Whispers of Eternity: Inside Blancpain’s Grande Double Sonnerie
Blancpain’s new Grande Double Sonnerie is a wrist‑worn cathedral bell tower: a hyper‑complicated, musical machine that can charm a newcomer and still give a seasoned watchmaker goosebumps.
Source: Blancpain
What “Grande Double Sonnerie” means
In simple terms, this watch can chime the time by itself, on the wrist, and do it in different ways.
- A grande sonnerie automatically strikes the hours and the quarters as time passes, without needing to press a button.
- A petite sonnerie is a quieter mode that usually strikes the hours but simplifies or omits the quarters to keep things more discreet.
- On top of that, this watch also includes a minute repeater, which chimes the exact time on demand when activated. Think of it as asking the watch to “say the time out loud.”
For the lay person, it is like having a grandfather clock’s musical brain shrunk down into a wristwatch. For the horologist, it is the apex of chiming complication architecture.
Source: Blancpain
Two melodies, four notes, four hammers
The poetic hook of this piece is “time in two melodies.”
- The movement uses four notes – E, G, F, B – played on four distinct hammers and gongs, giving a rich, layered sound instead of the usual two‑gong repeater setup.
- It can play the classic Westminster chime, the same melodic structure associated with Big Ben. That immediately roots it in the historical language of tower clocks.
- It also offers a unique Blancpain melody composed by drummer Eric Singer, giving owners a signature sound no other watch has.
A collector can therefore “tune” the personality of the watch: traditional and cathedral‑like with Westminster, or contemporary and individual with the Blancpain melody.
Source: Blancpain
A movement built like a micro city
Blancpain openly describes this as the most complicated watch in its history, and the numbers back that up.
- The calibre is built from 1,053 individual components, documented across 1,200 technical drawings, an engineering workload more akin to designing a car than a typical watch movement.
- Development led to 21 patents filed, with 13 integrated into the final movement, signaling not just “more complications” but genuinely new solutions, especially important in a sonnerie where safety and energy management are critical.
Everything is conceived, produced, decorated, and assembled in‑house, so this is not a modular stack of outsourced parts; it is a single, deeply integrated construction.
Source: Blancpain
Layered high complications for the purist
Under the musical spectacle sits a full suite of classical haute horlogerie complications.
- In addition to grande and petite sonnerie and the minute repeater, the watch includes a fully integrated retrograde perpetual calendar, allowing calendar indications to jump back to a starting point rather than rotate endlessly.
- A flying tourbillon is built into the architecture, both as a technical regulator and as a visual centerpiece, floating without a visible upper bridge.
- The movement is described as “entirely secured”, which in practice means complex safety systems prevent the user from damaging the sonnerie train through incorrect manipulation, an ever‑present risk in traditional striking watches.
For horologists, the fascination lies in how these systems share space, power, and control logic without stepping on each other’s toes.
An 8‑year quest for sound
Blancpain spent eight years developing this Grande Double Sonnerie, which is a realistic timeframe for a clean‑sheet grand complication of this scale.
CEO Marc A. Hayek sums up the philosophy with a winemaker’s analogy: listening to a sonnerie is like tasting a great wine, where clarity, resonance, persistence, and richness all matter more than brute volume.
The result is a watch designed not just to display time, but to stage it as a performance, on demand or automatically, with a choice of voices and a level of technical density that few manufactures can even attempt today.
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