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<p class="Heading-1"><span>10</span>. The Armonica Wanes</p>
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<p class="Normal">For all its enthusiasts, the armonica also had its detractors — mostly arguing that playing the glass armonica (or even listening to it) could be downright hazardous to your health!</p>
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<p class="Normal">First of all, it is worth considering the glass armonica players we know — what were their life spans? </p>
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<p class="Normal para-style-override-1">Name</p>
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<p class="Normal para-style-override-1">Age at Death</p>
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<p class="Normal para-style-override-1">Cause</p>
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<p class="Normal">Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)</p>
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<p class="Normal">84</p>
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<p class="Normal">Franz Mesmer (1734–1815)</p>
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<p class="Normal">81</p>
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<p class="Normal">Marianne Davies (1743–1816?)</p>
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<p class="Normal">73?</p>
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<p class="Normal">Phillip Frick (1742–1798)</p>
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<p class="Normal">56</p>
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<p class="Normal">Joseph Schmittbauer (1718–1809)</p>
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<p class="Normal">91</p>
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<p class="Normal">Marianne Kirchgessner (1769–1808)</p>
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<p class="Normal">39</p>
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<p class="Normal">Pneumonia</p>
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<p class="Normal">Johann G. Naumann (1741–1801)</p>
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<p class="Normal">60</p>
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<p class="Normal">Karl L. Rollig (1750?–1804)</p>
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<p class="Normal">54</p>
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<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
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<p class="Normal">Considering that the average lifespan in those days was about 40 years,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">1</span> from the data above the argument could be made that playing the glass armonica <span class="char-style-override-2">lengthens</span> life instead of <span class="char-style-override-2">shortening</span> it!</p>
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<p class="Normal">Nevertheless, as we have seen:</p>
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<ul>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Mozart composed music for it in 1791 and by the end of that year he died.</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Beethoven composed for it and went deaf.</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Donizetti used it for the ‘mad scene’ in his opera <span class="Book-Title">Lucia di Lammermoor</span>, and thirteen years later went mad himself and died in an insane asylum.</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Marianne Davies played it and suffered from ill-health later in life.</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> The composer Johann Zumststeeg died after an armonica concert by Marianne Kirchgessner.</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Marianne Kirchgessner played it and ultimately died from pneumonia.</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Phillip Frick played it and ultimately quit music to devote himself to religious visions.</li>
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</ul>
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<p class="Normal">Lütge (in 1925) asserts: “nearly all virtuosos had to give up playing after a few years”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">2</span> and further extends our list of armonica carnage:</p>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> The early death of the beautiful Friederike Bause</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> The attempted suicide by the wife of Kupferstechers Stock</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> The unlucky poverty of Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf</li>
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<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> Rollig suffered from “nerves, twitching muscles, dizziness, cramps, tumors and paralysis of the limbs”</li>
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</ul>
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<p class="Normal">However dangerous the armonica might be while you’re alive, at least it can prove helpful after you’re dead! The Weimar physician Carl Schwabe in his book <span class="char-style-override-2">The </span><span class="char-style-override-2">Mortuary at Weimar: With some Words on Apparent Death</span> (1834) described a mortuary in which the corpses were attached by strings to a glass armonica that would alert the guards of any signs of life, ensuring that no one was buried alive — a common worry at the time.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">3</span> (I’m having trouble grasping how that would work...)</p>
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<p class="Heading-2">Nervous Disorders<span class="char-style-override-4"></span></p>
