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<p class="Heading-1"><span>4</span>. The Musical Glasses</p>
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<p class="Heading-2">Georg P. Harsd<span>o</span>rffer</p>
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<p class="Normal">Georg Philipp Harsd<span>o</span>rffer (Harsd<span>ö</span>rffer, 1607–1658), German poet and polymath, was born at Nuremberg. He studied law at Altdorf and Strassburg, and subsequently traveled through the Netherlands, England, France and Italy. His knowledge of languages gained for him the nickname “the learned,” and his writings in German and Latin fill fifty volumes. In 1636 he published (with Schwenter) a work entitled <span class="Book-Title">Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae</span> (“Physico-Mathematical Delights”) consisting of three volumes of mathematical and physics curiosities (as in ‘parlor tricks’), observations on music and poetry, designs for curious machines, observations on biology, etc. It includes a chapter on how to make “a merry wine-music”:</p>
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<p class="Quotation"><span class="Book-Title">To Make a Merry Wine-Music</span></p>
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<p class="Quotation">Take 8 glasses of equal form; put in the one a spoonful of wine, in the other two [spoonfuls], in the third three, and so on; then let eight persons, with fingers dipped in wine, at the same moment pass them over the brim of the glasses and there will be heard a merry wine-music that the very ears will tingle. You can also have fewer glasses speak in thirds, fifths and octaves, by controlling the size of the glasses and the amount of water being more or less. </p>
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<p class="Quotation">A half-empty and completely-empty glass make an octave; 2/3 empty makes a fifth; 1/3 empty makes a third.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">How to synchronize music with clocks by means of a barrel / cylinder fitted with pegs/pins, is common knowledge. As to how such a contraption may evoke the body’s physical condition, cf. Part 13.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">1</span> </p>
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<p class="Normal">Like Kircher, Harsdorffer’s assertions that “a half-empty glass and a completely empty glass make an octave” are simply mistaken. (Try it!)</p>
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<p class="Normal">And there is no mention of playing melodies on them. On the other hand, a set of singing glasses tuned to essentially random pitches and played simultaneously still produces its own “merry” effect. (Try it!)</p>
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<p class="Normal">Harsd<span>o</span>rffer also describes an experiment reminiscent of Kircher’s five glasses:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">With Four Glasses — Examples of the Four Humors [Temperaments]. Take four chalices, equally large, tall and wide, and fill the first with brandy, the second with wine, the third with ordinary water, and the fourth with salt water (which you can make yourself with salt) or with oil. Turn a wet finger around them and you will discern a loud tone.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The brandy, which is hotter in nature, correspondences with the angry/passionate gall-bladder and has a louder sound, and a faster agitation can be seen.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The wine is not so active, but still gives a bright sound, and corresponds with the liver. It makes good blood, and is the quickest to transmute into useful nourishment.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The water corresponds with phlegm; it is slow in action and gives a greater sound.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The saltwater and oil, however, give hardly any action because of their earthy character, so the sound is weak and coarse. The more subtle the moistness, the more subtle, pure and versatile the sound and what it can do to human beings.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">From this we can see several reasons why one music is more admired than another, from the similarity between the sound and its body quality. A set of strings, like veins in the body, can be excited, affected and dominated.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The diseases of the blood which easily incline to sadness can be wondrously healed by music — or at least the aches relieved.</p>
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<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 11: </span><a id="Anchor-7" />An experiment from Harsdorffer's <span class="Book-Title">Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae</span> (1636): two wine glasses support a stick being sawn</li>
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<img class="frame-1" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/hars411-sawing_fmt.png" alt="hars411-sawing.psd" />
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<p class="Quotation"></p>
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<p class="Quotation">I cannot neglect to recount here what the often celebrated Athanasius Kircher in his <span class="Book-Title">Musurgia</span> on page 219, informs us concerning the Tarantula spider — like a shell affixed in the water — which danced and leapt as long as the lutenist played, and when he stopped playing the spider also rested. After diagnosing the poison from its bite, they also prescribed certain music.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">2</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Harsdorffer also describes a curious experiment involving supporting a wooden rod with a glass at each end, striking the rod in the middle, and observing that the glasses break less easily when there is water in them.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">3</span><span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1"> </span>(See <a href="#Anchor-7">Figure 11</a>.)</p>
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<p class="Heading-2">The ‘Verrillon’ in Early 18th Century Germany</p>
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<p class="TOC-Figures">Music for the ‘verrillon’ appears in Germany in the early 18th century. (The French word for ‘glass’ is ‘verre’ (German is ‘Glas’) — does the apparently French origin of the name suggest that the instrument originated in France?)</p>
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<p class="TOC-Figures">One example is a cantata by Gottfried H. Stoelzel (1690–1749), called <span class="Book-Title">Volles Vergnügen, ausnehmende Freüde </span>(1732, “Full of Gladness, Exquisite Joy”) composed for the birthday of the wife of Prince Gunther of Schwarzburg-Hausen. It contains a duet for soprano and bass — and ‘verrillon’.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">4</span> The part consists exclusively of fast notes — something that is more natural on an instrument played with beaters than with the wet-finger-around-the-rim.</p>
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<p class="TOC-Figures">That’s consistent with a short article we have from 1738 in Eisel’s <span class="Book-Title">Musicus Autodidaktos</span> “Teach Yourself Music.” In an article entitled “<span class="char-style-override-3">What Kind of Instrument is the Verrillon?”, he says</span>:<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">5</span></p>
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<p class="Quotation">It is a glass instrument consisting of 18 beer glasses of various widths, which after their various sizes, have the following range:</p>
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<li class="Figure-Caption para-style-override-1"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 12: </span><span class="char-style-override-4">The range of a '</span><span class="char-style-override-4">verrillon', from </span><span class="char-style-override-4">Eisel's </span><span class="Book-Title char-style-override-4">Autodidaktos</span><span class="char-style-override-4"> (1738)<br />NOTE: In north-German music nomenclature, their B = our B</span><span class="char-style-override-5">¯</span><span class="char-style-override-4">, their H = our B</span><span class="char-style-override-5">Ω.</span><span class="char-style-override-5"></span></li>
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<img class="frame-3" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/autodidactus001_fmt.png" alt="autodidactus001.tif" />
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<p class="TOC-Figures para-style-override-2"></p>
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<p class="Normal">Eisel’s book also has an image of a verrillon player (see <a href="#Anchor-2">Figure 13</a>).</p>
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<p class="TOC-Figures">Eisel’s image would suggest that Harsdorffer’s insight of playing them with wet-fingers-around-the-rim was still unknown to Eisel.</p>
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<p class="TOC-Figures">In 1839, well after the heyday of the glass armonica, Pierre Lichtenthal (an eminent musicologist in Italy) still defines the ‘verrillon’ thus [the ‘diatonic scale’ is the usual “do, re, mi...” scale with no sharps or flats]:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">[Verrillon:] An ancient instrument composed of eight to ten glasses chosen after the diatonic scale, or tuned to the diatonic scale with water; the glasses are placed on a board covered with cloth, and one plays it with small sticks also covered with cloth.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">6</span></p>
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<img class="frame-4" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/eisel-autodidactus_fmt.png" alt="eisel-autodidactus.psd" />
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<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 13: </span><a id="Anchor-2" />A man playing a 'verrillon': 18 cups tuned with water, <br />played with beaters. From Eisel's <span class="Book-Title">Autodidaktos</span> (1738)</li>
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<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
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<p class="Heading-2">Christoph W. Gluck</p>
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<p class="Normal">In 1745 the composer Christoph W. Gluck (1714–1787) came to London seeking fame and fortune. At this period in time London and its environs were twice the population of Paris, and three times the population of Vienna, so London acted as a magnet for musicians throughout Europe.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">7</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Gluck’s opera <span class="Book-Title">La caduta de’ giganti</span> was only repeated five times after its first performance.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">8</span> In March he composed another opera: <span class="Book-Title">Artamene</span> (adapted from previous operas he had written) which wasn’t performed at all; and in that same month he gave a concert with Handel, the reigning musical king in London, who had said that Gluck “knows no more counterpoint [music theory] than my cook.”</p>
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<p class="Normal">In April, Gluck played a concerto on 26 glasses at a benefit for himself.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">9</span> An advertisement appeared in the <span class="Book-Title">General Advertiser</span> for April 23, 1746:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">At Mr. Hickford’s Great Room in Brewer’s-street, on Monday, April 14, Signor Gluck, composer of the operas, will exhibit a concert of musick. He will play a concert upon twenty six drinking glasses, tuned with spring water, accompanied with the whole band, being a new instrument of his own invention, upon which he performs whatever may be done on a violin or harpsichord; and therefore hopes to satisfy the curious, as well as the lovers of musick. To begin at half an hour after six. Tickets half a guinea each.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">10</span> </p>
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<p class="Normal">Horace Walpole mentions this concert in a letter of March, 1746:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The operas flourish more than in any latter years; the composer is Gluck, a German; he is to have a benefit, at which he its to play a set of drinking glasses, which he modulates with water. I think I have heard you speak of having seen some such thing.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">11</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Gluck found himself in Dresden in 1747. We know he performed on his ‘drinking glasses’ again in Copenhagen in 1749, but that’s it. Gluck’s fortunes improved considerably after his London venture — perhaps he didn’t need to resort to his ‘drinking glasses’ any more.</p>
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<p class="Heading-2">Richard Poekrich</p>
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<p class="Normal">Richard Poekrich (c.1695?<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">12</span>–1759, ‘Poekrich’ is how he himself spelled his name, others spell it Pockrich, Pockeridge, Pockridge, Pokeridge, and Puckeridge) was a highly eccentric Irish politician, inventor and entrepreneur. Poekrich was ridiculed for many of his plans, but many (if not most) of them have since been implemented, although a few still remain quite ‘fanciful’ — to put it delicately. Poekrich is most remembered for inventing the musical glasses, or at least significantly promoting them by performing on them throughout England and Ireland. As we shall see, when Franklin tells the story of how he invented the armonica, he specifically mentions Poekrich.</p>
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<p class="Normal">One of our main sources about Poekrich is John Carteret Pilkington (1730–63) who tells us in hilarious detail the story of their short and ill-fated musical partnership. We’ll get to that story presently. </p>
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<p class="Normal">Our other main source is Thomas Newburgh (c.1695–1779)<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">13</span>, a man of wealth and position, and a poet who found in Poekrich an endless opportunity for his satire. Poekrich’s father (also named Richard) had married a Newburgh, so the satirist was related to his victim — probably a first cousin. Poekrich also had a younger brother named Newburgh (and a younger sister named Lettice).</p>
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<p class="Normal">Thomas Newburgh proposed to write “an heroick poem in twenty-four books” about Poekrich to be called “The Pockriad” which would “tell exhaustively the inspiring life and adventures of the restless inventor of new plans for the improvement of everybody and everything.” [Un]fortunately the threatened epic did not appear.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">14</span> But Newburgh devotes about 35 pages to Poekrich in his <span class="Book-Title">Essays Poetical, Moral and Critical</span> (1759) — the rest of this book (apparently the only one that mentions Poekrich) is devoted to a variety of serious and satirical verse and prose. </p>
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<p class="Normal">Poekrich was born at his family’s estate about 1695. Although of English descent on his father’s side, his family had long been settled in north Ireland, at Derrylusk, County Monaghan, where they had their estate and extensive property. His father had raised and commanded an independent company during the Williamite Wars (for the Irish throne), fought through “the late happy revolution,” and was dangerously wounded at the siege of Athlone in 1690.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">15</span> </p>
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<p class="Normal">His son Richard inherited an estate from him at age 25, worth £1000 per year according to Newburgh,<span class="Superscript char-style-override-6">16</span> and £4000 per year according to Pilkington.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">17</span> Both agree that he quickly dissipated this great inheritance on a long list of schemes. But that turns out to not be quite the case. By the time the estate was liquidated, the debts discharged and the estate lawyers paid, Poekrich received a one-time lump sum of a little over £4000 — not an annual income.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">18</span><span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1"> </span>£4000 was certainly worth a lot more in Poekrich’s day than it is now, but even still, it certainly wasn’t any great fortune.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Poekrich was rather civic minded in his own eccentric way, and advocated the encouragement of Irish industries. He decided to set an example by establishing a brewery near Islandbridge (a landmark within Dublin) where he also experimented in distilling. Newburgh states: </p>
