Tower Orchestra

(Adolphe Sax, 1850)

I shall need four immense towers, higher than the Pantheon or Nôtre Dame and joined by bridges, making a gigantic platform. Once my towers are built, I shall construct an apparatus using all the principal methods of producing sounds known to date. Steam engines will put huge cylinders in motion, compressing air at five, ten, or even fifteen times its normal atmospheric pressure, in reservoirs or regulators, to distribute it to the high or low stops of the instrument….Add to this an enormous set of triangles, cymbals, big drums, kettledrums on which elephant hide has been used instead of sheepskin. Add to this metal ropes the size of cables which will hold the suspended bridges; stretch these ropes over an opening from which compressed air will make them resound at will and with unequalled power. Imagine a hundred other ways, which I shall spare you, of completing, perfecting, and developing the ensemble and the effects of my orchestra, and tell me if it will not surpass in power and variety of timbre our miniature orchestras.

Though this proposal for a colossal orchestra may read like a satire of techno-giganticism, it is was in fact quite serious. Adolphe Sax, famed for his namesake the saxophone, was also the inventor of more quixotic instruments. In the inventor’s quest for instruments of improved tone, range, intonation or loudness, practicality often fell by the wayside. The resulting instruments were a popular target for caricaturists, as seen in the two illustrations above. The tower orchestra represents an extreme expression of this strand in Sax’s work, which mingled acoustical knowledge and engineering prowess with an idealistic disregard for physical and economic limitations.

With the tower orchestra, Sax aimed to combine a full range of tone colors with unprecedented loudness. The same aim animated the concerts of massive orchestral and vocal forces that featured in concert life of the period (see Berlioz’s “Euphonia”). But Sax noted that multiplying the number of instrumentalists did not proportionately increase the volume of sound: with such enormous ensembles, players far away from the audience were heard with less intensity than those closer. Sax’s envisioned solution was to build resonators of enormous size, activated by superhuman forces, and mounted high above the city so that their tones would spread far and wide in all directions. Involving towers linked by suspension bridges, steam engines and metal ropes set resounding by compressed air, it was a solution that applied industrial developments to musical purposes.  To Sax’s contemporaries, the plan was equal parts genius and insanity – an idea ahead of its time. As Sax’s friend Savart reportedly told him, “nothing is simpler, but keep your thoughts to yourself; for if you share them before another fifty years of progress, they’ll take you for a madman.”

Text: Henry Berthoud, “Concert fantastique de Sax” Le Paye 23 Sept 1850
Images: “Le public visitant la trompette de M. Sax,” Le Charivari, 1855; Sax’s Sextett-Horn, Kladderadatsch, c. 1860