Euphonia: A Utopian Kingdom Where We Are All Musicians
Hector Berlioz imagined a town in the year 2334 dedicated to creating the world’s best music.
Perfect musical harmony has been a utopia since times remote. Since Pythagoras, who talked of the music of the spheres, many thinkers have related the alignment of the planets and mathematics with the perfect concordance of sounds. In the utopia of the sky that Dante wrote about, music has a primordial place.
French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz imagined a musical utopia in 1844, in a future Germany in the year 2344. In Les Soirées de l’Orchestre he wrote of a world in which people move with the same ease on earth as they do in the air (through an air full of sounds of perfect voices and wind harps), and where there is a town called Euphonia, which is a place as well as the world’s largest musical instrument, because all of its inhabitants are members of an immense orchestra. All of them are musicians and singers, and who also make instruments and write scores.
The streets, ordered into guilds, are called Tenors, Counter Tenors, Violins and Harps. All of the inhabitants of Euphonia study music from a young age and also study silence.
Composers conduct their own pieces in gigantic music festivals, the world’s best, which are held in an auditorium of perfect acoustics. People from all over and even the emperor visit to listen to these magnificent concerts. Thanks to the invention of a series of apparatus that transmit indications from the conductor, of intensity and rhythm, to each musician, an orchestra of 12,000 functions with a never-before-seen musical precision.
Berlioz was a key composer of classical music, as well as being renowned for his musical contributions and his treatise on instrumentation. His imagination led him to create Euphonia and try to bring a little of that non-existent town into reality.
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