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<p class="Quotation">Mr. Pockrich having made a little too free with his fortune, in the year 1715 set up a brewery, in order to repair it; to which business, notwithstanding repeated discouragements, he still shews a great propensity.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">19</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">1715 would be five years before Poekrich’s father’s death — is such an early date really possible? The brewery was certainly functioning in 1745 when Poekrich competed for the Royal Dublin Society’s premium for the best barrel of ale. He didn’t win any award, but it still must have been fairly good as the judges published that “All the ales produced were extraordinary good.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">20</span> Contemporaries said that Poekrich “consoled himself by philosophically and courageously drinking his own brew.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">21</span> Newburgh poetically comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">In brewer’s grains you gold can find —<br />To all such treasure I am blind.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">22</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">The brewery ultimately failed. (Historically, breweries in Ireland have had a difficult time surviving.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">23</span>)</p>
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<p class="Normal">In that same year Poekrich ran for Parliament in County Monaghan and lost. In 1749 he ran again in Dublin, arguing for the production of Irish malt liquors to replace imports from Britain and making proposals for getting the beggars off the streets and putting the able-bodied to work. He lost again.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">24</span> Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Methinks I hear th’exulting Crowd<br />“Pockrich for ever,” cry aloud.<br />Hear him in Senates next dispense<br />The nerves and force of eloquence!<br />Or, god-like, raise the uplifted thunder<br />’Gainst pensioned knaves who nations plunder.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">25</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Poekrich seems to have been particularly interested in putting Irish land to better use, especially by draining and reclaiming bogs, for which he claimed to have an original method (but apparently neglected to enlighten anyone with details).<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">26</span> Newburgh informs us “Mr. Pockrich, tho a great farmer, never takes any land but that is reckon’d by others irreclaimable,”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">27</span> so Poekrich’s proposals may have had a basis in personal expertise. Poekrich wrote pamphlets in support of his proposals, and tried to interest Parliament and the public in them without success.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">28</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">One of his proposed uses for reclaimed land was to plant vineyards — an idea which never came to fruition, as Ireland’s climate is much more conducive to raising barley for Irish Whiskey than it is for raising grapes. Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">These spongy fens, now firm, produce<br />The grain or grape’s enlivening juice.<br />Ceres in Golden Harvest glows,<br />Bacchus the cluster’d grape beflows.<br />Becchus and Ceres both combine<br />To make the gifts of heav’n thine.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">29</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">He tried, unsuccessfully, to raise geese in County Wicklow<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">30</span><span class="char-style-override-7"> </span>and declared that if properly encouraged he could supply the whole of the markets of Ireland, Great Britain and France.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">31</span> This isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds, as goose-farming was a profitable occupation: Ireland at that time exported great quantities of goose quills to England for making into pens<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">32</span> (and presumably down and meat). Newburgh comments (alluding to Roman geese whose cackling raised the alarm when the Capitol was attacked, and to Xerxes’ invasion of Greece which included three million geese, as recorded by Herodotus):</p>
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<p class="Quotation">His numerous flocks the Bard next sees —<br />Not flocks of sheep, but flocks of geese:<br />As geese by cackling saved a state,<br />So grazing geese may mend thy fate.<br />See! the vast mountains and the rocks<br />Now covered o’er with cackling flocks;<br />Nor less in number than those bands<br />That once o’erspread the Grecian sands.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">33</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Poekrich also talked of constructing an astronomical observatory on the highest mountain in County Wicklow. Newburgh says it was for “astrological purposes,”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">34</span> but astrologers haven't been looking through telescopes to determine the positions of the planets for centuries at least — printed astronomical tables called ‘ephemerides’ are much more accurate and convenient for that purpose. On the other hand, in Poekrich’s day there was not yet an astronomical observatory in Ireland at all (until Dunsink was erected in the 1780s),<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">35</span> so perhaps Poekrich was advocating that the first observatory be built. Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">From humbler sounds that soothe our ears,<br />You seek the music of the spheres;<br />When, far from ken of human sight,<br />You seek some mountain’s aery height,<br />Wrapt in the clouds, you there survey<br />A boundless tract of land and sea —<br />Or with a leveled tube from far<br />Descry a bog in every star.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">36</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">He proposed to build unsinkable ships of metal for the maritime powers, and to supply each man-of-war with 500 tin boats which, he said, would float under any or all circumstances, and would prove invaluable in cases of shipwreck or collision.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">37</span> Ships of his day were of course still constructed wood — metal hulled ships didn’t appear until over a century later. “Perhaps it was this nautical venture which gained him the courtesy-title of Captain, to which he had no other claim, but which was sometimes used, even in legal documents.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">38</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Sometimes thy ship bounds on the rocks,<br />With idle thumps and harmless knocks.<br />My friend, who dreads the boisterous main,<br />Inglorious seeks the rural plain.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">39</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">He proposed a canal for linking the Liffey to the Shannon River.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">40</span> Construction on this 132 km / 82 mile canal was begun in 1756 (during Poekrich’s lifetime) and completed in 1804.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Some of his proposals were decidedly less feasible. He planned to provide everyone with a pair of wings for flying:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Mr. Pockrich has often declar’d his opinion that wings might be contriv’d for human flight; and hereafter it might be as common for men to call for their wings, as now for their boots. The means that have been us’d to render this scheme feazible, may be laid before the Public in proper time.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">41</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">On Eccles-Mount, you spurn the ground,<br />Indignant with an angry bound,<br />You wing your daring flight,<br />And range the azure fields of light,<br />My dastard soul, of humbler birth,<br />Grovels contented here on earth.<br />Nor dare I plume my wing to soar<br />Where mortal never flew before.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">42</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">But the project which excited Poekrich the most was his plan for blood transfusions. He declared that he could — by connecting a sick or old person with a healthy or young one (such as “strong healthy cook maid, or a kitchen wench”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">43</span>) by a pipe or tube — revive the former by improving their blood to the degree that death would be virtually unknown.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">44</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Pockrieh was aware that the end of Death (except by accidents) would have disadvantages for certain members of society such as estate lawyers, so he suggested an act of Parliament decreeing that “anyone attaining the age of 999 years shall be deemed to all intents and purposes dead in law.” This would enable relatives to go to court to claim their inheritance, and vicars their burial fees, from legally dead 999-year-old parishoners.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">45</span> Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Dye, said the Bard, you smile at Death,<br />And God-like eternize your breath.<br />Cities shall crumble into dust,<br />And Time itself shall meand’ring rust.<br />Pock still shall live by wond’rous skill,<br />His schemes immortal to fulfil.<br />Old Pock shall live to see old Death<br />Resign his pestilential breath.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">46</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Poekrich also had a plan for rejuvenating wrinkled skin:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Take common brown paper, steep it in vinegar, then apply it to the forehead, the skin about the eyes, or any other winkled part; let it lie on some time, every half hour renewing the application. The wrinkles not only disappear, but the cheeks glow with a vermeil that excels the power of paint. Mr. Pockrich has practiced his experiment for some years past with great success.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">47</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Alas, Poekrich had no more success with Cupid than he did the Grim Reaper. In 1745, by now a 50-year-old bachelor, Poekrich married widow Margaret Winter in spite of efforts by the bride’s family to prevent the marriage.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">48</span> Newburgh comments:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">From flights sublime in liquid Air,<br />Descending, you address the Fair<br />Cupid we’re told, oft takes his stand<br />Upon some Widow’s Jointure land<br />From thence the god lets fly a dart,<br />And pierces Pock’s obdurate heart.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">49</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Poekrich’s new wife proceeded to run up substantial dressmaking debts,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">50</span> and in 1748 after eight years of marriage she ran away with Theophilus Cibber, an actor and playwright.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">51</span> The usual story is the ship which carried them to Scotland was shipwrecked, and the elopers were lost with everyone else on board.<span class="char-style-override-7">52</span> That isn’t quite the case: Mrs. Poekrich and Cibber <span class="char-style-override-8">were</span> drowned when their ship was shipwrecked, but the ship was traveling <span class="char-style-override-8">to</span> Dublin <span class="char-style-override-8">from</span> England — normally you’d expect elopers to sail <span class="char-style-override-8">away </span>from the ex-husband-to-be. On the passenger manifest the name “Widow Pockrich” appears next to Cibber, and is followed by those of an actor and actress in Cibber’s acting company travelling with them.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">53</span> And we know that at this point Cibber was trying to re-invigorate his faltering acting career.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">54</span> Make of this mess what you can. Newburgh comments:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">From her who late possesse’d your Heart,<br />Sad cruel Stars you now must part<br />...<br />Marriage at length you find a Noose<br />In which intrapt you Freedom lose.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">55</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Poekrich himself was to pass away a year later, in 1749. He was on one of his musical tours through England, and was lodging at Hamlin’s Coffee House, Sweeting’s Alley, near the Royal Exchange, London, when a disastrous fire broke out, destroying several houses and Poekrich as well. (O’Donahue suggests that it originated in Poekrich’s room, perhaps due to one of his experiments.)<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">56</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Poekrich had made plans for the disposition of his body after death: in case he should happen to die before his blood transfusion scheme was worked out...</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">[Mr. Pockrich] has order’d the executors of his will to deposite his body in a large lead coffin to be fill’d with spirits of his own making, which he apprehends will preserve it from putrefaction for many centuries. The coffin [is] to be plac’d in some public depository, where late[r] posterity may indulge their curiosity in beholding the remains of so illustrious and venerable a personage.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">57</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">But the fire put awry even this very last of Poekrich’s schemes. (When it says “spirits of his own making,” did he mean he wanted his body to be pickled in the product of his own brewery?)</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In 1755 Poekrich published <span class="Book-Title">Miscellaneous Works</span> — a volume of poetry. Alas, none of his poems concern his musical glasses. But here’s an example of Poekrich’s poetry nonetheless:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">A Poem of Thanks to a Lady, who sent the Author a Present of Syder [Cider] and Bacon</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">This comes to thank my lovely Cousin,<br />For Syder, I receiv’d a dozen,<br />Excepting one, by chance, was broken,<br />Just at your door, by the same token.<br />Were I a Bishop, Priest or Deacon,<br />My Instrument shou’d pierce your Bacon;<br />The very Thought gives rapt’rous Pleasure,<br />How I’ll indulge then without measure!</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Satan, they say, once enter’d swine<br />But tho’ the old Boy enter’d thine,<br />My knife I’ll notwithstanding stick,<br />In your sweet bacon, to the quick:<br />And tho’ he stood e’en at the door,<br />A belly-full I wou’d secure.<br />But lest my rapsody might shock,<br />I still conclude your thankful Pock.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">58</span><span class="char-style-override-3"> </span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In spite of all his schemes, Newburgh tells us that Poekrich was a personable fellow:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Let the reader be further made sensible, that whatever opinion he may conceive of Mr. Pockrich’s understanding from his projects, that in conversation he is a pleasant jocular and agreeable companion, and but seldom discovers any marks of an unfounded mind.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">59</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Except for his musical glasses which would ultimately bring him success, even Poekrich's musical endeavours fared no better than his other schemes.