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<p class="Normal">There was definitely concern about the ‘health effects’ of playing the armonica. Etienne Sainte-Marie, member of the Medical Society of Montpelier, in the extensive appendix to his translation (from Latin to French) of Joseph-Louis Roger’s <span class="char-style-override-2">Treatise on the Effects of Music on the Human Body</span><span> (1803</span>) describes the timbre of the armonica:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The melancholy timber of the armonica plunges us into a profound detachment, relaxing all the nerves of the body, to the point that a very robust man is not able to listen to it for an hour without becoming ill. For me a rough accurate comparison is that it causes a general malaise similar to what we feel when the wind blows from the south.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">4</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Pohl writes in 1862:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Notwithstanding the objections made against the instrument, as having a tendency to affect the nerves — indeed, so much so as to cause it to be forbidden in several countries by the police (in the Museum at Salzburg it is still shown to the visitors as such) — its introduction to the public, and its consequent favour could not be prevented; and even the poets of that period sang its praise for its sweet and melting tone, and thus tended to render it popular.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">5</span><span class="char-style-override-5" /></p>
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<p class="Normal">(Along with the armonica, coffee was also banned at this time. Frederick the Great, to protect his subjects’ health and pocketbooks, used bans, taxes and even a special police squad nicknamed “the coffee sniffers” who roamed the cities sniffing for caffeine criminals.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">6</span>)</p>
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<p class="Normal">And Roubaud-Luce, Director of the School of Medicine in Toulouse, in his <span class="Book-Title">Medical-Philosophic Research on Melancholy</span> (1817) writes about the “strange effect” of the armonica:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Six months ago, a young man prone to melancholy by hereditary defect, loved this instrument to the point of often playing part of the day, and leaving his bed at night to give himself to this dangerous enjoyment. One day his sister learned by a letter from him that the extraordinary effects of the armonica, strengthening his inclination towards melancholy, had finally brought him to commit suicide.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">7</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">And in 1826, Peter Lichtenthal advised that “the nervously infirm should not attempt to play it at all, the hale should play it in moderation because its excessively dulcet tones induce melancholia; and those in whom the darker bile tends to predominate should either shun the instrument completely, or else play only sprightly tunes on it.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">8</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">The idea that the armonica causes nervous disorders was common and controversial enough for Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842) to write an editorial about it in the <span class="Book-Title">Allgemeine Musikalishe Zeitshrift</span> (AMZ, “The General Music Journal”). The AMZ was an important popular and respected periodical about music of its day. It was published in Vienna, one of the major musical centers of its day (where Mozart and Beethoven flourished, for example). Rochlitz was its highly regarded and influential editor for its first 20 years, and counted Beethoven and Goethe among his friends and colleagues.</p>
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<p class="Normal">In 1798 he wrote an editorial about the controversy, <span class="Book-Title">“</span>Concerning the Claimed Damaging Effects of Playing the Armonica.” We can hardly do better than to let this keen observer with a front row seat in 1798 have his say.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">9</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">He begins:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">It is strange how seldom the armonica, this ethereal instrument, is found in Germany. Comparing us to other countries that are usually thought of as barbaric, wild and rude... one finds that the child of Harmonic Beauty is more treasured, loved and enjoyed there than by us.</p>
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<p class="Normal">He continues, listing why the armonica even in 1798 should be so rare:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">There may be several reasons for the rarity of the Armonica. Just the cost of the instrument itself, a good and especially a pure instrument (and it has to be very pure sounding, due to its tender tone, because every impurity is doubled in unpleasantness for the trained ear); the current fad for cultish and glittery music; the few teachers and compositions for the armonica; the false but widespread preconception that learning how to play the instrument is very difficult; and foremost the almost general opinion that its music damages health, irritates the nerves too much, makes one sink into painful depression, makes one gloomy, melancholic, and would be a perfect way to slip into suffering. These are perhaps the main causes of the rare use of the armonica. I here say nothing of the first claims, but will keep just to the last ones, those being the most important.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">... I have had the opportunity to get to know several armonica players, both men and women, and from our collective experiences I can assert that playing the armonica harms one’s health no more than playing any other expressive instrument.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">How then and in what way is it harmful? Some say more on the physical level, others say more in a psychological respect. More physical, by what means? Through irritation by the glasses, it is said, when played for long periods: the humidity softens the skin so that the nerves are more easily stimulated. Through the mild vibrations of the bells while playing the nerves are stimulated causing more trouble. Do they really know this instrument, those who make these hasty deductions? I confess that their theories are completely true, but they do not apply to the armonica. Because who is able to play it for long periods at a time? Who, with soft skin? One who has a hand suited for the armonica, a hand whose skin is not too hard, is able to play no more than two or three quarters of an hour, and with cool air temperature (with warm temperature somewhat shorter time). After that one must stop, and not because of the irritation of nerves, but because of rather grave reasons. It is in the nature of the instrument that the tones become higher, false and very ugly as soon as one wants to play longer and with softened and irritated skin.</p>
