Another of my patented Crazy Thoughts While Waiting for the Bus[sup]TM[/sup]…
What is the largest musical instrument ever built?
I’m thinking, the pipe organ. I’m not sure whether pipe organs are custom-built for each installation, or whether there is enough demand to create standardized parts…
Could a speaker system be included as part of a musical insrument? That might include PA systems at concerts.
How about really large choirs?
Earth Harpis probably going to win for stringed instruments.
Some cultures have a tradition of water drumming - wading into hip deep water and slapping, splashing and otherwise moving the water to make rhythmic music. Hard to imagine a bigger instrument than an ocean!
I can’t define a speaker system or a choir as a “musical instrument,” so I guess it would be a pipe organ.
P.D.Q. Bach had an instrument called the Pandemonium, but I believe it was famous as being the loudest instrument, not the largest. Of course, this was before heavy metal rock bands.
How about the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns (Virginia, USA)?
I’ve often wished that some clever programmer could come up with a virtual Pandemonium. The trickiest part are the cannonballs, which clang and clatter through the instrument the first time any given key is pressed on the keyboard, but not subsequently. This really wakes the audience up when a composition suddenly changes keys…
(I love watching audiences jump at performances of Saint Saens’ Third Symphony, where things get really gentle and soft and sleepy…and the ORGAN COMES IN FULL BLAST! And, yeah, it makes me jump two times out of three, and I know it’s coming!)
Or maybe not … 
Hmmm…I was expecting a carillon or something similar as being “largest.” I guess it depends on how you define “large.”
Googling ‘largest musical instrument’ I expected something bigger and more exotic than that.
I know. I mean, according to Wikipedia, the bourdon (low bell) at the carrilon at Riverside Church weighs 41,000 pounds (!) and is over 10 feet across. You can see footage of it being raised here. And that’s just one of 74 bells. Total weight of all the bells is over 100 tons.
Bells should easily be the heaviest instruments. Earth Harp was mentioned before. You’d have to categorize area, volume, and weight to work this out. You could probably set a new record by something across the net, connecting machines around the world to a single keyboard or other input device to play music.
It wasn’t built as a musical instrument, but the Golden Gate Bridge has been used as one.
San Francisco’s Wave Organ, though I don’t know its exact size. And similar ones in Croatia and Blackpool, U.K.
Not to be too flippant, but the Universe itself was really, truly, considered and deeply studied as a musical instrument, for a far longer time than any other concept of physical reality in the West: the music of the spheres.
Kepler himself was grounded in the thought. A quickie page here has some juicy quotes, and for good measure has a sound file of his mathematics, which is kind of wrong-headed, I must say.
The music of the spheres is quite a rich area of investigation, and the validity of sounding music is by no means trivial for those who were into it.
There are any number of compositions that use plotted star locations, background radiation, etc., as generating devices, so by that token those are quite large instruments.
Aren’t there some whistling caverns somewhere?
I’d always heard that the Wanamaker organ at the eponymous (always wanted an excuse to use that word) dept. store in Philadelphia was the world’s largest. Since the store has changed from a high prestige dept. store to a schlock joint, could the organ have been moved to Atlantic City? It would have been a massive moving job.
Not really. I helped with one, once, where closed church A sold the organ to church B. We disassembled it (slowly, carefully labelling and diagramming parts the whole way), and they loaded the parts in their cars and vans, and drove it away. Reassembly on the other end was presumably just the reverse process. I was only on the sending end.
They would do the same for any pipe organ, although they might need a semi truck to haul all the parts of a very large one.
There are many YouTube videos of the Wanamaker organ in concert, as well as interviews with organists on playing it. One is a broadcast performance with the organ and its city’s eponymous symphony orchestra.
Your turn.
Possibly the heaviest musical instruments of all time were the Mark II and III Telharmoniums, electronic instruments built around 1900, each weighing nearly 200 tons. The tones were produced by a set of dynamos that basically filled a warehouse.
THANKS Musicat! I’d totally forgotten P.D.Q. Bach. I laughed for over five minutes straight reading about him.
::Snip:: “Although P.D.Q. Bach was born on April 1, 1742 and died on May 5, 1807, the dates on his first tombstone (before he was moved to an unmarked pauper’s grave) were inscribed “1807-1742” in a transparent attempt to make it appear that he could not have been the son of J.S., who died in 1750. Nice try, Bach family—close, but no cigar: some of us, or at least one of us, are not fooled, or at least, is not fooled.” 