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Newburgh informs us that Poekrich would have obtained the post of chapel master at Armagh Cathedral, a post for which he had applied, if Archbishop Boulter hadn’t died before the appointment could be made. Newburgh also speaks with praise of Poekrich’s musical compositions, and says that Poekrich had fully intended to take his doctorate in music at Trinity College, Dublin, and to give a public performance of the music he had composed for the examination, but “was prevented.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">60</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Poekrich thought the drum had vast musical possibilities. Newburgh explains:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">From the part of the kettledrum sometimes bears in concerts, Mr. Pockrich conceiv’d a musical instrument might be compos’d consisting wholly of drums. Accordingly he try’d the experiment, and for that purpose procur’d, or caus’d to be made, about twenty drums of different sizes, gradually increasing in their dimensions, from the smaller trebles to the larger base tones. These were usually plac’d by him in a circular position. The performer sitting or standing in the center, whose office was to strike each particular drum, before, behind, or on each side., as the particular note or movement of the composition requir’d. This gentleman devoted some months wholly to the practising upon, and improvement of, this most extraordinary instrument, but to the great mortification of all lovers of martial musick, (the gentlemen of the sword in particular) he has sometimes since I hear, dispos’d of his drums.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">61</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">To which he adds his poetic comment:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">With brandish’d hand aloft in air,<br />In thunder next you strike mine ear,<br />When from the drum’s tumultuous sound,<br />You deal your martial thumps around.<br />In softer strains my ears delight,<br />Nor choose a drum but when I fight.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">62</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The musical glasses may be the only endeavour of Poekrich’s that Newburgh didn’t ridicule:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Mr. Pockrich’s skill in musick has been made known by his no less surprising than agreeable performance on drinking glasses, an invention entirely his own. And I cannot but wish that drinking glasses, instead of being (as too frequently) the instruments of sottishness and debauchery, were oftener applied to so innocent and entertaining a purpose.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">63</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Newburgh even devoted a poem to Poekrich’s musical glasses (here in its entirety):</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">On Mr. Pockrich’s Playing on Drinking-Glasses</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation"><span class="char-style-override-8">Quem cepit vittrea fama</span> (Horace)<span class="char-style-override-9"><a id="footnote-358-1-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-358-1">1</a></span></p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Between two rival gods a feud arose,<br />To Jove as umpire they their feuds disclose,<br />O’er glass, says Bacchus, I’ve my Pow’r maintain’d,<br />E’er since the purple juice the glass has stain’d.<br />Phoebus my rights invades. Great Ruler of the Skies,<br />With aspect bland the Delian god replies,<br />“O’er sounds harmonious I with right preside,<br />The harp and lyre the ensigns of my pride,<br />But harp and lyre to tuneful glass must yield,<br />Such is its virtue when by Pockrich fill’d.<br />Pockrich my son, this secret has explor’d,<br />O’er glass harmonious sole despotic lord.<br />’Tis he in varying changes, can at will,<br />(Unknown before,) display a magic skill,<br />Then let the bard still tend his glassy care,<br />With sprightly sounds still charm the list’ning ear.<br />Let him correct intemperate desire,<br />E’er yet the purple juice begins to fire,<br />And sober joys with tuneful glass inspire.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Persuasive, mild, thus spoke the Delian god,<br />Jove grants his suit, — assenting gives the nod<br />With songs of joy the Empyrean rings,<br />While every Muse the praise of Pockrich sings.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">64</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Later, after apparently hearing Miss Davies play on Franklin’s version of the musical glasses called the ‘armonica’ (which we shall consider shortly), Newburgh had this to say:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Let it be here observed, that the new invented musical instrument, called the Harmonica (with which the celebrated Miss Davies not long since so agreeably entertained the town) is no more than an improvement upon Mr. Pockrich’s glasses, and that it is to the gentleman’s original invention we are indebted for one of the most pleasing instruments within the compass of sound.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">65</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Poekrich’s schemes frequently led him into debt — a prison offense in those days. Fortunately Poekrich’s musical glasses came to his aid when bailiffs arrived at his brewery to arrest him. To be sure, offering them some of the product of his brewery probably helped matters as well:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Mr. Pockrich, in his brewery near Island-bridge, happening one day to be seized by bailiffs, thus addressed them: “Gentlemen, I am your prisoner but before I do myself the honour to attend you, give me leave as an humble performer of musick, to entertain you with a tune.” “Sir,” replies one of the bailiffs, “we come here to execute our warrant, not to <span>h</span>ear tunes.” “Gentlemen,” says the Captain, “I submit to your authority, but in the interim, while you are only taking a dram, ... here Jack,” calling to his servant, “bring a bottle of the Ros Solis I lately distilled: I say Gentlemen, before you take a dram I shall dispatch my tune.” In the meantime he flourishes a prelude on the glasses, and afterwards displays his skill through all the pleasing turns and variations of the ‘Black Joke’. The monsters, charmed with the magick of his sounds, for some time stand at gaze. At length, recovering [from] their trance, thus accost the Captain: “Sir, upon your parole of honour to keep the secret, we give you your liberty. Tis well, playing upon the glasses is not more common: if it were, I believe our trade would find little employment.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">66</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">This wasn’t Poekrich's only encounter with debt-collectors:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The Captain and his friend Talbot Edgworth, Esq., finding themselves one Sunday morning unexpectedly attack’d in their coach by a number of bailiffs, were resolved to maintain or sell their liberty at as dear a price as possible. The bailiff’s having surrounded the coach, the Captain undertakes the defence of one door, Mr. Edgeworth of the other. As often as the bailiffs, &c. [etc.] attempted to break open or get into the coach on either side, as often were they repuls’d, by the bravery of our heroes, who in this manner with the bare points of their swords, kept off a multitude of armed assailants for near an hour, till the populace satisfy’d of the courage of the besieg’d, thought fit to interpose. The bailiffs and their followers were dispers’d, our heroes quit their citadel, and each flourishing a drawn sword, head a party of the populace, who follow them with acclamations and huzzas, till they conducted them both safe to their respective homes.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">67</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Poekrich’s musical glasses were the basis of a short and ill-fated musical partnership with John Carteret Pilkington (1730<span class="char-style-override-4">–</span>?). Pilkington began his stage career as a boy soprano; after a short stint as a naval volunteer he made a meagre living writing verse for various magazines, following his mother into Marshalsea prison on three separate occasions. O’Donahue says that Pilkington was “a worthless son of doubtful parents.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">68</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In his autobiography, Pilkington gives a detailed account of his brief partnership with Poekrich. Having survived a terrible sea voyage, and broke, Pilkington arrives in Dublin and meets Poekrich in a pub:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">I then called for some warm punch, and before I had drank two glasses, a tall middle-aged gentleman entered, with a big wig and a sword on.... In the course of some general chat, I mentioned my singing at the concert in Cork; upon this he eagerly said, why, can you sing? I told him I believed I could: he begged I would just hum a tune to give him an idea of my voice and manner; when I did, he cry’d, bravo! Bravo! By G-d, I’ll make your fortune...</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">You must know, sir, that I am a gentleman who has run thro’ a plentiful estate in schemes, for the publick good; ... In the more gay and happy hours of my life, I studied musick as an amusement, and am, perhaps, the best master of harmony in the known world; of this I will give you an immediate demonstration: saying so, he pulled from his sleeve sixteen large pins, and from his pocket a small hammer; with this he drove the pins into a deal table, all ranged one above the other, and some almost in as far as the heads: he then took from his side pocket two pieces of brass wire, and demanded what tune I would have: I told him the Black Joke: then lay your ear to the table, says he, hear and admire: I did so, and to my infinite amazement, he played it with all its variations, so as to sound somewhat like a dulcimer.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Encouraged by the applauses I gave to this uncommon instrument, he took a parcel of drinking glasses, and tuned them, by putting different quantities of water in each: upon these he layed a number of the newest tunes in the most elegant taste, giving me delight and satisfaction.... said he, I have at home glasses as large as bells of my own invention, that have a sound as loud as an organ, but more delicate and pleasing to the ear: now, Sir, as we are both gentlemen, and both possessed of excellence in the science of musick, if we unite together, we must make a fortune...<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">69</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">They proceed to Poekrich’s house; on the strength of their ‘future earnings’ Poekrich ‘borrows’ from Pilkington the fare for the coach. Poekrich goes on to explain that his current lodgings are the only ones he could find where his extensive musical activities wouldn’t disturb the neighbors; then Poekrich strikes a light ...</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">... which revealed to my eyes the most litter’d dirty hole I had ever yet seen: the furniture consisted of an old taudry bed, one rush bottom chair, a frame with a number of large glasses ranged on it, and the case of a violincello. I believe the Captain observed the dismay in my looks, and in order to comfort me, said, that he had made the people take all superfluous things out of the room, and that he never suffered a servant to clean it, lest their damn’d mops and brushes would break his glasses.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">He then set down and played Handel’s water musick,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">70</span> and several other pieces, on the glasses, that indeed made some amends for the wretched appearance of every thing about him.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">71</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">With no other options, Pilkington decides to continue with Poekrich’s plan. They rehearse and plan their program, and finally the big day arrives:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The songs I was to sing at my first appearance were fixed upon, and every thing got in readiness for the important event; when I hoped my patience and long suffering would meet some reward, for by this time two months had sneaked away: at length the hour arrived. The Taylors Hall was finely illuminated, the newspapers filled with encomiums on the angelick organ, every publick corner was covered with large bills, and tickets dispersed amongst the nobility. About three hours before the concert was to begin, the Captain went to arrange and tune his glasses, when unfortunately stepping out for some water, a large unmannerly sow entered, and, oh! Guess the rest! — threw down the whole machine, and covered the ground with glittering fragments; destroying not only the hopes of the publick, but ours of a present and future subsistence. When the Captain returned, and found his lofty castle in the air reduced to an heap of rubbish, he looked just like Mark Anthony, when he beholds the body of Julius Caesar on the earth, and says:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Oh! Mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">He, however, supported the catastrophe with a dignity and heroism peculiar to great minds; and without staying for the company, desired the door-keepers would inform the world of the melancholy event, returning himself once more to his gloomy abode.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">72</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Shortly after this episode Pilkington writes that he was 14 years old,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">73</span> which would put this story at about 1744. We have seen that Poekrich’s brewery was still functioning in 1745 as he entered ale from it in the Dublin competition. So even allowing for exaggeration, it’s still clear from Pilkington’s narrative that Poekrich’s finances had ebbed very low indeed. But the musical glasses ultimately turned the tide for our good Captain.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">After this Pilkington and Poekrich part company. Pilkington’s autobiography gives scant further mention to Poekrich — just a few chance encounters.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">74</span> But according to Flood in his <span class="Book-Title">History of Irish Music</span> “[Poekrich] gave performances through England and Ireland on the glasses, having as vocalist John Carteret Pilkington.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">75</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">At the time of Pilkington’s narrative (c.1745) Poekrich is apparently still playing his glasses by striking them with sticks (it is still a verrillon):</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Colonel Newburgh ... was endeavoring to give Baron Dawson, a gentleman of true wit and humour, an idea of Pockridge’s instrument, by telling he runs two sticks along the glasses, and by that means played distinct tunes; but, says the Colonel, except you were to see and hear it, you can have but little concept of its excellence; oh! But I have, said the Baron, ‘tis like a blackguard boy, trailing a stick along iron rails.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">76</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">But Poekrich also calls his instrument an ‘angelick organ’.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">77</span> The wet-finger-around-the-rim would seem much more suggestive of an ‘organ’ than tapping the glasses with sticks. Poekrich did switch to the ‘wet-finger-around-the-rim’ at some point, although it is unclear when that occurred.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">78</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In October 1742 Poekrich is listed as giving a performance in Dublin on the ‘glasses’ along with tumblers and other musicians in the Smock Alley Company.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">79</span> And we find an advertisement in <span class="Book-Title">Faulkner’s Journal</span>, Dublin, for April 26–30, 1743:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">For the Benefit of the Inventor at the Theatre in Smock Alley, on Tuesday the 3rd of May, will be a Musical Performance upon Glasses with other Instruments accompanied with Voices. To which will be added a Comedy called the ‘Old Batchelor’. This being the first time that Glasses were ever introduced in Concert, it is hoped that Curiosity will induce the Town to see what has so much surprised all those who have heard them even at the greatest disadvantage. All Gentlemen that love a cheerful Glass will undoubtedly be zealous in the Affair. — The following Pieces of Musick will be performed that Night, viz. one of Vilvaldi’s <span class="Book-Title">Seasons</span> called The Spring, ‘The Early Horn’, to be sung by Mr. Baildon; Hark! ye little warbling choirs, by Mrs. Storer, Ellin a Roon, Jack Latten and the Black Joke with additional Variations, some of which cannot be executed on any Instrument but the Glasses. The principal Parts in all the above Musick, will be played on the Glasses.