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<p class="Normal">‘Prune fingers’ — the fingertips becoming wrinkled after being wet for a long time — definitely interferes with playing, mostly by making it harder to get a sound out of the instrument at all. Rochlitz says that players can’t play for longer than two to three quarters of an hour. The author has played for 2–3 hours straight without difficulty.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Others say that the particularly piercing and penetrating quality of this sound itches through the whole nerve system, shaking it violently and afflicting the nerve roots. Namely so that it creates inclination where it is not yet there, or that it amplifies greatly where it already is. That would be terrible, if it were true. But it does not fit the Armonica [in general], rather just some unqualified armonica players. Because it’s not the piercing sound that [amateurs] produce, but rather the milder, or in musical terms a smoother tone, which is the right and beautiful one from this instrument. This can be learned and one can eliminate these piercing sounds and thus the consequences will stay away. However, where there are [already] nerve problems, playing the armonica can be harmful, but what is not harmful? Is not everything harmful, which works on the emotions? Is not the sight of a touching spectacle harmful, the reading of a touching book, an emotional song? Does not the smallest annoyance cause harm, a small scare, even an interesting conversation, just as the armonica? But ill players are the exception among the population of players, just as ill people are the exception among the population of people: from them we cannot determine a general opinion.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Yes, beginner players can’t produce a clear tone on the armonica, just as beginning violin players can’t produce a clear tone on their instruments either. And notice how he asserts that <span class="char-style-override-2">anything</span> that arouses the emotions is potentially harmful? That ‘arousing the emotions’ in general was potentially unhealthful was a common idea of the time, and we shall consider it shortly.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Rochlitz continues:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Other detractors find harm in the Armonica when they look at it from a mental point of view. They say: since one can only play sad things on this instrument, it maintains a sad mood that is already there, and leads to a sad mood when one is not yet in such a mood. By regular repetition this mood sticks, the mind gets used to depression, and this results in dark, lonely, sad and melancholic people. But is it true that one can only play sad things on the instrument? It does indeed take virtuosity to play pieces other than slow ones — but even with virtuosity, fast pieces are not good, are not practical and not sure to succeed, and when they succeed, they may not please, because they are opposite to the characteristic beauty of the instrument. But, are all slow pieces also sad pieces? Are there not also melodies, such as for example many hymns, that raise the heart, the courage, leading to a happy prayer, a trustworthy optimism? And which do not warp the mind, do not cloud it, especially when their effect is amplified and to which one can mentally add the lyrics? Are only sad lines to be found in the compositions for the armonica by Naumann? Are in fact most of them really not sad at all? And isn’t it exactly for such upbeat and gently uplifting melodies that this instrument is so appropriate, because of the swelling of its tones, etc.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">So I find little harm in playing the armonica. Yet I do not completely contest that it does not require some care. But simply no more or less, in my opinion, than with everything that strongly excites, intensifies and refines our emotions. Allow me to touch upon a few such rules of care:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(1)	People with nervous disorders, until they are cured, should not play the armonica, just as they should avoid everything that excites their emotions strongly in any way and thus stimulates their disease.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(2)	One who is not ill should not play too much. But for the same reason that playing the armonica, like all other solitary enjoyments, when enjoyed too much, makes socializing more indifferent and withdrawn, I do not know if this is generally true, but it is at least in some relationships of social life.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(3)	When one is in a heavy mood, one should either not play, or play upbeat and inspiring pieces, in the same manner as one should not write, read, rhyme or speak anything that amplifies a heavy mood.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(4)	One should avoid playing late into the night, even if sometimes one is strongly attracted to do so. This is because the body through being tired, the nerves through the influence of the atmosphere, the mind through the silence and darkness of the night, are all more than at other times inclined toward melancholy. One should avoid playing, but not more or less as one would avoid all other things that would stimulate this melancholy.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(5)	On the reasons stated above, one should rather use tepid water for wetting the armonica glasses rather than cold water. But just a little tepid, similar to the temperature of water that has stood in the room for a several hours during a summer’s day. If one takes it too warm, the skin will be too much softened and then, in additional to being able to play only for a short period of time (due to the false tones of the glasses), one must perhaps be worried that the nerves in the hand are stimulated, which, due to the fact that all nerves are connected to each other, could lead to the whole [body].</p>
