Before deciding on his programme, Berlioz was thinking of basing a symphony on Goethe’s Faust. The ‘Sabbath Night’ is inspired by the Walpurgisnacht vision of the beloved transformed into a witch. The movement continues Berlioz’s exploration of new orchestral sonorities to represent his nightmare scenario. Another instrument new to the symphony orchestra is a pair of deep bells; for which, as they would not often be available, he wrote the part to be played on pianos. His handling of the usual instruments, woodwind, brass, percussion, and strings, is no less original. The bells chime, the Dies irae plainchant is played and caricatured. The idée fixe is transformed into a vulgar jig suitable for a witches’ Sabbath, and the ‘Ronde’ begins as an academically correct fugue, its subject combined at the climax with the plainchant.

The results for the vibrating string are generalized to discuss vibrating systems that are not necessarily harmonic. Solutions are characterized by counting the nodes for solutions—that is, locations where the vibrational amplitude is always zero. One-dimensional solutions for uniform bars and rods, relevant for various chimes and bars used for music, are presented. The nonuniform bars used for xylophones and marimbas, and how they are used for tuning, are presented. The procedure is generalized for two-dimensional objects, where node lines are considered, and applied to membranes, such as drum heads, and plates. The complications that arise with degeneracies, or multiple solutions with the same frequency, are presented. A general, symbolic way of representing vibrational modes is shown, as well as how that can, very symbolically, represent any possible solution for a vibrating object as a sum of those with sinusoidal time dependence.

As a lookout atop the Dresden Kreuzkirche during the uprising of 1849, Wagner describes the spectacle of a city in flames, and the acoustic panorama of cannon and gun fire, amid the immense bells pealing just behind his head: ‘a wonderful intoxicating polyphony’. It was also deafeningly loud and conveyed the unfolding violence and brutality below. His willing absorption may seem perverse, yet it invites us to consider ways in which the qualities of lived experience are entwined with auditory effects: the experience of proximate physical danger, the perception of violent sounds, and the vicarious experience of conflict through rhythmically moving sound masses, from regimented columns of insurgent soldiers to the ostinato-based ritual of Grail knights. With Wagner’s experience as a focal point, this chapter investigates the willing abolition of normative categories of experience vis-à-vis the perception of danger. It asks to what extent massed, rhythmic, non-musical sound complexes, viewed within the tenets of the sublime, infiltrate the sonic image of Wagner’s music. By positing cannon and bells as reciprocal signalling devices tethered to the sublime, it also suggests that these material objects perform a dazzling confusion of purposes, simultaneously communicating time, propagating war, staging opera and physically stimulating bodies.