Four Bagatelles with Curious Titles is an attempt to share the unique sound vocabulary of a relatively unknown and intriguing instrument. The piece focuses on timbral varieties which often go neglected in standard literature for handbells. In Four Bagatelles the four players act upon the set of bells and handchimes as a single instrument. This distinctive performance style is typical for handbell music; however, this piece takes the concept further by integrating other timbres into the mix, especially those that stretch the bounds of the motion-based playing style that handbells already require.

The titles of the short pieces are meant to conjure up imagery while remaining curiously disconnected. (The third title is an exception. That one is just dutifully fulfilling its role as the archetypal slow movement.) 

I. But I Was Asleep

Christian Guebert is a composer and music educator from Orange, California. His commissioned works include published and award-winning pieces, settings, and orchestrations for instrumental and choral ensembles. His music aims for immediacy, thoughtfulness, idiomatic performing style, and sonic depth. 

A prolific program director, he heads several yearly concert series including community handbell ensemble concerts and sacred music festivals, and he has served as adjudicator and clinician for handbell topics including several teaching appointments at National Seminars of Handbell Musicians of America. Guebert holds an MM degree (Cal State University, Fullerton, 2013, composition) and a Parish Music Certification (2015) and BA (2010) from Concordia University, Irvine, CA; he is now a PhD student in composition at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where he is a teaching associate for advanced musicianship and theory courses. He has taught university classes and lessons in theory, composition, ear training, singing, piano, counterpoint, orchestration, percussion, handbells, conducting, technology, and sacred music. Aside from current doctoral work, he also serves as music director at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Orange and adjunct professor at Concordia University Irvine (where he served as Composer-in-Residence). Recent publications include a handbell piece (Glad Adoration, Lorenz) and an orchestration of a choral work (Peter Anglea’s Silent Night, Beckenhorst). 

Recent works include a commissioning project as a Composition Fellow with Orange County-based Choral Arts Initiative, culminating in a March 2019 premiere of a large choral song cycle of Walt Whitman sea poetry set with harp and handbell ensemble (Voyaging, 2019), which incorporates “The Untold Want,” the prizewinning piece of the 2017 Pacific Chorale Young Composers Competition, performed by the John Alexander Singers.