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<p class="Quotation">If opponents of this unrivaled instrument have more objections, if they have more compelling reasons for the harmfulness of the instrument, they should please make such reasons known to me and disprove me, and this journal (in which this article is published) is perhaps the best place to do so. Permit me to add a few questions, concerning the armonica, while I pose them certainly not just in my own name, but also in that of most armonica players.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(1) In particular to the virtuosi on this instrument. Is there no way to avoid the high and false tones of the armonica glasses during the warmest days? And are there ways, which are very likely, since there are traveling virtuosi that play a lot during warm days: are they not willing to make known their techniques? The usual methods, such as rose water, cooked water, water mixed with lemon juice, rubbing the hands with almond bran etc, achieve but little effect.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">(2) To the composers. Why are there so few compositions for this instrument? Is it only due to the limited number of players and consequently a limited number of customers? I believe that there are not that few, that it will be a risk for a publisher: and a subscription could identify them. I know that those who have knowledge of music, imagination and skill to express, would rather play, specially here, their own fantasies; one who has this knowledge but without the imagination or the skill, one who has only a good ear, uses the arrangements of compositions for voice or other instruments. But how few are there among the first, and in proportion, among the second case? Moreover, arrangements are always just arrangements. Besides the Sonatas by Naumann and the pieces by Rollig (which are not so excellent, since Mister Rollig plays much better than that he composes) there are no compositions known, at least to us. Aren’t these too few? And what about arrangements that are incorrect, that spoil the taste and hearing? Isn’t this is why we usually hear pieces that go against the nature and beauty of this instrument?</p>
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<p class="Normal">Johann Christian Muller said much the same thing in the preface to his <span class="Book-Title">Self-Instruction Manual for the Glass Armonica </span>(1788):<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">10</span></p>
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<p class="Quotation">The glass armonica, so generally beloved, would long ago perhaps have been in the hands of all artists and amateurs if its rather high cost could be lowered and if, despite its extraordinary effect, it could overcome some prejudices which have crept into people’s minds as easily as have its tones. Who would have believed that this enchanting instrument would not have become more popular after its invention?</p>
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<p class="Quotation">The price of such an instrument seems quite high, which cannot be altered. However, since I have been involved, to some extent, in the manufacture of such instruments — as a result of a real passion for it — I am truly surprised that cultivated people can say, “That is a great deal for such an instrument, etc.”</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Production of the glass armonica entails many difficulties, which are apparent only after much experience and money spent. In order to achieve the desired result, it is necessary, so to speak, to wrestle with all the component elements. These, however, would not serve as an obstacle for the general public. Prejudice, though is capable of anything!</p>
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<p class="Quotation">It is true that the armonica has extraordinary effects on people — different for each person, according to his temperament. But that these are injurious to the health has never been proven. This [hasty] conclusion is drawn after hearing the instrument once or twice, but after listening to it frequently, one has a different impression. Is this not always the case with the first reaction to a previously unknown work of art created by the human mind?</p>
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<p class="Quotation">If playing the armonica were to bring the performer gradually closer to death, or at least cause certain illnesses, that would be truly terrible. But where is the evidence? Miss Bause died of the most natural causes in the world.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">Everyone is acquainted with the enthusiasm with which our talented Mr. Breitkopf, the famous merchant Mr. Rost, and my very good friend, the merchant Mr. Wege have provided many pleasurable hours for their acquaintances with their sensitive playing. Even our immediate neighborhood offers proof. The Gentlemen of the Bedchamber von Bodenhhausen and Lieutenant Thielmann, both of whom are my close friends and patrons, play the armonica with great success. I could name still more of my students, as well as various other people in Dresden, in order to prove my contention, if I did not fear becoming too verbose on the matter. None of us is aware of any illness brought upon us by playing the armonica, and we are, thank heaven, all healthy and well!</p>
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<p class="Quotation">“Yes, but still it is very enervating.” Friend, beware of other enervating things in our century! The armonica does not enervate you. But if you enervate yourself, or if you have been upset by harmful novels, false friends, or perhaps a deceiving woman then abstain from playing the armonica — it will only upset you even more. There are people of this kind — of both sexes — who must be advised not to study the instrument, in order that their state of mind should not be aggravated.</p>
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<p class="Heading-2">The ‘Health Risks’ of Music in the 18th Century</p>
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<p class="Normal">In the latter half of the 18th century it wasn’t just the glass armonica that caused ‘nervous disorders’ — it was Music in general, with the armonica being an especially egregious offender. We can’t understand their thinking about ‘nervous disorders’ (and much else about the story of the armonica) without understanding the enormous sea change in world view that was taking place in Western Civilization at that time. And for that we must return once again to Pythagoras.</p>
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<p class="Heading-3">The Music of the (Hemi)-Spheres</p>
