Epilog

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write something worth reading
Or do things worth the writing.

—B. Franklin

And so we bring our story of the glass armonica to a somewhat arbitrary close, roughly in the middle of the 19th century. We save for another day considerations of:

• • Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) Carnival of the Animals (1886) that specifies a ‘glass harmonica’ for the “Aquarium” movement — yet there is question if he had the Franklin-style instrument in mind.
• • Richard Strauss (1864–1949) specified a glass armonica for his opera Die Frau Ohne Schatten (c.1916, “The Woman Without a Shadow”) — and had to have an instrument made for the premiere.
• • Bruno Hoffmann (1913–1991) who with his glass harp — a goblet/musical glasses style instrument except that the glasses were ground to pitch to eliminate the water tuning — single handedly revived glass music in the 20th century. (It was Bruno Hoffman’s CD that introduced the author to the glass armonica.)
• • Gerhard Finkenbeiner (1930–1999?), a world-class glassblower who began producing armonicas again in the late 20th century, and one day took off in his private plane and disappeared without a trace, adding yet one more mysterious chapter to the already uncanny history of the glass armonica.

I opened this book with a quote from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand...” And that’s what this book has really been about — a long list of ‘divine maniacs’ who saw Possibilites in some infinitesimally small little thing: putting a pipe into molten glass and blowing — and thereby creating one of the foundational technologies of the modern world. Or the resource crisis in England that put an end to the use of wood to fire glass furnaces — that opened up a whole new world of glass possibilities. Or that the one lasting scheme of the eccentric Poekrich was not his ‘practical’ plans to raise geese, but his ‘frivolous’ music-making with glasses. Or that Anne Ford would see musical glasses as an effective weapon to avoid an unwanted marriage — and succeed! Or that of all Franklin’s inventions, the glass armonica would be one that was especially near and dear to his heart, and probably helpful in his efforts to charm support from the French in the American Revolution and thus found a nation. Or a blind girl who by society’s standards of the time should have been completely helpless and useless, nevertheless made an outstanding life for herself and indirectly made a lasting contribution to Music by inspiring Mozart to compose for her.

The ‘majority’, the ‘status quo’ are the inertia that keep Society, Art, and Science continuing on the current path. And inertia has its place — we can’t be changing everything all the time just because. Yet, our world faces unprecedented challenges, and I have to wonder if the solutions we need won’t be found by yet more congressional committees, or bureaucrats, or academia, or even Fortune 500 companies, but rather by modern day Poekrichs, and Franklins with virtually no formal education, and Mesmers and Robertsons and Kirchgessners and Steve Jobs’s and Einsteins and Teslas who all began on the fringes.

In 1995 I had just emerged from a particularly dark period of my life, and moved to Seattle to begin again. A new friend there asked if I had any unusual recordings and I said “Wait, I have one for you — music for the ‘glass armonica’ ”. My friend liked it and said: “Why don’t you do this?” The question struck me like one of Franklin’s lightning bolts — the thought had never crossed my mind.

And here I am. As I write this a decade and a half later I am in a hotel room in Toronto, here to play the glass armonica in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor. Some unknown crackpot in 1st century Syria, and Ravenscroft centuries later, and Poekrich, and Anne Ford, and Franklin, and Kirchgessner, and Donizetti and countless other ‘divine maniacs’ all made this possible.

It is natural to expect the Future to be found in the next Grand Thing announced on CNN, where the great majority expects the ‘big breakthroughs’ figured out by the ‘big players’ to be announced. But maybe the real possibilities that will actually work and make a real difference and lead Humanity constructively forward are to be found in the lowly ‘grains of sand’ that we’ll miss if we don’t pay attention.

Let's be awake to those opportunities.