Glass harmonica
The glass harmonica, also known as the glass armonica, glass harmonium, bowl organ, hydrocrystalophone, or simply the armonica or harmonica is a type of musical instrument that uses a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction. It was invented in 1761 by Benjamin Franklin and produces sound similar to the Glockenspiel.
Nomenclature
The name "glass harmonica" refers today to any instrument played by rubbing glass or crystal goblets or bowls. "Harmonica" is derived from ἁρμονία, harmonia, the Greek word for harmony. The alternative instrument consisting of a set of wine glasses is generally known in English as "musical glasses" or the "glass harp".When Benjamin Franklin invented his mechanical version of the instrument in 1761, he called it the armonica, based on the Italian word armonia, which means "harmony".
The unrelated free-reed wind instrument aeolina, today called the "harmonica", was not invented until 1821, sixty years later.
The word "hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica" is also recorded, composed of Greek roots to mean something like "harmonica to produce music for the soul by fingers dipped in water". The Oxford Companion to Music mentions that this word is "the longest section of the Greek language ever attached to any musical instrument, for a reader of The Times wrote to that paper in 1932 to say that in his youth he heard a performance of the instrument where it was called a hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica." The Museum of Music in Paris displays a hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica.
Forerunners
Because its sounding portion is made of glass, the glass harmonica is a type of crystallophone. The phenomenon of rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a wine goblet to produce tones is documented back to Renaissance times; Galileo considered the phenomenon, as did Athanasius Kircher.The Irish musician Richard Pockrich is typically credited as the first to play an instrument composed of glass vessels by rubbing his fingers around the rims. Beginning in the 1740s, he performed in London on a set of upright goblets filled with varying amounts of water. His career was cut short by a fire in his room, which killed him and destroyed his apparatus.
Edward Delaval, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a fellow of the Royal Society, extended the experiments of Pockrich, contriving a set of glasses better tuned and easier to play. During the same decade, Christoph Willibald Gluck also attracted attention playing a similar instrument in England. In April 1760, the poet Thomas Gray wrote to James Brown, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, of a performance by Delaval that: "No instrument I know has so celestial a tone. It was like a cherubim in a box."
Franklin's armonica
invented a radically new arrangement of the glasses in 1761 after seeing water-filled wine glasses played by Edward Delaval at Cambridge in England in May 1761. Franklin worked with London glassblower Charles James to build one, and it had its world premiere in early 1762, played by Marianne Davies.In a letter addressed to his friend Giambattista Beccaria, an Italian priest, physicist and mathematician in Turin, Franklin wrote from London in 1762 about his musical instrument:
"The advantages of this instrument are, that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being well tuned, never again wants tuning. In honour of your musical language, I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it the Armonica."
In Franklin's treadle-operated version, 37 bowls were mounted horizontally on an iron spindle. The whole spindle turned by means of a foot pedal. The sound was produced by touching the rims of the bowls with water-moistened fingers. Rims were painted different colors according to the pitch of the note: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and accidentals were marked in white. With the Franklin design, it is possible to play ten glasses simultaneously if desired, a technique that is very difficult if not impossible to execute using upright goblets. Franklin also advocated the use of a small amount of powdered chalk on the fingers, which under some acidic water conditions helped produce a clear tone.
Some attempted improvements on the armonica included adding keyboards, placing pads between the bowls to reduce sympathetic vibrations, and using violin bows. Another supposed improvement, based upon later observations of non-playing instruments, was to have the glasses rotate into a trough of water. However, William Zeitler put this idea to the test by rotating an armonica cup into a basin of water; the water has the same effect as putting water in a wine glass – it changes the pitch. With several dozen glasses, each a different diameter and thus rotating with a different depth, the result would be musical cacophony. This modification also made it much harder to make the glass "speak", and muffled the sound.
In 1975, an original armonica was acquired by the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis and put on display, albeit without its original glass bowls. It was purchased through a musical instrument dealer in France, from the descendants of Mme. Brillon de Jouy, a neighbor of Benjamin Franklin's from 1777 to 1785, when he lived in the Paris suburb of Passy. Some 18th- and 19th-century specimens of the armonica have survived into the 21st century. Franz Mesmer also played the armonica and used it as an integral part of his Mesmerism.
An original Franklin armonica is in the archives at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, having been donated in 1956 by Franklin's descendants after "the children took great delight in breaking the bowls with spoons" during family gatherings. It is only placed on display for special occasions, such as Franklin's birthday. The Franklin Institute is also the home of the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.
A website has attempted to catalog publicly known Franklin-era glass armonicas. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has an early 19th-century instrument on display, which is occasionally used for public performances and recordings.
