TWENTY FIVE IN THE WORLD, AND IT SINGS.

Tiffany & Co. has made a clock that most houses could not attempt, because the craft it depends on very nearly died.

The Singing Bird on a Clock takes Jean Schlumberger’s Bird on a Rock, the brooch he designed for the Maison in 1965, and gives it breath. Press a discreet push piece and the automaton wakes. The bird pivots. Its beak opens and closes. The wings flutter. And it sings, in a voice startlingly close to the living thing.

What produces that song is the remarkable part. There is no chime, no striking mechanism, nothing borrowed from the music box. Inside sits a set of miniature bellows and pipes, a tiny organ in all but name. Air is released in precisely timed intervals, and the pitch of each note is governed by the dimensions of the pipe it passes through. An arrangement of cams and gears keeps every movement of the bird synchronised to the melody, so the beak opens on the note rather than near it.

The technique dates to the late eighteenth century, when singing bird automata were the wonder of the European courts. Almost nobody still builds them. Tiffany turned to Reuge, the Swiss manufacture that remains one of the last true custodians of the discipline, and the two houses spent more than two years developing the piece.

The gem setting alone accounts for 130 hours across the case and the bird. The whole is presented under clear glass, which is the correct decision. A mechanism this beautiful should not be hidden inside a case, and here every wheel and lever is visible at rest.

Twenty five examples will be made. The price is not published.

Schlumberger spent his career at Tiffany rendering the natural world in stones, whimsical and precise in equal measure. Sixty years after the brooch, the bird has been given a voice. It is difficult to think of a more fitting tribute.

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