Jim Rossetti has been mesmerized by handbells since the mid-1970s.

The Monroeville native was a young band director in the former Churchill School District when he visited two of his students’ parents, who were music directors at Beulah Presbyterian Church.

“They asked my wife and I if we’d ever seen handbells,” said Rossetti, 76, of Economy. “And despite both of us being music majors, we hadn’t heard of them.”

Today, Rossetti is the founder and director of Ring Pittsburgh, a community handbell choir that will perform a May 31 concert at First Presbyterian Church in Greensburg.

“I think it’s such a unique way to make music,” Rossetti said.

Because players typically only use two bells, no single ringer gets the melody to themselves.

“It has to pass from one person to the next,” Rossetti said. “It’s the ultimate musical team sport.”

In the early 1990s, Rossetti’s wife, Mary Rita, became the music director at St. Bernadette Parish in Monroeville and decided to start a handbell choir.

“We wanted to raise enough money to buy three octaves’ worth of bells,” he said. “People were so excited that we ended up buying four octaves along with the other equipment we needed.”

Several years later, Mary Rita became music director at St. Alexis Church-St. Aidan Parish in McCandless, and the Rossettis started another handbell choir.

“We had such a good group that when my wife was no longer there, they didn’t want to disband,” Rossetti said.

In 2016, Ring Pittsburgh was formed around Rossetti’s dining room table. He said the primary challenge is finding prospective members with the proper musical literacy background.

“You can take a part and highlight or label the bells a person will use, but for me, it’s very important to find people who can really read the music,” he said.

Over the years, Rossetti has taught handbell workshops on ringing, conducting and rehearsal techniques, and has conducted several massed ringing events at regional handbell festivals.

Below, watch the group perform the jazz standard, “Misty”:

Ring Pittsburgh’s Sunday performance will be themed — like so many events this summer — around the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

“There’s a good deal of patriotic music in there, but we’re also taking a kind of tour of the U.S.,” Rossetti said. “We’re playing things like the ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ (John Denver’s song about West Virginia), ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ and ‘The Beer Barrel Polka,’ which always reminds me of Pittsburgh.”

The performance, titled “We Journey, Celebrate and Remember,” will take place at 2 p.m. Sunday at First Presbyterian Church, 300 S. Main St., Greensburg.

For more information, visit RingPittsburgh.org.