Fire Organ/Pyrophone

Linda and I were in Bristol, Vermont, on New Year's Eve for "Best Night." Linda's music group, Full Circle was playing at the Baptist Church on the green. On the way across the green we saw Antoinette Jacobson playing her Fire Organ.

Antoinette's sister Nora made a film, Nothing Like Dreaming, about some Vermonters that featured the Fire Organ. She showed it at Colby-Sawyer in 2004. This review explains that Antoinette and Michel Moglia built the large organ used for the film and a series of smaller organs like the one we saw on the Bristol Green.

There is an interesting history of musical instruments that use fire, heat, or explosions to vibrate tubes or pipes. Physicist Georges Fredric Eugene Kastner created one in 1875.