Wind-Powered Music

Atlanta is now the home to a new entry in the Guinness Book of World Records -- the world's largest tuned wind chimes. Meanwhile, a new book sings the praises of wind-powered harps, among other airy topics.

On June 4, Emory University unveiled the 24-foot high, 2,300 pound "basso profundo" chime at its Crawford Long Hospital on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. There are at least a dozen basso profundos (boy, that's fun to say!) installed around the world, but this is the largest, and the only owned by a hospital. Crawford Long is not a typical hospital, however. Its recent renovations added a waterfall leading to the medical office tower, an aviary full of singing birds, lush gardens and fishponds. The overall look and feel has been compared favorably to luxury hotels.

The wind chime was a gift from the Emory Crawford Long Hospital Auxiliary. It was designed by Ken Orr of HighGrove Partners and manufactured by chime-builder Music of the Spheres. Guinness has recently certified it as the world's largest wind chime and will list it in upcoming editions.

Rothenberg, a professional musician as well as a philosophy professor, has just edited a new volume of essays entitled "Writing on Air," in which a diverse group of writers consider the power and mystery of air. The Chronicle of Higher Education excerpted one of his essays in its July 25, 2003 issue.

Rothenberg is particularly taken with Aeolian harps, which, as he reminds us, stirred "nearly all the major writers of the 19th century... Coleridge, Shelley, Spenser, even Emerson and Melville were suitably impressed." Why did this strike a chord with the Romantics? Because "we can't own the wind or easily convert it to music."

The Aeolian makes a good stab at it. Typically just an ordinary-looking rectangular box equipped with between 4 and 20 long, open strings, it lies in wait for gusts of wind to set it resonating. But unlike wind chimes, which are tuned to circle through the notes of a single chord, Aeolians produce sounds "stranger than the chime, because they are not tuned to any scale but the natural harmonic series, similar to the overtones you get if you blow across a bottle's mouth with a range of strengths, or the harmonics that come when you touch and release a single unfretted guitar string."

Rothenberg prefers the purity of the natural scales and overtones, and the "melodies created by vibration alone," to what he calls the "cheap trick" of the wind chime.

Even the grosso basso profundo? Perhaps Rothenberg can come to Atlanta with an Aeolian, and we can have a public "Battle of the Wind Giants"?

Visit HighGrove Partners and Music of the Spheres, "The Stradivarius of Windchimes" (whose motto is "World Peace - One Backyard at a Time")

Read the article on the basso profundo in the June 23, 2003 Emory Report

Learn about other record-breaking musical instruments, performances, and artistic feats at the Guinness Book of World Records [the wind chime is not yet listed as of this publication]

Examine "Writing on Air" at Amazon.com and at the publisher's web site

Learn more about Rothenberg's music and academic work

Listen to the sound of an Aeolian harp and see examples of Aeolian harps

Visit the Chronicle of Higher Education [only subscribers can access complete articles]