How’s this for a dying art: a glimpse at the exotic and often-misunderstood world of bell ringing:

Twelve people stood in a circle in a tower high above Wall Street. Eyes flitted from side to side, watching, concentrating, as arms rose and fell to a cascading cacophony of bells, bells, bells. One shook her head in disgust over missing a beat.

“This is all,” said Dale Winter, the conductor, using the technical phrase to close out a sequence of rings. The clanging inside Trinity Church’s 280-foot bell tower fell silent.

Trinity this week is the focus of the American bell-ringing world. The North American Guild of Change Ringers is holding its annual meeting at the church, which in New York fashion is promoting a mini-festival of classes, ringing performances and private sessions, including a 24-hour marathon beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday (which will take place behind sound-baffling shutters and only if the church can find enough ringers). Public sessions are scheduled for noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday, along with the normal ringing before and after services on Sunday morning.

The meeting is a sign of Trinity’s rapid arrival as a beacon of bell towers: three years ago it installed a set of 12 bells, making it the only church in the nation with that many. Canada and the United States have about 45 functioning bell towers between them. North America’s only other 12-bell tower is at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto.

“It’s a Michelin three-star,” Dr. James L. Snyder said of the Trinity set. Dr. Snyder, a retired urologist and visiting ringer from Clifton Forge, Va., has traveled to bell towers in Britain a dozen times and to others in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

The quintessentially British art form of change ringing is not the playing of carillons or chimes, in which one person controls all the clappers and can play melodies. In change ringing, each member of a band controls a rope that rings one bell, weighing from several hundred to several thousand pounds. The rope is strung along the groove of an upright wheel. The rope pulls the wheel, it revolves, and the bell — which starts with its bottom pointed upward — turns 360 degrees. Clang.

Simple rope pulling it ain’t. Change ringing is a surprisingly difficult and subtle art that involves a series of coordinated hand movements and a sensitive touch. Ringers time their strokes partly by listening, partly by watching the movement of the ropes around them. A sense of timing is essential because of the one-second gap between the pull of the rope and the sound of the bell.

The “music” consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls. Variations in the order are introduced according to strict rules. About five minutes of ringing is called a touch. A full peal has 5,000 individual sequences. Skillful ringing is like a steady stream of sand; poor ringing clumps up like wet earth.

You can read more at the link. And you can actually see and hear what all the fuss is about at the Times audio slideshow.

PHOTO: by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times