

​