First posted: 20 October 2025

First Cyclic Spliced Maximus Peal Rung in Australia

Charlotte Sorell, Phil Goodyer, Ian Harris and I joined 8 NSW ringers recently for a challenging peal at St Mary's Cathedral. If you want to know what a cyclic peal is, and why we rang it, keep reading.

As is often the case, the peal’s composition was a "multi-part", meaning that the calls made by the conductor are repeated a certain number of times throughout the peal composition. For many multi-part compositions, the "part-end", the exact point where the composition repeats itself, only has a few light bells swapped around making the composition relatively easy to keep track of. However, in this case, the part-ends rotated every bell except the treble, meaning it was a cyclic peal. To make it harder, this peal was on 12. The part ends looked like 1ET234567890 (0 for ten, E for eleven, and T for twelve). While ANZAB has rung peals of Cyclic Major before, this is the first time that an ANZAB band has rung Cyclic Maximus. The composition, by Thomas Perrins, may be found here.

Ringing drawing

In the past few decades, Cyclic Maximus compositions have become incredibly popular amongst UK 12-bell peal bands. This is due to a preference for runs of bells. Changes with something like 67890E or 765432 are considered to be good music, and runs are something that cyclic compositions can excel in, due to one simple rule: wherever a long run appears in one part, another long run of different bells appears in another.

At right is a screenshot of the same section of the composition in different parts showing how the musical runs, highlighted in green, appear in the same place each time. There are some exceptions, such as the tenor interrupting 65432T at the back, but the rule holds generally throughout. This means that the composition generates an extremely high amount of music throughout. Composition Library has a "score" for music. A peal of Bristol S. Maximus may have an score of up to about 1200, but this composition scored 2657.

The composition we rang uses somewhat easier (but not easy!) methods than are normally rung in the UK. Hopefully it is a stepping stone to allow ANZAB bands to potentially ring the "current trend" of 12-bell peals.

David Sorell

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