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">80</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The notice doesn’t name Poekrich, but he seems the likely performer. And we have seen that “The Black Joke with Additional Variations” mentioned in the notice was a standard piece in his repertoire. Poekrich performed March 1st, 1744, at Mr. Hunt’s Great Auction Room in Stafford-street, and apparently still accident-prone, had this to say about the performance in an advertisement: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">When the Glasses were first introduced in Publick, an accident happened which prevented the Inventor from shewing that instrument to any advantage; some imputed it to his taking a Glass too much; but the real cause of it was owing to the hurry in removing them, which untuned and disconcerted that instrument.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">81</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">On March 15th, 1744, he gave a most successful recital at the Taylors’ Hall, Back-lane, being a repeat of his performance a fortnight previously. One of the novelties was a song, “Tell me, lovely Shepherd,” sung by Miss Young, “who never performed before in Publick.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">82</span><span class="char-style-override-10"></span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Concluding our tale of Captain Poekrich, Newburgh writes:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Such of my readers as may be unacquainted with Mr. Pockrich, those particularly of a less warm imagination, may apprehend that many of the facts and schemes mention’d in the above lines, may have had not existence but in the author’s imagination. Let such readers be affirm’d to the contrary...<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">83</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">After all his sardonic poetic commentary, in the end Newburgh writes Poekrich an elegy that might almost be affectionate:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Mr. Pockrich, after having made considerable sums of money in London, by playing upon his glasses, unhappily perished in the year 1759, by an accidental fire, which consumed the house he lodg’d in, with several others in the same street.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Take his Epitaph as follows,</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Old Pock no more, full lives in deathless fame,<br />He blaz’d when young, — when old expir’d in flame.<br />Mourn him, ye bogs, in tears discharge your tides,<br />No more shall Pockrich tap your spongy hides;<br />Ye geese, ye ganders, cackle doleful lays,<br />No more his mountain tops your flocks shall graze;<br />Be silent, dumb, ye late harmonious glasses —<br />Free from surprise, serenely sleep, ye lasses*.<br />Let drums, unbraced, in hollow murmurs tell<br />How he that waked their thunders silent fell.<br />Let tempests swell the surge, no more his boat,<br />Secure from wreck, shall on the billows float;<br />No more, ye sons of Nappy, shall his beer<br />Or nut-brown ale your drooping spirits cheer,<br />To his own castles, built sublime in air,<br />Quitting his geese and bogs and glassy care,<br />With blood infused, and, like a meteor bright,<br />On his own pinions, Pock has winged his flight.<br />—<br />* <span class="char-style-override-10">Pock has frequently lain upon the lurch in ladies bedchambers, or hid under their beds, with an intent it might be imagined only to surprise them at an unguarded hour. And yet it must be own’d, that Pock, even in the days of his youth, was never known to have done any real mischief at such times, or to have made any other use of such opportunities, than barely to gratify a very odd kind of curiosity. Had he been less timorous, or more adventurous upon such occasions, some ladies perhaps, might have afterwards kept him, at not so great a distance.</span><span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">84</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal--Web-">Poekrich was supposedly Anne Ford’s teacher,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">85</span> an extraordinary musical glasses player in her own right to whom we now turn our attention. If Captain Poekrich used the musical glasses to turn the tide of his fortunes, Anne Ford used them to evade an unwanted marriage...</p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-2">Anne Ford</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Anne Ford (1732–1824) was a performer on the musical glasses, well known in London, and the first to publish an instruction book on how to play them. She was also one of the foremost performers on the viola da gamba of her day (also known as the ‘viol di gambo’) and composed for the instrument as well. She also was an author who published several books.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">She was the only child of Thomas Ford, solicitor [lawyer] and Clerk of the Arraigns, and his wife (née Champion). Through her mother’s side, Anne was the niece of Dr. Ford, the Queen’s physician, and of Gilbert Ford, Attorney General of Jamaica.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">86</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Anne was an only child, and was educated with uncommon care and at no small expense. At an early age she displayed an aptitude for languages, art, and dancing, but particularly for music. How Anne received her musical training is unknown, we are told only that she was taught music by the most eminent professors of the day. But by her late teens she was apparently an accomplished musician who sang and played the wire-strung English guitar, the gut-strung Spanish guitar, and the viola da gamba. She also played the harp.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">87</span> Her interest in these instruments would suggest a propensity for unusual musical instruments since, by this point, the viola da gamba had passed out of general use, and the guitar was a rarity.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">88</span> She gave Sunday amateur concerts which “attracted the notice of all the gay and fashionable world,” and were attended by the best society.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">89</span> Anne was joined by eminent professionals such as Dr. Thomas Arne, composer of <span class="Book-Title">Rule Britannia,</span> and the great castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci (c.1735–1790). Apparently Anne was also involved in private theatricals. On October 2, 1758, an attendee described a performance of <span class="Book-Title">Julius Caesar</span> in which Anne participated:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">They introduced a procession of vestals to mourn over Caesar’s body ... <br />[O]ne of them sang a dirge divinely well. She is, I think, take her for [what] she is ... the most pleasing singer I ever heard I don’t dare say the best because I have not judgment enough to decide, but I know that I would rather hear her than any Italian I have yet heard. She is a Miss Ford, daughter of a sort of lawyer in the city.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">90</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Phillip Thicknesse — Anne’s future husband — played on the lute at these concerts, and his wife Elizabeth attended.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">91</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Apparently around December 1758 Anne’s father decided it was time for Anne to ‘settle down’: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">At this critical period, finding herself closely pressed by her father respecting some proposals about settling in life, she was reduced to the disagreeable necessity of flying from the paternal mansion, and taking refuge in the house of a lady of quality [Elizabeth Thicknesse]. Here she deemed herself equally secure from enquiry and pursuit; but she proved to be mistaken; for the premises were surrounded by the myrmidons [police] of Sir John Fielding [the Bow Street magistrate], whose very name carried terror along with it; and a warrant, granted under the signature of that magistrate, having been presented, all resistance proved vain, so that the young lady was taken prisoner and carried home! </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">While in the carriage, in her way back, she found herself in company with a gentleman whom she had before seen, who was particularly attentive to her, and soon after seized an opportunity to disclose his passion to her in due form; but he met with a rebuke instead of a kind return, on account of his ill-timed intervention. Mr. Ford, however, deemed him a proper person to be a suitor to his daughter, and his addresses were accordingly encouraged. It was even hinted, that marriage might conquer any affected dislike; and that before their arrival in Jamaica, where he possessed large estates, which he was about to visit, they would become a happy couple!</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The idea of an union with a man she could not love, and being sent into exile in the West Indies, at a distance from all her friends [and her music], appeared intolerable to a young lady possessed of sensibility. She accordingly eloped a second time, and having taken a lodging at Kensington, happily eluded all pursuit. In this situation, instead of resigning herself to grief and melancholy, she determined to turn her talents to advantage, and by one bold effort render herself independent. As she had lived in habits of familiarity with the first nobility, she conceived the idea of rendering their patronage subservient to her scheme. The Opera-House was accordingly hired, and a fine band of music prepared for three nights only. Every one was eager to subscribe; and the young performer was wooed, like Dana<span>ë</span> of old, in a shower of gold.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">92</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The outlandishness of this venture can be seen by observing that hers were the only subscription concerts<span class="char-style-override-9"><a id="footnote-358-2-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-358-2">2</a></span> held in London between 1756 and 1763, which were “quite outside the mainstream,” with “fashionable and sizeable” audiences “perhaps more attracted by the scandal than her music.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">93</span> Her father also offered her a settled income if she would cease from public performance. She declined.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">94</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Later in life Anne wrote a novel called <span class="Book-Title">The </span><span class="Book-Title">School for Fashion</span> (1800). In the novel she appears as the heroine Euterpe, and many of the other characters are clearly based on the members of her circle.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">95</span> Thus the novel is an additional source of biographical information about Anne. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">We have her advertisements for the March–April 1760 concert series: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs first Subscription Concert will be Tomorrow, the 18th instant, at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. As the Pit, Boxes and Gallery, are the same Price, the latter will be equally illuminated with Wax-Candles. </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">First Part. Overture of Pasquali; Song by Miss Ford, Voi Legete; Concerto Hautboy [oboe], Mr. Simpson; Song, Miss Ford, Gentle Youth, &c. Solo, Miss Ford, on the Viol di Gamba.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Second Part. Concerto Bassoon, Mr. Miller; Song ,Miss Ford, Sparge Amar; Solo Violin, Mr. Pinto; Song, Return O God of Host. Full piece of French Horns.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Tickets at Half a Guinea each, to be had at the Theatre; at Mr. Deards; at Mr. Gardens, in St. Paul’s Church-yard; and at Mr. Walshs, in Catharine-street. </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">No persons to be admitted behind the Scenes.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">To begin at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">No more Tickets will be delivered than the House will contain.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Monday, March 17, 1760; also 4, 5, 8, 11 and 18 March 1760</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">March 25, 1760:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs second Subscription Concert will be This Day the 25th Instant, at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The Vocal Parts by Miss FORD, who will play a Solo on the Viol di Gambo, and a Concerto on the Guittar. Pit and Boxes are laid together, at Half a Guinea each Ticket; Gallery 5s.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Tickets to be had at Mr.Deards Toy-shop, at Mr. Gardens in Saint Paul’s Church-yard; and at Mr.Walshs in Catharine-street.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">To begin at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Tuesday, March 25, 1760; also 20, 22 and 24 March 1760</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">April 8, 1760:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs Third Subscription Concert will be This Evening at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The vocal Parts by Miss FORD, who will play a Solo on the VIOL DI GAMBO; and a Lesson and Song accompanied with the Guittar. Signor Gwkottowsky will play a Concerto on the German Flute.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">SONGS.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Non sai qual pena.<br />Hush ye pretty warbling Choir.<br />What tho I trace each Herb and Flower.<br />Ah se un Cor Barbaro.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Tickets to be had at the Theatre; at Mr. Deards Toy-shop, and at Mr.Walsh’s, at Half a Guinea each. Gallery 5s. To begin at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Tuesday, 8 April 1760; also 3, 4, 5 and 7 April 1760</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">April 14, 1760:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs Fourth Subscription Concert will be This Day the 14th Instant, at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The vocal Parts by Miss Ford, who will play a Solo on the</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">VIOL DI GAMBO.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">OVERTURE.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Nonsai qual paza sia. Song.<br />Concerto Traversa, by Sen.G.<br />Sweet Bird. Song.<br />Solo Viol di Gambo.<br />Concerto Violoncello, sen. Pasqualina. Hush ye pretty warbling Choir. Song.<br />Solo, Violin, Mr. Pinto. Duetto, Caro Spiegar Vorrei.<br />Lesson on the Guittar, and (by particular Desire) the 104th Psalm.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">FULL PIECE.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Tickets to be had at the Theatre; at Mr. Walsh’s, in Catharine Street in the Strand; and at Mr. Gardens, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Pit and Boxes laid together at 10s. 6d. Gallery 5s.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">To begin at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Monday, 14 April 1760; also 11 and 12 April 1760</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">April 22, 1760:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs fifth and last Subscription CONCERT, will be This Day the 22d instant, at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The Vocal Parts by Miss Ford, who will play a Solo, and accompany a Song, (Oh Liberty, thou choicest Treasure) on the Viol di Gambo; a Lesson on the Guittar, and sing a Hymn set by herself.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Pit 179 and Boxes laid together at Half a Guinea each; Gallery 5s.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Tickets to be had at Mr. Walsh’s, in Catharine Street; at Mr. Gardens, in St. Paul’s Church-yard; and at the Theatre.