One of our new artists at Living Spaces is Antoinette. Her so called fire organs are so wonderful sculptures, we enjoy seeing them even without playing them.

Artist’s Statement

A fire organ_a made up name and a made up musical instrument! But it is also a sound instrument that works on the principle first described in 1875 by French physicist George Kastner. He called a "pyrophone" a set of tubes that produce sound when heat is applied to them.

If high heat is applied to the open bottom of a metal pipe that has a sort of obstacle placed high up in it, as the heat rises it pulls down cooler air from above; as the column of air inside the pipe vibrates against the barrier inside it the hot air and the cold air pass each other and sound is created.As in a traditionnal flue pipe organ the diameter and the length of the pipe control the pitch of the vibration but varying factors like the weather affect the tone of it.

Currently, there are very few pyrophones in the world ; the leading creator of such inventions is a Frenchman, Michel Moglia, a classically trained musician and artist who` taught me to make fire organs when we worked together to build a fire organ for an independant film maker, my sister Nora Jacobson for her film "Nothing Like Dreaming" .
Michel normally creates huge weaponlike sculptural installations of stainless steel , titanium and glass that he and his team fire up with all kinds of fuels. He performs in fire events all over the world with other musicians, fireworks, sometimes hot air balloons and other fire artists; we are waiting for him to perform in the United States!

Michel tunes his fire organs to many different modes; I am interested in building mine so that each one has a specific relationship of sounds; in fact, mine are tuned _ to each other and to specific circumstances. At the moment I am not interested in creating equal step 12 tone scales but perhaps one day I will be.