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<p class="Normal">The ancient Greeks believed that each of the planets was supported by an enormous crystal sphere, and each of these spheres emitted a musical note. So the sum total of the movement of the planets created the ‘music of the spheres’. (We don’t hear this music for the same reason that people living near a waterfall no longer hear it — we’ve become acclimated to it. Pythagoras himself, however, being the ‘advanced being’ that he was, is supposed to have been able to hear it.) </p>
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<div>
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<div class="frame-7">
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<img class="frame-6" src="12-TheArmonicaWanes-web-resources/image/Kepler001_fmt.png" alt="Kepler001.psd" />
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</div>
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<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
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<ol>
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<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-3">Figure 44: </span><a id="Anchor" />From Kepler's <span class="char-style-override-2">Harmony of the World </span>(1619)</li>
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</ol>
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</div>
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</div>
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<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
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<p class="Normal">The ‘music of the spheres’ was a key idea in Western astronomy/astrology until Kepler (1571–1630), whose three laws of planetary motion are still taught in Physics 101 today, but if you go back and look at the books in which Kepler introduced his laws, they are a marvelous mixture of mathematics and music. (E.g. <a href="#Anchor">Figure 42</a>)</p>
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||
<p class="Normal">In essence, the key idea here from Pythagoras is that if the planets are musical, then they are also mathematical. And that is definitely a seed idea that grew into Western Science. Plato himself described astronomy and music as “twinned” studies, both requiring understanding of mathematical proportion: “As the eyes, said I, seem formed for studying astronomy, so do the ears seem formed for harmonious motions: and these seem to be twin sciences to one another, as also the Pythagoreans say.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">11</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">The idea of the ‘music of the spheres’ is credited to Pythagoras, but it first appears ‘in print’ in Plato’s <span class="Book-Title">Republic</span>. Towards the end of this book the spirits take Socrates on a tour of the cosmos, and in Plato’s imagination the planets aren’t supported by spheres, but <span class="char-style-override-2">hemi</span>-spheres, ranging from larger to smaller, nested inside of each other, and all rotating on a giant spindle of light. And a Siren stands on each rim singing a note — if the Sirens had instead touched their rims with wet fingers we’d be saying Plato invented the glass armonica instead of Franklin! </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Admittedly, Plato’s vision isn’t <span class="char-style-override-2">exactly</span> an armonica (for example, the hemispheres don’t all rotate in the same direction), but it is eerily close, as you can see from the passage below. Much of Plato’s vision is poetic — terribly difficult to translate at best. The word translated “whorl” (SPHONDULOS, one of the planetary hemispheres) is quite complex: it can mean “vertebra,” “the circular whorl which balances and twirls a spindle,” and “the head of an artichoke” — to list just a few of its meanings.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">12</span>)</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">[T]hey came in four days to a spot whence <span class="char-style-override-6">they discerned, extended from above throughout the heaven and the earth, a straight light like a pillar</span>, most nearly resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer. To this they came after going forward a day’s journey, and they saw there at the middle of the light the extremities of its fastenings stretched from heaven; for this light was the girdle of the heavens like the undergirders of triremes [a Greek ship], holding together in like manner the entire revolving vault. <span class="char-style-override-6">And from the extremities was stretched the spindle of Necessity, through which all the orbits turned.</span> Its staff and its hook were made of adamant [the hardest metal, or a diamond], and the whorl of these and other kinds was commingled. <span class="char-style-override-6">And the nature of the whorls was this: Its shape was that of those in our world, but from his description we must conceive it to be as if in one great whorl, hollow and scooped out, there lay enclosed, right through, another like it but smaller, fitting into it as boxes that fit into one another, and in like manner another, a third, and a fourth, and four others, for there were eight of the whorls in all, lying within one another, showing their rims as circles from above and forming the continuous back of a single whorl about the shaft, which was driven home through the middle of the eighth. </span>Now the first and outmost whorl had the broadest circular rim, that of the sixth was second, and third was that of the fourth, and fourth was that of the eighth, fifth that of the seventh, sixth that of the fifth, seventh that of the third, eighth that of the second; and that of the greatest was spangled, that of the seventh brightest, that of the eight took its color from the seventh, which shone upon it. The colors of the second and fifth were like one another and more yellow than the two former. The third had the whitest color, and the forth was of a slightly ruddy hue; the sixth was second in whiteness. <span class="char-style-override-6">The staff turned as a whole in a circle with the same movement</span>, but within the whole as it revolved the seven inner circles revolved gently in the opposite direction to the whole, and of these seventh the eighth moved most swiftly, and next and together with one another the seventh, sixth and fifth; and third in swiftness, as it appeared to them, move the fourth with returns upon itself, and fourth the third and fifth the second. <span class="char-style-override-6">And the spindle turned on the knees of Necessity, and up above on each of the rims of the circles a Siren stood, borne around it its revolution and uttering one sound, one note, and from all the eight there was the concord of a single harmony.