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">To begin at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Tuesday, April 22, 1760; also 17, 18, 19 and 21 April 1760</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The advertisement for her first concert specified that she would “play a solo on the viol da gamba” — an instrument somewhat like the cello — held between the player’s knees. A woman performing on the viola da gamba was somewhat scandalous and the instrument was conventionally reserved to male performers. She also sang and played the guitar. The violinist Thomas Pinto, and other instrumentalists also contributed pieces.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">96</span> No musical glasses yet. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">So Anne’s father attempted to disrupt the first concert:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">He was still vexed, and angry at her having left his house; and he abhorred the idea that his daughter should appear on the stage for any period, however short, or under any circumstances however favourable. He accordingly applied to the same magistrate who had before assisted him, and all the avenues to the Haymarket were occupied by Sir John’s runners. But these myrmidons [police] were dispersed by the late Lord Tankerville, then an officer in the Guards, who threatened to punish any interposition on their part, at a time when some of the royal family were expected to be present; and to enforce his declaration, determined to send for a detachment of horse and foot. On this they immediately disappeared.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">97</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The reference to the royal family is explained in the next paragraph:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The timidity incident to a first performance, was in some measure repressed by the kindness and support of her friends. Prince Edward condescended to drink a cup of tea with her in the green-room; on which occasion his equerry, Colonel Brudnel, brother to the Duke of Montague, stood behind his chair, and soon after handed her to the stage door, where she was received with bursts of applause. Nor was the audience disappointed; for when Miss Ford, who was dressed in white satin and pearls, sang one of Handel’s oratorio songs, beginning </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">‘Return, O God of Hosts!<br />Relieve thy servant in distress!’</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">she displayed such exquisite sensibility, that many of her friends actually burst into tears.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">98</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And so, after her success in the spring of 1760, Anne went to Bath. Some relaxation, after such an exhausting effort, now became necessary, and London itself had ceased any longer to have charms. Miss Ford accordingly left the great world divided into parties concerning her conduct; and having accepted an invitation on the part of Governor and Lady Elizabeth Thicknesse, accompanied them into Suffolk.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">99</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Before she was 20 she had been painted by Nathaniel Hone (1718–1784) “in the character of a muse playing on the lyre, sweeping the strings of the viol di gamba, and expressing, if not uttering, melody.” </p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-5" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/anneford-bw2_fmt.png" alt="anneford-bw2.jpg" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 14: </span><a id="Anchor-9" />Anne Thicknesse ne<span>é</span> Ford, by Thomas Gainsborough (c.1760)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The painting appears to be lost.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">100</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In 1760 Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) painted his famous portrait of her (<a href="#Anchor-9">Figure 14</a>). The Thicknesses were friends and benefactors of Gainsborough (1719–1792) and Thicknesse would go on to write the first biography of Gainsborough.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">101</span> Gainsborough and Miss Ford were both in fashionable Bath in 1758 when he painted a portrait of Lord Villiers, son of the third earl of Jersey. (We shall meet his father, the aged and ailing Earl of Jersey presently.) This circle included William Whitehead, from whom we get a glimpse of the effect Miss Ford had:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">I have seen Miss Ford, nay almost lived with her ever since I have been here. She has a glorious voice, & infinitely more affectation than any lady you know. You would be desperately in love with her in half an hour, & languish & die over her singing as much as she does in performance.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">102</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Gainsborough had moved to Bath in October 1759 to improve his fortunes, and rapidly built a reputation for painting superb likenesses. One well worn tactic for promoting yourself was to display prominently in your painting room a striking, full-length portrait of a person who was then in the public eye. So, in 1760, a visitor to his studio would have been confronted with Anne Ford’s full-sized portrait: 197 x 135 cm (77 1/2 x 52 7/8 in.), by far his most ambitious full-length work to date, a portrait of “stunning virtuosity and coloristic bravura.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">103</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The picture certainly attracted attention. On October 23, 1760, Mrs. Mary Delany visited Gainsborough’s studio and was struck by “Miss Ford’s picture, a whole length with her guitar, a most extraordinary figure, handsome and bold; but I should be very sorry to have any one I loved set forth in such a manner.” The portrait was, after all, by the standards of the day, borderline risqué. Joseph Burke has noted how Miss Ford “crosses her legs above the knee, a masculine freedom unrecorded in the female portraits of Rubens and Van Dyck.... An air of high breeding redeems the suggestion of wantonness in the bold asymmetrical pose,” a judgment borne out by a contemporary conduct book, which advised women against crossing their legs in company, “for such a free posture unveils more of a masculine disposition than sits decent upon a modest female.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">104</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">It was in the ‘Gainsborough circle’ that Miss Ford met the Earl of Jersey (1706–1769), who was as captivated by her as everyone else. He was a “constant attender at her concerts” and, although 26 years her senior, was “extremely agreeable, gay, and rich.” He was married, though he “still presumed to talk of love,” his wife “being supposed to be attacked by an incurable malady, which soon after actually put an end to her life, he was already looking out for a successor.” He offered to marry Anne on his wife’s death, offering £800 a year in the meantime, but this “coronet in expectancy had no charms” for her, and she rejected him.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">105</span></p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-6" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/ford-letter.gif" alt="ford-letter.gif" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 15: </span><a id="Anchor-3" />Image from "A Letter from Miss F..d" (1762)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">It would seem that the Earl of Jersey persisted, because in January of 1761 Anne rejected him in print. She published a thinly disguised pamphlet entitled <span class="Book-Title">A Letter from Miss Fxxd, addressed to a Person of Distinction</span>, of which the following is a sample:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">When your L..d..., on your knees, and with tears trickling down your aged cheeks, swore the sincerity of your love; when you told me you could not help your age, if I object to that, but every proof which was in your power I might command: You know, I then told your L..d.., that your age and person were both very agreeable to me.... I should have preferred you to any other man in the Kingdom, had you been single... <span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">106</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Her pamphlet sold 500 copies in the first five days. A year later it was reprinted, and at the same time appeared a reply from the Earl: A letter to Miss F..d, which quickly ran into a second edition.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">107</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">This second edition included <a href="#Anchor-3">Figure 15</a>, in which we see the gouty earl (with crutches) kneeling at the feet of Anne, who is seated holding what looks like a lute-shaped English guitar. Her father looks on approvingly on the left, while there is a boar’s head on the table — a reference explained by Anne’s remark that the earl sent her “a present of a boar’s head” and that it was “an odd, first, and only present, from a L—d to his beloved mistress.” The earl is singing “Believe my sighs my Vows my dear &c,” a snatch deriving from the song “Believe my sighs my tears my dear” from George Bickham’s <span class="Book-Title">Musical Entertainer</span>. She replies with “Si tutti de Olberir,” which is a reference to her song “Se tutti gli alberi dell mondo” (“If all the trees of the world”).<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">108</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And the January and February 1761 editions of the <span class="Book-Title">Gentleman’s Magazine</span> (a major periodical of the day) treated readers to long excerpts from Ford’s and Jersey’s pamphlets. The Earl of Jersey also attempted to sabotage a concert by arranging an alternative entertainment to which he induced many of her invited guests to go instead.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">109</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Simultaneously, in January 1761, Anne mounted two concerts at the Haymarket in London:<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">110</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs Subscription Concert will be at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, on Friday the 23d instant. The Vocal Part by Miss Ford, who will also play a Solo on the Viol di Gambo, and a Lesson on the Arch-Lute and Guittar.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The Instrumental Parts by the best Performers.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Pit and Boxes laid together, at Half a Guinea each. Gallery 5s. Places to be taken and Tickets to be had at the Snuff-shop adjoining to the Theatre.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">To begin precisely at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Saturday, 10 January 1761; also 13, 15 and 17 January 1761</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation"></p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORDs Subscription Concert will be THIS DAY, the 23d Instant, (being the last Time of her appearing in Public) at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. The vocal Part by Miss Ford who will play a Solo on the Viol di Gambo; a Lesson on the Guittar; and sing the 104th Psalm, accompanied by herself on the Arch Lute.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Pit and Boxes laid together at 10s. 6d. Gallery 5s.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Places to be taken and Tickets to be had at the Snuff-shop adjoining to the Theatre. To begin at Seven oClock.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Friday, 23 January 1761; also 19, 20 and 22 January 1761</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In these advertisements we find hints that these performances weren’t as successful as those nine months earlier: in the January 19th advertisement we read that it would be “the last time of her appearing in Public” and the phrase “The Instrumental Parts by the best Performers” is omitted — the advertisement makes it clear that Anne is providing her own accompaniment. Also, it was advertised as a “subscription concert,” but since there were no more concerts in early 1761, it would seem that the subscription plan had to be abandoned due to a lack of subscribers.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In the fall of that year she announced yet another concert series, this time in a much less prestigious venue, on a different basis, and this time including the musical glasses. In her <span class="Book-Title">Instructions for Playing the Musical Glasses</span> she writes:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">From the short practice I have had, it being not above four weeks since I first heard them, and little more than a fortnight since I made my first attempt to play, I have not had sufficient time to examine what improvements the musical glasses are capable of...</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Her <span class="Book-Title">Instructions</span> were published November 2, 1761; her first advertisement for a concert that included the musical glasses was October 14. All of this would suggest that she first heard and began playing them in the autumn of 1761, two years after Poekrich’s death. (So it is hard to see how Poekrich taught her musical glasses.)</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">These concerts are no longer at the prestigious Haymarket, they’re in an “Auction-Room.” Her ticket prices are a quarter of what they had been just a year previous. And her advertisements have to reassure the public that the venue will be heated! — “a constant Fire kept.”</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORD having engaged the large Room late COXs Auction Room, over the great China-shop near Spring-Garden, (which will be fitted up in a proper Manner for the Reception of genteel Company) proposes To-morrow, the 15th Instant, between the Hours of One and Three, to sing some favourite English Songs, and accompany herself on the Musical Glasses; she will also play a Lesson on the Guittar, and a Solo on the Viol di Gambo.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The Room will be opened at Twelve oClock, which is well aired, and a constant Fire kept in it.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Admittance Two Shillings and Sixpence.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Wednesday, 14 October 1761; also 15 October 1761</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation"></p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">MISS FORD having engaged the large Room, late Cocks Auction-Room, over the great China-Warehouse, Spring-Gardens, (which is fitted up for the Reception of genteel Company) proposes singing a few English Airs, and accompanying herself on the Musical Glasses; she will also (if desired) play a Solo on the Viol di Gambo, and a Lesson on the Guittar.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The Room will be opened at Twelve oClock, which is well aired, and a constant Fire kept. The Performance will be every Day between the Hours of One and Three.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Admittance Two Shillings and Sixpence.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">—The <span class="Book-Title">Public Advertiser</span>, Saturday, 17 October 1761; also 19–24 and 26–31 October 1761, 2–7 November 1761</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Count Kielmansegge describes one of Anne’s concerts:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">In the morning of the 7th of November I went to hear Miss Four’s [Ford’s] concert. She is a pupil of Schumann, and has performed here for some time on musical glasses. She plays entire concerts with one finger, on a row of tuned wineglasses, and is accompanied by a violoncello; she sings well, and has a good voice, accompanying herself on the ‘viola di Gamba’ and guitar, and gives her audience a varied entertainment.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">111</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Frederic Theodor Schumann taught both the English guitar and the musical glasses. It is clear from advertisements for Schumann’s own performances, also in Cox’s Room from August 6 to October 7, 1761, that Anne’s were an imitation of his. Furthermore, Anne published treatises on playing two instruments that Schumann played and taught: the musical glasses, and an earlier treatise on playing the English guitar, which couldn’t have made Anne’s teacher or former-teacher very happy. Schumann promised to play “upon the glasses” and to attend there “every Day (except Sunday) from One to Three, and Likewise from Six till Eight, to play to company.