Musical works
Composers including J. G. Naumann, Padre Martini, Johann Adolph Hasse, Baldassare Galuppi, and Niccolò Jommelli, and more than 100 others composed works for the glass harmonica; some pieces survive in the repertoire through transcriptions for more conventional instruments. European monarchs indulged in playing it, and even Marie Antoinette took lessons as a child from Franz Anton Mesmer.Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his 1791 K. 617 and K.356 for the glass harmonica. Ludwig van Beethoven used the instrument in his 1814 melodrama Leonore Prohaska. Gaetano Donizetti used the instrument in the accompaniment to Amelia's aria "Par che mi dica ancora" in Il castello di Kenilworth, premiered in 1829. He also originally specified the instrument in Lucia di Lammermoor as a haunting accompaniment to the heroine's "mad scene", though before the premiere he was required by the producers to rewrite the part for two flutes. Camille Saint-Saëns used this instrument in his 1886 The Carnival of the Animals. Richard Strauss used the instrument in his 1917 Die Frau ohne Schatten.
For a while the instrument was "extraordinarily popular," its "'ethereal" qualities characteristic, along with instruments such as the nail violin and Aeolian harp, of Empfindsamkeit, but "the instrument fell into oblivion," around 1830. Since the armonica's performance revival during the 1980s, composers have again written for it including Jan Erik Mikalsen, Regis Campo, Etienne Rolin, Philippe Sarde, Damon Albarn, Tom Waits, Michel Redolfi, Cyril Morin, Stefano Giannotti, Thomas Bloch, Jörg Widmann, and Guillaume Connesson.
The music for the 1997 ballet Othello by American composer Elliot Goldenthal opens and closes with the glass harmonica. The ballet was performed at San Francisco Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, and on tour in Europe including at the Opera Garnier with Dennis James performing with his historical replica instrument.
Joseph Schwantner's symphonic poem Aftertones of Infinity, which was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Music, employed individual wine glasses played by numerous members of the orchestra at key points during the work.
George Benjamin's opera Written on Skin, which premiered at the 2012 Aix-en-Provence Festival, includes a prominent and elaborate part for the glass harmonica.
Non-musical cultural works
's short story "Der Geisterruf" from Gespensterbuch centers on the ethereal otherworldly quality of glass harmonicas.Andrei Khrzhanovsky's 1968 animated short film The Glass Harmonica is named after, and features, a "glass harmonica". It is particularly notable for being the only Soviet animated film to be banned by censors.
Purported dangers
The instrument's popularity did not last far beyond the 18th century. This may have been due to the inability to amplify the volume so as not to be drowned out by other instruments.Some claim this was due to strange rumors that using the instrument caused both musicians and their listeners to go mad. It is a matter of conjecture how pervasive that belief was; all the commonly cited examples of this rumor seem to be German, if not confined to Vienna. One example of alleged effects from playing the glass harmonica was noted by German musicologist Johann Friedrich Rochlitz in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung:
Marianne Davies, who played flute and harpsichord – and was a young woman said to be related to Franklin – became proficient enough at playing the armonica to offer public performances. After touring for many years in duo performances with her celebrated vocalist sister, she was also said to have been afflicted with a melancholia attributed to the plaintive tones of the instrument. Marianne Kirchgessner was an armonica player; she died at the age of 39 of pneumonia or an illness much like it. However many others, including Franklin, lived long lives.
For a time the armonica achieved a genuine vogue, but like most fads, that for the armonica eventually passed. It has been claimed the sound-producing mechanism did not generate sufficient power to fill the large halls that were becoming home to modern stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and percussion. That the instrument was made with glass, and subject to easy breakage, perhaps did not help either. By 1820, the armonica had mostly disappeared from frequent public performance, perhaps because musical fashions were changing.
A modern version of the "purported dangers" claims that players suffered lead poisoning because armonicas were made of lead glass. However, there is no known scientific basis for the theory that merely touching lead glass can cause lead poisoning. Lead poisoning was common in the 18th and early 19th centuries for both armonica players and non-players alike; doctors prescribed lead compounds for a long list of ailments, and lead or lead oxide was used as a food preservative and in cookware and eating utensils. Trace amounts of lead that armonica players in Franklin's day received from their instruments would likely have been dwarfed by lead from other sources, such as the lead-content paint used to mark visual identification of the bowls to the players.
Historical replicas by Eisch use so-called "White Crystal" developed in the 18th c. replacing the lead with a higher potash content; many modern newly invented devices, such as those made by Finkenbeiner, are made from so-called Quartz "pure silica glass" – a glass formulation developed in the early 20th c. for scientific purposes.