Greubel Forsey resurrects the lost art of cathedral gongs
The Geneva manufacture has painstakingly rebuilt the knowledge of gong making from scratch for its Grande Sonnerie, crafting metal resonators shaped to its asymmetrical case to produce sound of uncompromising purity.
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Hands in dark cotton gloves cradle a polished movement beneath a magnifying lamp, turning it slowly to inspect the delicate metal forms that will voice the watch. These cathedral gongs, curved and fitted to the contours of Greubel Forsey’s asymmetrical case, represent something far rarer than precious metals or complicated mechanisms: the recovery of a craft that had almost vanished.
By the late eighteenth century, watchmakers had moved beyond the tinkling bells of earlier chiming watches, wrapping fine metal wires around the movement’s circumference to create resonant tones. Greubel Forsey took that lineage further, fashioning gongs that conform to the specific geometry of their Tourbillon 24 Secondes, curved around the visible regulator to produce sound of unprecedented loudness and melodiousness.
When work began on the Grande Sonnerie, the knowledge of how to construct such gongs had all but evaporated from collective memory. The atelier undertook the painstaking work of rebuilding that expertise from the ground up. Every chime that emerges from these handmade gongs is tested and measured: volume, tone, pitch, duration, intensity and timbre are each calibrated with meticulous precision. The striking train itself was engineered to serve the gongs alone, governed by a silent centrifugal regulator rather than a traditional escapement, ensuring nothing interferes with the purity of their voice.
One Grande Sonnerie leaves the Geneva atelier each year, a constraint born not from commercial calculation but from the absolute refusal to compromise on the labour that sound requires. Each movement spends weeks under the hands of artisans, its gongs shaped, annealed, tested and refined until they achieve a standard that cannot be hastened. To own this watch is to hold a piece of restored knowledge, a connection to the patient mastery of those who understood that in horology, the most profound luxury is often the one you hear.
Imagery courtesy of Greubel Forsey (@greubel.forsey).