Special Effects, Dry Ice, and Lasers

“Instruments continued growing in size and complexity. Everything else about music grew as well, as colossalism transformed the art. Some theaters seated up to forty thousand people. In one play a thousand mules pranced about the stage. Concerts featured a hundred blaring trumpets, accompanying thousands of actors and acrobats. ‘Not being able to make it beautiful,’ wrote Pliny the Elder around the time of Christ, ‘they made it rich.’ In time, Romans hardly enjoyed music for its own sake, so preoccupied were they with the size of orchestras, the volune of sound, and novel performances. Thus did they carry sensate music, along with the rest of their culture, to the end-point of decadence” (B.G. Brander, Staring Into Chaos, pp. 290).