Crystal and song

For well over 100 years, the highly skilled artists at Reuge have been creating mechanical wonders, including their amazing singing birds, dressed in real Hummingbird feathers (from a large stock of vintage feathers). This year's piece is called: “Crystal and Song”

The word “crystal” comes from the ancient Greek word meaning “hard ice”. This idea has been nurtured by the fact that most crystals are found in the high mountains, amongst the snow and ice. Even the Romans subscribed to this idea. The poet Plinius said that crystals can only be found where mountains of snow rest.

Viewing this masterpiece by Reuge, one is tempted to agree with Plinius: the walls of this piece of art do indeed remind us of polished ice.

The wonderful pieces of rock crystal, a special and colourless variety of quartz, which is used in “Crystal and Song”, have been hidden for some 15 million years in crevasses and deep caves, until discovered by modern day geologists.

The stone grinder, another specialist craftsman, then works to shape the raw quartz for many hours, using diamond tipped tools, which are the only ones hard enough for this delicate work. It has taken hundreds of hours to transform a 3kg piece of raw quartz into this magnificent, elegant rock crystal piece, whilst there was the ever present risk that the mineral could crack and shatter. This makes the final rock crystal sculpture all the more precious.

It is not only the rock crystal elements of “Crystal and Song” that require such delicate attention. The mechanical automaton mechanism and the exquisite song birds have been created by Reuge in the Swiss Jura, where Reuge has worked its magic for more than 120 years. No less than 250 separate moving parts make up the movement that drives the antics and exquisite song of the tiny feathered bird, bringing it to life in the most charming way.

This exceptional creation is a one-of-a-kind piece that will make its debut during BaselWorld 2011 – a piece that will delight its owner and succeeding generations of his family.