Konstantin Saradzhev (1900–1942) was a composer, virtuoso bell ringer, and theorist of Russian bell ringing. He was born in Moscow on April 6 (March 25), 1900. His father, Konstantin Saradzhev, was a violinist and conductor; his mother was Natalia Filatova.
From the age of 14, Saradzhev devoted himself seriously to bell ringing. He often played from the bell towers of Nikita Monastery and the Church of Maron the Hermit in Moscow. He described bells as his musical medium and said he had created 116 works that could be performed only on bells because of their fine distinctions in pitch.
Saradzhev developed his own theory of music and described a special ability to hear the individual tones of objects and living beings. He recorded the sound spectra of 317 of the largest bells in Moscow’s churches, monasteries, and cathedrals. The manuscript is held at the Danilov Monastery museum and was published in 1977 in the annual volume Monuments of Culture: New Discoveries, in an edition prepared by musicologist and bell specialist Larisa Blagoveshchenskaya. Anastasia Tsvetaeva later reported that Saradzhev said he could hear 1,701 sounds within an octave.
Saradzhev envisioned a Moscow concert belfry devoted to musical rather than church bell ringing. In 1930, he created a bell tower at Harvard University using bells acquired from the Soviet Union. He returned to the Soviet Union in December of that year. He was working on a book titled Music-Bell, whose manuscript has not survived.
He died in 1942 when a bomb struck a neurological hospital in the Moscow region. Anastasia Tsvetaeva wrote about him in the 1977 article “The Tale of the Moscow Bell Ringer” and later co-authored the book Master of the Magical Ringing with his brother, Neil Saradzhev.