MUSIC BY ELECTRICITY.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3308, 8 November 1883, Page 3

MUSIC BY ELECTRICITY.

There has just been added to the attractions of the Crystal Palace, a London paper states, an instrument, the orchestre militaire (electro moteur) of Herr Schalkenbacb, in which all the modern developments of electricity are applied to music. The instrument is a combination of organ, harmonium, and piano, with all the instruments of percussion admissible to an orchastra, together with such startling effects as cannon, mitrailleuse, and musketry, the howling of the wind, the pattering of a rain or hail storm, the flashing of lightning, and the rolling of thunder. By the aid of isolated wires, a bichromate battery of 26 cells, four Geyseler’s vacuum tubes, with Rhumkorf coils, and a multiplicity of ingenious appliances for their application, the inventor is able to play the instrument, giving the effect of an orchestra, and to produce all the effects mentioned. Round the theatre, in front of the gallery connected by wires with the instrument, are subsidiary musical instruments such as three German zithers, fixed on one sounding board, peals of bells, a number of trumpets, a small electric railway train, carrying on the engine an incandescent lamp, a windmill, a church, a catacomb and warlike implements. By dint of some small labor on the part of the performer, not only a series of martial airs were performed, with the accompaniment of the detached zithers, bells, trumpets, drums and gongs, but guns were discharged, the mitrailleuse growled out its murderous volleys, a thunderstorm was simulated with torrents of rain and rushes of wind, the church WBS struck by lightning, the catacomb thrown open, disclosing a cross, illuminated by an electric lamp, with a choir of angels chanting round it, and finally the passing away of the storm clouds, giving glimpses of the moon and a triumphal illumination of the orchestre militaire.