When people ask the Bells at Temple Square conductor Geoff Anderson what he does, they tell him the same thing.
“And that is: ‘I love the Bells,’” Anderson said.
When the Bells at Temple Square concert “Ringing in the Season of Light” begins, it will be the first concert with a new assistant conductor — Mat Ulmer. He was recently announced as the new assistant conductor.
Anderson was the assistant conductor for seven years under LeAnna Willmore, who retired in June 2024. He’s been the conductor since.
Anderson and Ulmer have directed choirs and taught music in school. Both also started and directed handbell choirs in their schools.
“They are incredible musicians,” Anderson said of the 32 volunteer bell ringers. “It’s just an amazing experience to be a part of that, but there’s more than just the music that happens there.”
He added, “There’s not another musical form that’s quite like it.”
The Bells at Temple Square is celebrating its 20th anniversary year, as it was organized in March 2005.
About the concert
The holiday “Ringing in the Season of Light” concert is Friday, Nov. 21, and Saturday, Nov. 22, at 7:30 p.m. in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in downtown Salt Lake City. Tickets, which are free and required, have all been distributed. The concert is recommended for those 8 and older. A standby line will be available.
The concert on Saturday, Nov. 22, will be streamed on the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square’s YouTube channel, and it’s anticipated it will be available for on-demand viewing.
Anderson said the concert includes a mix of music, including fall and Thanksgiving themes, Christmas music, and spiritual and festive music. There will be some new music for handbells, too.
With the two seven-octave sets of English handbells and handchimes, the performers usually use about 170 handbells and about 150 handchimes, Anderson said.
For this concert, there will be more than 330 bells due to the music, he said.
“We’ve got extra bells on the tables because we have rhythmic things that have to happen,” Anderson said, adding, “We have literally crazy charts to show us what’s being used.”
They’re using The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square’s touring bell set along with borrowing bells from a school and individuals.
Ulmer notes that they began rehearsing the music in July. “The level of this music and what they have to do, it takes us about six months to put it together,” Ulmer said.
Tabernacle Choir organist Linda Margetts will also perform along with other members of the Orchestra at Temple Square.
About the conductors
Anderson taught high school choir for 30 years, including helping to start a handbell choir. He directed the high school’s handbell choir for about 25 years.
“It’s kind of interesting how the Lord directs your feet, and you don’t realize what’s happening,” said Anderson, looking back on his career and how he became part of the Bells at Temple Square.
Anderson grew up in the central Utah town of Redmond. When he was in fifth grade, his older sister was the high school band drum major. During one of the parades he attended, he saw the drums as the band went past and thought, “I want to do that.” Young Anderson started pretending to play the drums. One of the band instructors looked at him and said, “If you practice hard enough, you’ll be part of this,” Anderson recalled, adding, “And I was hooked.”
He was already taking piano lessons and did play drums in the band in high school and in college. It was from those experiences that he wanted to be a music teacher.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah, and a master’s from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.
One of his students was part of the first group of bell ringers when the Bells at Temple Square was organized, Anderson said. And after taking time off, she is now back in the ensemble.
Ulmer, who is from the East Millcreek area near Salt Lake City, took piano lessons growing up, like several of his siblings. While he initially pursued a music degree at the University of Utah, he switched to an English and history degree in education. He did continue to participate in choir.
His student teaching was with a junior high teacher who taught history in the morning and choir in the afternoon, which he helped with. When she moved to the high school, Ulmer began teaching history and choir. He did go back to the University of Utah for the rest of his music degree and for a master’s degree.
After 18 years at the junior high, he moved to a high school. “I remember the interview where they asked me if I had an experience with a bell choir,” Ulmer recalled. “And I said: ‘Well, no. But I’m willing to learn.’”
He worked with the previous teacher along with several others to learn about handbell choirs, including teaching students and directing. Ulmer was at the high school for 10 years, leading the five vocal choirs and the bell choir. He retired in 2023, in part to help care for his wife, who had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. After she died at the end of 2023, he began teaching private lessons.
Then in early 2024, “out of the blue,” Ulmer said, he got a text asking if he could meet with Tabernacle Choir leaders.
Ulmer said: “This is just so fun to watch and work with them and to be mentored by Geoff. It’s just amazing.”
For Anderson, he sees how the musicians working together is a spiritual experience.
“As many times as I stand on that stage, and there’s many times as we enter that building, it’s still a sacred experience,” Anderson said. “I’m amazed at what happens in our rehearsals and in our performances, that there really is something that happens with the way that the Spirit becomes very strong.”
Performing in a handbell choir
The 32 members of the Bells at Temple Square are a double handbell choir, which is unique, Anderson said.
“We have two handbell choirs that play in tandem, so that’s kind of how it is most of the time,” Anderson said.
One is on the left and another is on the right with two people playing most of the notes at the same time. A few elements aren’t doubled — one side has an additional seventh octave with the larger, aluminum bells, and the other has the V-shaped chimes that play lower.
Usually, the musicians on the right side have 85 bells and 66 chimes and the left side has 73 bells and 73 chimes, he said.
“They perform in such a unique way, their musicality is so unique: The way that they play, the way that they read their music, the way that they are involved and what they do,” Anderson said.
Unlike a musical score that has different lines of music for different parts, music for bell ensembles has all of the notes that need to be played on the same lines of music. Each bell ringer is in charge of four to eight bells. And sometimes, depending on the music, it could be up to 10 bells.
“You’ve got all these notes that are in there,” Anderson said. Sometimes the notes are spread out and other times there are many notes clustered together.
“You get everything. You get the whole score where you see everybody’s notes, and they see yours,” Anderson said. “And then you are trusted — and you trust everybody else— to play the notes when they’re supposed to happen.”
There may be five or more people to make sure the melody line — all of the clusters of chords — work. And, as needed, they figure out among themselves how to make the chords work and share bells.
“It’s just an amazing thing to watch what they do,” Anderson said. He added, “It takes quite a bit of musicianship to ring a bell.”
Ulmer said as he’s been at rehearsals, he sees how rehearsing and progressing the music has lessons for life.
“I think it’s a fun microcosm of life just to watch the work and the sweat, and how each week is a little bit up and down, but mostly, it’s progress each week,” Ulmer said.
As people retire from the Bells at Temple Square and more people audition and join the ensemble, it takes about a year of training before they begin performing.
Bells at Temple Square members rehearse weekly. They have two annual performances, which have been in June and November, and also join “Music & the Spoken Word” a half dozen times a year. They perform in the Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square’s Christmas concert, which includes memorizing their four numbers.
The bell ringers also participate in the Spring Ring conference for the local area’s chapter of Handbell Musicians of America, the national organization for handbell groups. There, they play with other groups and also perform their own music.
Music from the bell ringers is available in the “Bells at Temple Square” playlist on the Tabernacle Choir’s YouTube channel.