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">112</span> It would seem that Schumann took offense at competition from a pupil, for soon after Anne’s concerts began at Cox’s Room he started his own series at his house in Bury Street. Starting on October 27 he promised music “every Day upon the GLASSES, between the Hours of One and Three.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">113</span> He seems to have won the contest, for on November 7, the day Anne gave up for good, he wrote triumphantly: “As Mr. SCHUMAN’s Performances on the MUSICAL GLASSES have given so great Satisfaction to the Public, he now begs Leave to return his grateful Thanks for the Encouragement they have given me.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">114</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Anne had been ‘taught to read’ (meaning, taught to read dramatic/poetic texts like Shakespeare in public) — by the actor Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788). Sheridan had been giving lectures on elocution and the English language in Cox’s Room since February 23, 1759, and in 1762 he published his <span class="Book-Title">Lectures on Elocution</span>. Anne performed occasionally at Thomas Sheridan’s lectures. This came to an end in December, when the <span class="Book-Title">St. James’s Chronicle</span> (for December 3, 1761) announced that Anne Ford was to be replaced by Miss Lloyd:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">At Mr. Sheridan’s lecture on Elocution, Miss Lloyd succeeds Miss Ford in performing on the musical glasses for the amusement of genteel company.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">115</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">There are two obvious reasons why these concerts eventually failed. One is that the novelty of Anne’s [un]romantic situation had worn off. The other is that competition was increasing: the years 1761 to 1764 “saw a spate of daily exhibition performances given by young ladies and by self-publicising teachers,” several of them, like her, playing novelty instruments such as the musical glasses and the English guitar.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">116</span> In addition to Anne and Schuman, and yet another musical glasses player named Lloyd, in late November and early December a Mr. Drybutter offered “Ten Tunes to each Set of Company” for only a shilling per person at his house in Pall Mall.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">117</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Elizabeth Thicknesse was expecting her sixth child, so in the latter half of 1761 Anne came down from London to be with Elizabeth in her confinement and to accompany the Thicknesses to his purchased post as lieutenant-governor of Landguard Fort, Suffolk. In January 1762 the baby was born, but three months later Lady Elizabeth died, leaving behind three sons and three daughters.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">On this Mr. Thicknesse was greatly affected, left the spot where she died; and after paying a last tribute to the virtues, and erecting a monument to the memory of his departed wife, he consigned the care of his family to Miss Ford, who acted during his absence with such discretion and propriety, as to ensure entire approbation on his return. Time and a change of scene at length abated his grief; and he began to think that no one could better supply the loss of his lady than her most intimate friend.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">118</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And so it was that on September 27, 1762 Anne Ford became Thicknesse’s third wife. Anne was now 25, he was 43. Anne’s father refused to attend the wedding.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">119</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">That was apparently the end of Anne’s short but extraordinary musical career (except for one charity performance, as we shall see). </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">One has to wonder what Anne saw in Phillip Thicknesse (1719<span class="char-style-override-4">–</span>1792). The son of a rector, at age 17 he joined the army. In 1742 he eloped with Maria Lanove, a wealthy heiress, after he abducted her from a street in Southampton and took up residence in Bath with her. In 1749 Maria and his children (now three of them) contracted diphtheria; she and two children died, leaving only a daughter, Anna, to survive. When Maria’s parents died some time later (his mother-in-law committing suicide), he spent much time in trying to claim their fortune.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">After a period in the South of England he became Governor of Landguard Fort between 1753 and 1766, a post which he purchased. Thicknesse was unpopular during his time at the Fort, being argumentative and a tyrant.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">In September 1761 a Court Martial held in the fort had found a Captain William Lynch not guilty of being absent without leave during wartime. This verdict annoyed Thicknesse who had pressed the original charge and in court his behaviour was such that he had to be reprimanded for his loss of temper. In spite of the court’s reprimand Thicknesse would not keep quiet and turned his anger on Colonel Francis Vernon, who held the Presidency of the trial. For this libellous outburst Thicknesse found himself in court at Bury St. Edmunds in August 1763. This resulted in a three month jail sentence, £100 fine and an order to file a bond sureties for seven years good behaviour.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">When Thicknesse returned to the Fort, after his enforced absence, he had not mellowed and he brought Court Marshal charges against an officer who had been in command while he was away. Things went from bad to worse and eventually more charges were brought against Thicknesse. At a trial held in July 1765 he was found guilty on two charges and sentenced to be publicly reprimanded.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Thicknesse returned to Landguard in September 1765. He was subsequently informed by the War Office that in their view he was unfit to command and that he should not reside at the Fort. In 1766 Thicknesse resigned his position.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">120</span><span class="char-style-override-3"></span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">He was notorious as an ardent supporter of the slave trade, variously accused of extortion, blackmail, and libel, and notorious as a lecher, drunk and sadist who took laudanum to infamous excess. It was said that “Thicknesse had in a remarkable degree the faculty of lessening the number of his friends and increasing the number of his enemies.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">121</span> He frequently published attacks on the people he disliked, which even led to his imprisonment for libel. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"></p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 16: </span><a id="Anchor-8" />Gilray's <span class="Book-Title">Lieutenant Governor Gall-Stone</span> (1790)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-7" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/gallstone_fmt.png" alt="gallstone.jpg" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Thicknesse and Gainsborough were friends, but a quarrel ended their friendship in 1774.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">When his sons George and Phillip reached majority they chose to take their mother’s maiden name ‘Touchet’ to disassociate themselves from him. In 1790 his son George published his father’s memoirs and makes his feelings clear right in the title: <span class="Book-Title">Memoirs and anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse, late Lieutenant Governor of Land Guard Fort, </span><span class="Book-Title char-style-override-11">and unfortunately father to </span><span class="Book-Title char-style-override-11">George Touchet, Baron Audley</span>. [emphasis mine]<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">122</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">An editor of the day responding to one of Thicknesse’s attacks said, “The abuse and smut with which Thicknesse seasons all his remarks often cover up for the paucity of thought which characterizes his observations.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">123</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">As an aside, in 1776 Thicknesse wrote to Benjamin Franklin, claiming to have been a supporter of the American Revolution, which support he said cost him <span>£</span>10,000, and would Franklin and the Continental Congress consider subscribing to his upcoming book about his journeys through France. A reply from Franklin does not appear to have survived.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">124</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">James Gillray sums up Thicknesse’s character in a caricature of him entitled “Lieutenant Governor Gall-Stone,” depicting him with an explosive jet of steam coming out of his head (Figure 15). One of Thicknesse’s nicknames was ‘Dr Viper’, reflected in this print by the medusa-like creature peering over his shoulder. This is Alecto, one of the Furies of Greek mythology, who has emerged from the jaws of hell to offer him assistance. This caricature is a parody of the conventions of formal oil paintings, in which gentlemen are portrayed in their studies, depicted as learned and serious, surrounded by books.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">But look! In the upper right-hand corner! (<a href="#Anchor-5">Figure 17</a>.) Whom do we see? Gillray shows Thicknesse standing behind Anne, his hands raised in admiration. She is shown playing her musical glasses to an audience of boars (they all have tusks), one of which is moved to tears. Recall that a boar’s head was a present the Earl of Jersey gave to Anne. In the balcony to the right, a boar holds a sheet saying “Pathetic Ode to Lord Jersey.” Overhead a cherub holds a banner reading “<span class="Strike-Thru">Miss Ford’s</span> St. Cecilia’s first appearance at the Little Theater.” Anne is accompanied by an orchestra of little devils.</p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 17: </span><a id="Anchor-5" />Detail of Gilray's <span class="Book-Title">Lieutenant Governor Gall-Stone </span>(1790), showing Anne Ford</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-8" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/gallstone-anne_fmt.png" alt="gallstone-anne.jpg" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Anne seems to have performed in public only once after her marriage, for a benefit event for the new Casualty Charity in Bath. We are told in <span class="Book-Title">Public Characters</span> that she was moved to organize it after hearing that an injured workman had been refused admission to the existing Pauper Hospital because it “was intended for strangers alone.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">125</span> Reports in the <span class="Book-Title">Bath Chronicle</span> show that she was planning the performance as early as July 1787, and that it was advertised for the parish church at Walcot near Bath on December 5, 1787.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">126</span> It was postponed because of repairs to the church roof, and finally took place on December 12, 1787 in the Margaret Chapel in Bath. It took place in the context of a morning service. Anne sang an anthem by John Weldon between the first and second lessons and her own setting of “All ye that pass by, to Jesus draw nigh” after the prayers, accompanying herself on the viola da gamba. There also must have been an accompanist, for we are told in <span class="Book-Title">Public Characters</span> that the organ of Margaret Chapel was “accompanied with her voice.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">127</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Thus we know that Anne continued to play the viola da gamba. On February 10, 1787 the <span class="Book-Title">Daily Universal Register</span>, the forerunner of <span class="Book-Title">The Times</span>, ran the first of three news items about Anne, comparing her favorably to Carl Friedrich Abel (1723–1787) who had been London’s leading professional viola da gamba player for nearly forty years. The articles make clear that Anne was still a fine player and had written a significant amount of music for her instrument:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">That Lady is an elegant, delicate, powerful, and learned performer on several instruments. Her vocal powers have seldom been equalled, and her compositions possess a happy union of taste and science. Her sonatas for the Viol da Gamba, with accompaniments for the harpsichord, &c. would do honour to Abel.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">128</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And nine days after Abel’s death, the newspaper went on to say: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">By the death of Abel there is now but one capital Viol Di Gambo player in England, and that is a Lady, whose adagios, if not so highly dressed with graces, are not inferior, in point of sentiment and delicacy of touch, to that great master.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">129</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And again on July 3:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The best performer on the Viol di Gamba now in England, or perhaps in Europe, is Mrs. Thicknesse. She was second only to Abel, as a general player. In more particular points, she was his equal. This accomplished lady has also composed for that instrument, and her compositions possess a degree of science, taste, and delicacy, which the best of Mr. Abel’s productions never excelled.<span class="char-style-override-7">130</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Alas, none of her viola da gamba compositions appear to have survived.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">She certainly continued the literary career she began with her <span class="Book-Title">Instructions for Playing on the Musical Glasses </span>by publishing <span class="Book-Title">Sketches of the Lives and Writings of Ladies of France</span> in three volumes (1778–1781) and a novel, <span class="Book-Title">The School for Fashion </span>(1800). She apparently raised Philip’s six children (they never had any together), and accompanied her husband in eight changes of residence in England, Spain and France (including during the French Revolution!). </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In the fall of 1792 Philip Thicknesse died in Anne’s arms in a coach on the way from Paris to Boulogne.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">131</span> By all appearances theirs had been a happy marriage of 30 years. On his monument Anne had inscribed:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Phillip Thicknesse ... He married thrice ... thirdly [to] Anne Ford, his now affectionate and afflicted widow, who inscribes this stone to her ever honoured and beloved husband, as the last mark she can give of her gratitude and unbounded love to the memory of a man with whom she lived thirty years in perfect felicity.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">132</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Anne was subsequently arrested and confined to a convent (as were all unaccompanied English women in France at that time) and upon the death of Robespierre in 1794 she was released.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">133</span> She eventually returned to England.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In 1806 — Anne would be 68 at this point — an anonymous writer described her thus:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Mrs. Thicknesse is in many respects the most singular, and if it may be added, perhaps the most accomplished woman of her day. She has attained the period of sixty-eight years, without any of the marks usually accompanying old age. Her teeth are as sound and to the full as white as those of a girl of nineteen. Her light-brown hair is braided around her head, without the least admixture of grey, or any appearance of change; while an uninterrupted series of health and a happy flow of animal spirits almost entitle her to expect that she will attain the age of the celebrated Countess of Desmond [who is supposed to have lived to be 120]. She still writes a fine, clear, intelligible Italian hand, that bespeaks vigour and strength of nerve; and such is the goodness of her eye-sight and her powers of execution that she has lately, in the way of trial, inscribed the Lord’s Prayer in distinct characters within the circumference of a wafer.