46 lines
10 KiB
HTML
46 lines
10 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
|
||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
|
||
<head>
|
||
<meta charset="utf-8" />
|
||
<title>02-Prolog</title>
|
||
<link href="02-Prolog-web-resources/css/02-Prolog.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
|
||
</head>
|
||
<body id="x02-Prolog" xml:lang="en-US">
|
||
<div>
|
||
<p class="Heading-1">Prolog</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">I’ve been a musician since I was 5 years old, with a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts — and in all my considerable music education there was no mention of the ‘glass armonica’ in music history or anywhere else. Then, in 1995, I happened to hear the Bruno Hoffmann recording of the Mozart works for the glass armonica. “This is too wonderful — I have to do this.” Thus began my Quest around the armonica.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Not only does the armonica have its own beautiful and unique musical voice, it also has an extraordinary history. It was invented by Benjamin Franklin. Mozart, Beethoven and Richard Strauss composed for it. Already it is very unique to have been invented by an inventor (and diplomat and statesman and businessman) as august as Benjamin Franklin, and it also has had music composed for it by equally august composers. In fact, no other musical instrument I know holds that distinction. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">But beyond its musical capabilities and unprecedented pedigree, an almost ‘supernatural’ dimension has been ascribed to it from the very beginning — both for Good and for Ill. The power for Good has been ascribed to it: Franklin and Mesmer used it for healing; and simultaneously the power for Ill: playing it wakes up the ghosts if you play it after midnight, players will suffer lead poisoning and nerve damage, and it even causes convulsions in your pets! I don’t know of any other musical instrument that holds this distinction either — as dubious as it is!</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">I don’t entirely know what to make of all of this, so I present it with little comment in the pages that follow. Meanwhile, to me, Franklin’s armonica is at the very least an extraordinary and beautiful musical instrument, with its own marvelous and unique musical voice, which has all but disappeared from use mostly because — we weren’t ready for it yet! Technologically for certain, and perhaps culturally also. It was just too far ahead of its time. Perhaps now we are finally ready for Franklin’s exquisite and delicate musical flower. Time will tell. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">An important note: some questions about glass musical instruments which can’t be resolved by appealing to scholarly sources can in fact be resolved by experiment. This is entirely in keeping with Franklin being an “Experimental Natural Philosopher.” For example, the standard musical reference <span class="Book-Title">Grove’s Dictionary of Music</span> states that adding water to a wineglass raises the pitch.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">1</span> I invite the reader to test this for themselves in their own kitchen: you’ll find that adding water <span class="char-style-override-2">lowers</span> the pitch. In general, my philosophy in this book is to either cite a source, or an experiment the reader can perform for themselves (with the suggestion “Try it!”). </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Along similar lines, I have taken several glassblowing courses. I never progressed beyond making sad little wine glasses, but it was still terribly enlightening to wrestle with molten glass myself. That experience has also informed parts of this book (experiences which the reader can also replicate for themselves).</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Lastly, I am a professional glass armonica player, so I am able to make observations from that perspective.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">I began this project about 14 years ago with some basic questions: why didn’t musical instruments based on the wet-finger-around-the-wine-glass idea appear before the 18th century? Why did it finally appear in force in 18th century England? And why did the glass armonica <span class="char-style-override-2">really</span> fall out of use only 60 years or so later? Those questions led to others, as turning over each rock seemed to reveal yet more interesting rocks, and the result is now in your hands. It has turned out to be a far more fascinating tale than I ever could have imagined.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Many sources are either challenging to access (e.g. a trip to the Library of Congress is necessary) or no English translation is available. So I have erred on the side of lengthier quotes. In part this is because I think there is great value in letting the eye-witnesses of that time tell their story in their own words, as archaic as their descriptions may sometimes seem. This also gives us greater insight into how different their world-view was from ours centuries later. The end result is that this book contains great swaths of material — particularly from Germany roughly 1790–1810 — available to the English reader for the first time.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">As for English sources, even English has changed considerably since Franklin’s day. The compromise on which I’ve settled is to let the historical spellings of words stand (because they remind us of the span of time between then and now), but to gently use modern practices of capitalization and punctuation because that makes the text far more comprehensible to the modern reader (except in newspaper advertisements where the plenitude of capitalized words shouting at the reader seems quite modern).</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Various famous people are intricately involved with the history of glass music (e.g. Franklin). In those cases I have presented just enough biography that their role in the story of glass music makes sense. The same is true of the chapter on the history of glass — it includes only the barest high points relevant to glass music.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">This book somewhat arbitrarily concludes at the end of the ‘golden age of the armonica’ in the first half of the 19th century, when the armonica was soundly relegated to the ‘endangered musical instrument list’. The story of the glass armonica (and musical glasses) of course continues nevertheless, but with nothing like the force of its heyday from 1761 to about 1835.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Perhaps the greatest surprise in researching this book is how many truly extraordinary people have been involved with glass music: </p>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Franklin — who invented the glass armonica, built one and always had one at hand for his remaining three decades as he soared from backwoods colonial amateur scientist to founding father and international diplomat; </li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Galileo — writing about the singing wine glass in his last days, under house arrest and failing health; </li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Athanasius Kircher — a maverick Jesuit scholar of significance, whose work was occasionally, as Chiapusso put it, “highly suspect but sensational”;<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">2</span> </li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Anne Ford — a high-born, wealthy and highly educated woman in 18th century London who resorted to the musical glasses in a heroic effort to avoid an unwanted marriage; </li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Richard Poekrich — an eccentric who went from one outrageous inventive scheme to the next — and championed the musical glasses; </li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span><span> The Great Belzoni </span>— <span>who started out as a circus strong man and musical glasses player, and ended up as an important Egyptologist with contributions still in the British Museum; </span></li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Franz Mesmer — who used his glass armonica to ‘mesmerize’ his patients, and was Mozart’s first paying patron; </li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Étienne-Gaspard Robertson — whose early slide-projector shows in the crypts of an abandoned monastery outside of Paris (accompanied by glass armonica!) were arguably some of the first ‘moving picture’ shows. </li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><span>And we’ll meet so many others.</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In <span class="Book-Title">Phaedrus,</span> Plato discusses “divine madnes<span>s</span>” (THEIA MANIA).<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">3</span> Now of course many forms of madness are simply crippling, but Plato has in mind the ‘divine madness’ that is behind great Art and Science, the ‘lunacy’ without whose boundless inspiration down through the ages we would still be living in caves. Glass music in general and the glass armonica in particular have long been associated with madness. I’ve come to the conclusion that those associations are largely correct: glass music and the glass armonica seem to have attracted more than their fair share of divine lunatics — that is, men and women thinking and creating on the fringes. In the course of this book you’ll be able to judge that for yourself. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">This book represents about a decade and a half of effort. Nevertheless, I’m acutely aware of the many shortcomings of this book, so many questions I have had to leave unanswered, and of the inevitability of errors and omissions in spite of all my efforts. For that I ask the reader’s indulgence.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">I must conclude with profound thanks to my wife Sue for enduring her husband’s ‘divine madness’, to Maarten Roos Ph.D. for his invaluable input, to Gerhard Finkenbeiner and Tim Nickerson of Finkenbeiner Inc. for making the glasses of my own armonica (by far the hardest part!), and to the librarians at the Library of Congress, Stanford, UCLA, UC Riverside, Harvard and elsewhere who so often went ‘the extra mile’. Perhaps divine madness is infectious! Let’s hope so!<a id="x1" /></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">William Zeitler<br />Glass Armaniac<br />San Bernardino, CA,<br />August, 2013</p>
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="TOC-FIgures"></li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</body>
|
||
</html>
|