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">134</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">She lived her last 18 years with her friend Sarah Cooper, and died at age 86 in January 1824.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">135</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Anne’s most lasting contribution to glass music is her booklet <span class="Book-Title">Instructions for Playing on the Musical Glasses</span> (1761). It begins:</p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-9" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/ford-title_fmt.png" alt="ford-title.bmp" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 18: </span>The title page from Anne Ford's <span class="Book-Title">Instructions for Playing on the Musical Glasses</span> (1761)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 19: </span>The illustration from Anne Ford's <span class="Book-Title">Instructions for Playing on the <br />Musical Glasses </span>(1761)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-10" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/ford-instruction_fmt.png" alt="ford-instruction.jpg" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">As the tones of the musical glasses are, from their similitude, more like the human voice, than any musical instrument, that ever was, or perhaps ever will be invented: there is much reason to suppose, these glasses will, in a short time, become as common a piece of furniture as an harpsichord: and that every lady, who can play or sing (but more particularly the latter) will be furnished with an instrument, in itself of no great expence: an instrument, that not only sets off the voice with greater advantage than any other: and if I was to say, will assist and improve the voice, I do not think I should say more than is due to the exquisite tone it produces a tone superior to every other instrument, and perhaps, the only one from which you hear the effect without cause.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><a id="Anchor" />She goes on to describe how to build and play an instrument. From the one illustration in her method it appears that her instrument did not have all the sharps and flats.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">She concludes:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">I have consulted an ingenious organ-builder who is very confident he can give the same touch to these glasses, and cause it to be done by the keys, as on an harpsichord: and I have employed him to make me an organ with glass notes, instead of pipes, which I have some reason to believe I shall soon produce before the public: and which, if it answers what the workman seems confident it will, may be an instrument that will astonish and delight more than any ever yet performed on....</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Miss Ford’s “organ with glass notes” never appeared.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Thomas Jefferson had a copy of Anne Ford’s <span class="Book-Title">Instructions for the Musical Glasses </span>in his library.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">136</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-2">Schumann, Frederic Theodor</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">As we have seen, F.T. Schumann was one of Anne Ford’s main competitors, but we know little else about him. He first appeared in London in the early 1760s when numerous German musicians were attracted by the court of Queen Charlotte (an active patroness of the arts who was also from Germany). Schumann performed in London since at least October 1761. His dedication to the Queen of his harpsichord concertos Op. 4 (c.1769) indicates that he performed on the musical glasses at court. We lose track of him after about 1780.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">137</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-2">E. Delaval</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Edward (Edmund?) Delaval (1729–1814) was a classical scholar and linguist who also made a European reputation for himself as a scientist, chiefly in chemistry and experimental philosophy. Delaval also performed on the musical glasses, having — as he claimed — the largest set in England at the time. It was Delaval whom Franklin heard and inspired him to invent the glass armonica.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Delaval was a Fellow of Pembroke Hall. Franklin helped his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1759.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">138</span> In 1769 Delaval was also on the committee (along with Franklin) appointed by the Royal Society to make recommendations on how to protect St. Paul’s Cathedral from lightning strikes.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">139</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">His other scientific contributions included: studying the effects of lightning; advocating the use of blunt lightning rods (instead of pointed, contradicting what Franklin advocated); he studied the specific gravities of several metals and their colors when bonded with glass; and the manufacture of artificial gems.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">140</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">He was a candidate in 1762, and again in 1768, for the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge — both times unsuccessfully. He was also known as “Delaval the Loud” for his loud voice,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">141</span> or sometimes just called “Delly” by his friends,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">142</span> who considered him “an honest gentleman.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">143</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">About March 28, 1760, Thomas Gray described one of Delaval’s concerts to his friend James Brown, the Master of Pembroke:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">We heard Delaval the other night play upon the water glasses, & I was astonished. No instrument that I know has so celestial a tone. I thought it was a cherubim in a box.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">144</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">On Dec. 8, Gray wrote to Mason: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Of all loves come to Cambridge out of hand, for here is Mr. Dillaval [sic] & a charming set of glasses that sing like nightingales, & we have concerts every other night, & shall stay here this month or two... <span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">145</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">But before long Gray took a dislike to Delaval and wrote in Jan. 1762</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">I am still here: so are the glasses & their master: the first still delight me: I wish I could say as much for the second.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">146</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-2">The Musical Glasses After Franklin</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">We shall shortly turn our attention to Franklin’s astonishing version of the musical glasses called the ‘glass armonica’. But the musical glasses continued to have a life of their own in spite of and independent from Franklin’s invention.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The following is hardly a complete history of the musical glasses/glass harp, but is suggestive of some noteworthy players:</p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">James Smith and his Musical Glasses</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">James Smith’s <span class="Book-Title">Tutor for the Musical Glasses</span> (1829)<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">147</span> describes the disadvantages of Franklin’s glass armonica:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The glasses of the harmonica are very liable to break. The larger revolve with much greater velocity than the smaller; the foot is apt to tire in turning the machinery; when to this we add the high expense of the instrument, we need not be surprised that it never came into general use.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">148</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith concludes by describing “the old slow, expressive soul-subduing melodies of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, performed upon them [the musical glasses] by a player of taste and feeling”: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">They come o’er the ear, like the sweet South, <br />That breathes upon a bank of violets, <br />Stealing, and giving odours.</p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">Captain Menzies and his Glass Harp</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">One of Franklin’s insights in inventing the armonica was applied back to the musical glasses: grinding the glasses to have the correct pitch without water tuning. Tune it just once when you build it, and never need to tune it again! This is now called the ‘glass harp’ — musical glasses in tune without water. (You still need wet fingers to play it.) Not only does this save the player the constant trouble of tuning (because water evaporates), but water in the glasses also dampens the sound (the more water, the more muffled) so glass harps also sound better than musical glasses.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith describes an improvement to the Glasses devised by Captain Menzies of the Perthshire Militia, “a gentleman who, from his infancy, seems to have prosecuted the study of Musical Instruments with the most enthusiastic devotion.”<span class="char-style-override-7">149</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">Francis Hopkinson Smith</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In the 1820s, Francis Hopkinson Smith (1797–1872) gave concerts in America on a set of musical glasses of his own design and construction which he called the ‘Grand Harmonicon’. (Interestingly, Charles Dickens calls E.G. Robertson’s glass armonica a ‘harmonicon’.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">150</span>)</p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-11" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/Harmonicon001_fmt.png" alt="Harmonicon001.psd" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 20: </span>From the title page of F.H. Smith's instruction manual ("The Preceptor", 1831) for his Grand Harmonicon</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith patented and manufactured his Grand Harmonicon and published method books for it. He was also the grandson of the well-known American composer of the Revolutionary War period, Francis Hopkinson, whom we shall meet later in his attempts to add a keyboard to Franklin’s armonica.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith was born in Virginia, and after marrying in 1820, the couple lived most of their married life in Baltimore, Maryland. They had seven children — three daughters and four sons.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">During the 1820s Smith gave concerts and exhibitions of the Grand Harmonicon in the Virginia and Baltimore area. He claimed it was his own invention, that “only needs to be more generally known to become a fashionable appendage to the parlor.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">151</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith claimed that the instrument was easy to play, stating that “a few week’s practice will make a pleasing performer.” Chords consisted of only two notes with one note being played by each hand. The instrument was intended primarily for use in the home by amateur musicians rather than in the concert hall.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith not only played the musical glasses, he manufactured them, and was granted a patent in 1825. Alas we can know nothing more about the patent because of the fire in the U.S Archives in 1836 that destroyed all existing patent records.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In 1824 the Grand Harmonicon could be purchased from Smith at Fitzwhylsonn’s store in Richmond, Virginia for fifty dollars. William Fitzwhylsonn was successively a school teacher, book and music store proprietor, and the mayor of Richmond.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Business was good. By 1826 all orders for replacement glasses were to be sent to him “post paid” at Eastville, Virginia,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">152</span> and in 1829 all purchase orders were to be addressed to Baltimore, where Smith built his factory and had a warehouse along with his home.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">153</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Alas, interest in the Grand Harmonicon began to fade, and by 1833 Smith had become a bank teller and had moved.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">154</span> Two years later in 1835 Smith was hired as an “agent for the Franklin Fire Insurance Co. of Philadelphia,”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">155</span> a position he held until 1853. He then became a brick maker. He is listed for the last time in 1858 as “salesman and steam brick press.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">156</span> He died in 1872 at the age of 75.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The glasses in Smith’s Grand Harmonicon were pre-tuned — no water tuning necessary. They were also essentially wine-glasses (blown specifically for the instrument) except that the glasses had no feet — the stems were fit into the sounding board. A case for the sounding board and glasses was available for an extra charge.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Smith’s earliest harmonicons, dating around 1826–1828, had square cases, and twenty-five goblets arranged as shown thus:</p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 21: </span>Arrangement of glasses for F.H.Smith's Grand Harmonicon (1)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-12" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/10249.png" alt="10249.png" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Observe that all the diatonic (“white”) notes are in the 4 x 4 lower-left square, and the accidentals (the “black keys”) are across the top and down the right. The numbers in the lower right hand corners show the glasses in order of increasing pitch. So ‘1’ is the lowest pitch glass, ‘25’ is the highest.</p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="frame-2">
|
||
<img class="frame-13" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/12750.png" alt="12750.png" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 22: </span>Arrangement of glasses for <a id="Anchor-6" />F.H.Smith's Grand Harmonicon (2)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Later he changed from his 5 x 5 arrangement to 4 x 6 (<a href="#Anchor-6">Figure 22</a>). This would have the advantage of making the higher glasses easier to reach. The 25th glass — the high B-flat — was included and the player would replace the B-<span>natural</span> glass depending on the key of the piece. Smith advised that the extra glass “be kept in a closet or other safe place.”</p>
|
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<p class="Normal">We have no record of the number of instruments he manufactured, but according to Ervine at least 20 have survived to the present day.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">157</span><span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">t</span></p>
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<p class="Heading-3">The Great Belzoni</p>
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<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 23: </span>Giovanni B. Belzoni, from his <span class="Book-Title">Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia</span> (1820)</li>
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<img class="frame-14" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/Belzoni2_opt.jpeg" alt="Belzoni2.psd" />
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<p class="Heading-3"></p>
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<p class="Normal">Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823), better known as “The Great Belzoni,” was born in Padua. When 16 his family moved to Rome where he “studied hydraulics” — a skill that was to prove invaluable later. He intended to take monastic vows, but when Napoleon occupied Rome in 1798 he changed his proposed career and moved to the Netherlands where he earned his living as a barber.</p>
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<p class="Normal">In 1803 he fled to England to avoid being sent to jail for reasons that are unclear. There he married Sarah Bane (1783<span class="char-style-override-4">–</span>1860), they joined a traveling circus, and Belzoni became a British citizen. He was a big man at 6 ft 7 in (2m1), and became a circus strong man and musical glasses player. He also gave phantasmagoria shows involving Magic Lanterns (which we shall consider shortly in connection with Robertson and the glass armonica.).</p>
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<p class="Normal">After over a decade of entertaining in Britain, Belzoni, his wife Sarah and their servant James Curtin left England to seek a better fortune. After a tour of performances in Spain, Portugal and Sicily they ended up in Cairo where Belzoni built a new and efficient water-wheel which he presented to the Pasha. His demonstration should have gone well but didn’t: the wheel was deemed “too dangerous” after some locals sabotaged machine, which nearly killed his servant James. </p>
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||
<p class="Normal">Looking for work again, Belzoni was employed by the British Consul to travel up the Nile to Luxor and retrieve the colossal bust of Ramesses II (a task which forces of Napoleon’s army had attempted and failed). Weighing 7 tons, it took him 17 days and 130 men to tow it 1200m/0.7 miles to the Nile. From there they were able to load it onto a boat for shipment to the British Museum in London, where it is still on prominent display.</p>
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<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-2">Figure 24: </span>The bust of Ramses II<br />excavated by The Great Belzoni<br />Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra</li>
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<img class="frame-15" src="06-MusicalGlasses-web-resources/image/RamsesII_Jean-Pierre%20D_opt.jpeg" alt="RamsesII_Jean-Pierre%20Dalb%c3%a9ra_flickr.jpg" />
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<p class="Normal"></p>
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<p class="Normal">Belzoni also investigated the great temple of Edfu, visited Elephantine and Philae, cleared the great temple at Abu Simbel of sand (1817), made excavations at Kamak, and opened up the sepulchre of Seti I. He was the first to penetrate into the second pyramid of Giza, and the first European in modern times to visit the oasis of Bahariya. He also identified the ruins of Berenice on the Red Sea.</p>
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<p class="Normal">In 1819 he returned to England and published an account of his travels. During 1820 and 1821 he also exhibited facsimiles of the tomb of Seti I.</p>
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<p class="Normal">In 1823 he set out for Timbuktu. He died en route from dysentery.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">158</span></p>
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<p class="Heading-3">Various Musical Glasses Players</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">We conclude our treatment of the musical glasses with a quick survey of a few other players:</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><span class="char-style-override-11">Miss Wilkinson: </span>Little is known about Miss Wilkinson except that in 1755 she was “a wire-dancer and a player of the musical glasses”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">159</span> at Sadler’s Wells in London (a theatrical house still in existence<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">160</span>), and was still heard there in 1764<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">161</span> with “Master Wilkinson” as her partner.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">162</span> </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><span class="char-style-override-11">Mr. Cartwright:</span> A certain Mr. Cartwright (his first name is a mystery) performed on the musical glasses in London in April, 1783. The British Museum possesses a handbill, on which </p>
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||
<p class="Quotation">Mr. Cartwright respectfully acquaints the nobility and gentry that he has taken Mr. Sechard’s convenient rooms at No. 115 Pall Mall, next to Carlton House, where, in a style peculiar to himself, he will perform on the Musical Glasses.... The reception he met with at Bath, and the persuasion of those people of fashion, who countenanced him there, have encouraged him to exhibit in the Metropolis. The dulcet tones, in imitation of the human voice, and soft notes of harmony, which have gained an admirer in every person who has honoured the performance, are the recommendation on which Mr. Cartwright rests for public support.... It having been thought that the Musical Glasses would not admit of great execution, Mr. Cartwright (hopes not presumptuously) takes the liberty of informing the public that he plays Fischer’s favourite minuet, with all its variations, and several others, no less difficult, which were never attempted by any other performer in public, on the glasses.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">163</span></p>
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||
<p class="Normal">On February 1, 1787, Cartwright returned to Bath, as advertised in the <span class="Book-Title">Bath Chronicle</span>: </p>
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||
<p class="Quotation">Upper rooms. By desire. Mr. Cartwright’s Public Breakfast will be on Saturday the 3d of February, 1787, attended with French Horns, Clarionets, etc. After breakfast Mr. Cartwright will perform on his new-invented grand set of musical glasses, several favourite compositions of Handel’s, Fischer’s and Shield’s etc.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">164</span></p>
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||
<p class="Normal">A second advertisement, of February 22nd, repeats the sentence “The dulcet tones... ” from his London announcement of 1783, and adds the following: “He also constructs this melodious apparatus for sale. Terms for instruction, 3 lessons for one guinea, one guinea entrance.” Apparently Cartwright continued to tour for some time, for in an 1827 encyclopedia, the article on the “Harmonica” includes:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Some readers will recollect the performance of Mr. Cartwright a few years ago in different parts of Britain. In the latter case (i.e. Cartwright’s as contrasted with the harmonica proper) the glasses are arranged in a frame or box.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">164</span></p>
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||
<p class="Normal"><span class="char-style-override-11">E. Cullen:</span> Dr. Edmund Cullen of Dublin, who lived in the second half of the eighteenth century, was another performer on the musical glasses. He used thirty-five glasses arranged in a special way to facilitate playing, and used a dampening device to prevent prolonged vibration. He claimed that his improvements made his instrument fully the equal of Franklin’s armonica, and seems to have enjoyed considerable popularity in Ireland. Cullen claimed to have heard Fischer’s celebrated rondo, Vivaldi’s fifth concerto and music by Giardini played with ease and clarity.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">165</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Edmund Cullen is listed as President of the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland in 1787. Dr. Edmund Cullen also published a book: <span class="Book-Title">Physical and chemical essays; translated from the original Latin of Sir Torbern Bergman, ... By Edmund Cullen, M.D.... To which are added notes and illustrations, by the translator.... in two volumes</span> (1784).</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><span class="char-style-override-11">J.E. Franklin:</span> No relation to Benjamin Franklin. J.E. Franklin published an <span class="Book-Title">Introduction to the Knowledge of the </span><span class="Book-Title">Seraphim, or Musical Glasses</span> in 1813. It was a method for playing thirty upright glasses, and includes a selection of popular songs. He also offered Seraphims for sale, and elicited a comment from a reviewer in the <span class="Book-Title">Gentleman’s Magazine</span>: “We think 15 gns [guineas] not a very moderate price for this fragile instrument.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">166</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><span class="char-style-override-11">Rev. </span><span class="char-style-override-11">Thomas Jessop:</span> Around the middle of the nineteenth century there was a clergyman by the name of Rev. Thomas Jessop, Rector of Wighill in Yorkshire (from 1830 to about 1860) of whom it is recorded<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">167</span> that he was </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">a man of prodigious learning, well read in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, besides Latin and Greek. He was a good mathematician, had a knowledge of chemistry, played well on the violin. When he held an evening service in his house, he would accompany the singing by playing on musical glasses.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">168</span></p>
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||
<p class="Normal"><span class="char-style-override-11">Musical Glasses Miscellanea: </span>The musical glasses continued to be popular throughout the nineteenth century, long after the glass armonica had essentially disappeared. Scholes records that in 1823 one Edwards </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">with two colleagues, gave performances in Scotland on a set of over 120 glasses, the largest of which held three gallons and the smallest of which was the size of a thimble, the whole providing a six octave scale.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">169</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Richard Twiss in his Travels through Portugal and Spain in 1772 and 1775 observes:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">I also heard [at Lisbon] a Portuguese lady’s performance on the musical glasses, which were empty, but her fingers were occasionally dipped in water.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">170</span><span class="char-style-override-3"></span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In <span class="Book-Title">Stainer and Barrett’s Dictionary of Musical Terms</span> (1888)<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">171</span> we read in the entry for ‘Musical Glasses’: “The instrument has been recently revived under the name of Copophone.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">172</span> ‘Coppa’ in Italian, and ‘copa’ in Spanish & Portuguese means ‘cup’, from the late Latin ‘cuppa’.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Meanwhile, new names for the musical glasses seem to get stranger and stranger. In the <span class="Book-Title">Musical Times</span> in 1901 we read: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">You probably refer to the “Crystalphonicon,” a species of musical glasses upon which a Mr. Arthur Lincoln, from New Orleans, performed, some thirty years ago, in London. He played on the glasses with his right hand and accompanied himself on the pianoforte with his left.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">173</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">But Scholes quotes in his <span class="Book-Title">Oxford Companion to Music </span>what has to be the all-time record for the strangest and longest name for any musical instrument:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">[The musical glasses have] the distinction of having had attached to it the longest section of the Greek language ever attached to any musical instrument, for a reader of the <span class="Book-Title">The Times</span> wrote to that paper in 1932 to say that in his youth he had heard a performance the advertisement of which styled the instrument the <span class="Book-Title">Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica</span>.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">174</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Also worth note are two posters dating from around 1820–1840: </p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">Positively for One Night only</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">----------</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">A Hundred Musical Glasses<br />Upon a Scale of Magnitude never before displayed in this Town</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">----------</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">The grandest, most ingenious, and exquisite<br />MUSICAL PERFORMANCE<br />Of the Kind ever exhibited in the known World, the Particulars<br />of which are as follows:<br />Mr. SMITH’S<br />NEW-INVENTED GRAND<br />HARMONICA,</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">Which met with such unbounded Applause at the Marquis of BUCKINGHAM’S, from a numerous Assemblage of British Nobility,at Stowe-House, on the 18th of February last, and at the Assembly Rooms in Sheffield and Doncaster.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">T.S. sole Inventory and Proprietor of the Grand Harmonica, which consists of ONE HUNDRED MUSICAL GLASSES, on a Scale of Magnitude never before attempted, and which are arranged in five Treble Sets, to be performed on by five persons all at one time, and all of one Family, forming in the whole the most Grand, Ingenious and Exquisite Musical Performance in the World!!! The Harmonic Glasses, for Sweetness and Brilliancy of Tone, even in their original state, are indisputably the most Melodious of all other Instruments; but how far superior must they be on such an amazingly extensive Scale, as in the present instance; as it is evident that five Persons performing on the Glasses at one time must produce a fuller body of sound, and a much more complete and melodious chord, than the exertions of one Person (however excellent his skill) can possibly execute; in short, the combination of Harmony which they are capable of producing is indescribable; and nothing but the Testimony of the ear can convey an idea of their exquisite sounds, which may very justly, and with great propriety, be termed the very QUINTESSENCE of MUSIC.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">175</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And another poster from the same time period:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">Three Musical Prodigies!<br />The greatest acknowledged Wonder in the Art and Science of<br />Music the Age has yet produced,<br />The celebrated Three Miss Smiths,<br />Whose astonishing powers in the Harmonic Art have<br />justly entitled them to the appellation of<br />INTANTILE [sic] MUSICAL PHENOMENA!<br />which includes the inimitable and unrivalled<br />MISS SMITH.</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">Only TWELVE YEARS OF AGE, who is enabled, from Mr. SMITH’S Inventions, to perform the most difficult Pieces ON TWO VIOLINS at ONE TIME, VIOLIN and PIANO-FORTE at ONE TIME; also VIOLIN and VIOLONCELLO at ONE TIME. Miss SMITH also performs Scientifically on SIX INSTRUMENTS, viz. Violin, Piano-forte, Tenor, Violoncello, Musical Glasses, and Grand Harmonica; is capable of leading any Band or Orchestra, and is allowed to be the FIRST JUVENILE FEMALE VIOLIN PERFORMER IN EUROPE.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">176</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">We conclude with Thomas Jefferson. In 1787 he was in Paris, and wrote to the musicologist Charles Burney in London. Referring to the musical glasses, Jefferson commented, “However imperfect this instrument is for the general masses, yet for those of a certain character it is delicious.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">177</span><span class="char-style-override-3"></span></p>
|
||
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||
<div class="footnotes">
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||
<div class="footnote">
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||
<p class="Footnote-Text"><a id="footnote-358-1" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-358-1-backlink">1</a><span class="Superscript Superscript"></span> A pun: “which took the glorious [= <span class="char-style-override-8">vitrea</span>] fame”, but ‘vitrum’ means ‘glass’</p>
|
||
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|
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<div class="footnote">
|
||
<p class="Footnote-Text"><a id="footnote-358-2" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-358-2-backlink">2</a><span class="Superscript Superscript"></span> For a ‘subscription concert’ the tickets were sold mainly in advance.</p>
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