</span> And there were other three who sat round about at equal intervals, each one on her throne, the Fates, daughters of Necessity, clad in white vestments with filleted heads, Lachesis, and Clotho, and Atropos, who sang in unison with the music of the Sirens. Lachesis singing the things that were, Clotho the things that are, and Atropos the things that are to be. <span class="char-style-override-6">And Clotho with the touch of her right hand helped to turn the outer circumference of the spindle</span>, pausing from time to time. Atropos with her left hand in like manner helped to turn the inner circles, and Lachesis alternately with either hand lent a hand to each.[Emphases mine]<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">13</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">(Note: Ernest McClain, in his <span class="Book-Title">Pythagorean Plato</span>, argues that Plato’s entire <span class="Book-Title">Republic</span>, including this passage about the ‘whorls’, is in fact an enormous treatise on musical tuning theory. McClain uses this approach to explain the strange numerical references in this passage.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">14</span>)</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Boethius (480–524/525) was an early 6th century philosopher — his execution by Emperor Theorodic is considered the beginning of the Middle Ages. Boethius wrote an important treatise on music theory called <span class="Book-Title">De Institutione Musica </span>(“The Foundations of Music”) — it was one of the first musical works to be printed in Venice at the dawn of the Renaissance between the years of 1491 and 1492. In this book Boethius introduces the threefold classification of music that informed so much discussion about music theory for over a millenium until the Enlightenment in the 18th century:<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">15</span></p>
|
||
<ul>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> <span class="char-style-override-2">Musica mundana</span> — subdivided into music of the spheres, the concord of the elements, and the consonance of the seasons</li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> <span class="char-style-override-2">Musica humana</span> — subdivided into the harmony of the soul and body, the consonance of the parts of the soul, and the concord of the parts of the body</li>
|
||
<li class="Bullets"><span class="char-style-override-3">•	</span> <span class="char-style-override-2">Musica instrumentalis</span> — instrumental music, subdivided into winds, strings and percussion</li>
|
||
</ul>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Here we see music as a metaphor for the order of the cosmos (<span class="char-style-override-2">musica mundana</span>) and the individual human being (<span class="char-style-override-2">musica humana</span>) – as expressed in performed music (<span class="char-style-override-2">musica instrumentalis</span>). Kircher expanded on this theme considerably in his encyclopedic book on music theory, <span class="Book-Title">Musurgia universalis</span> (1650).</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">It’s not so much that the ‘music of the spheres’ was a dominating concept in medieval thinking. But it was definitely a common expression of their belief that there was ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place’: from God in heaven, to the planets, to the Pope and the Catholic<span class="char-style-override-5"><a id="footnote-358-1-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-358-1">1</a></span> [means ‘Universal’] Church, then the Emperor/King, then the local lord, and so on. And what we call music — <span class="char-style-override-2">musica instrumentalis </span>— was an expression and reflection of this grand cosmic order.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Jamie James in <span class="Book-Title">The Music of the Spheres</span> (1995) describes this sense of the world nicely:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Picture to yourself, if you can, a universe in which everything makes sense. A serene order presides over the earth around you, and the heavens above revolve in sublime harmony. Everything you can see and hear and know is an aspect of the ultimate truth: the noble simplicity of a geometric theorem, the predictability of the movements of heavenly bodies, the harmonious beauty of a well-proportioned fugue — all are reflections of the essential perfection of the universe. And here on earth, too, no less than in the heavens and in the world of ideas, order prevails: every creature from the oyster to the emperor has its place, preordained and eternal. It is not simply a matter of faith: the best philosophical and scientific minds have proved that it is so.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">16</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">So when Galileo argued that the Earth is not the center of the cosmos after all (in, for example, his <span class="Book-Title">Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, </span>1632), his persecutors correctly realized that far more was at stake than astronomy textbooks.</p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">Music in the Enlightenment</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Matters took a decisive turn with the publication by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) of the <span class="Book-Title">Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica</span> (1687, “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), commonly referred to as simply the <span class="Book-Title">Principia</span>. Kepler had formulated his ideas within the context of the <span class="char-style-override-2">musica mundana</span> – God and the heavenly bodies and everything else are part of grand cosmic order. With Newton, however, even though he was a devout theist, God was no longer necessary to explain the motion of the planets. Nor was music: the music of the spheres that had resounded for millennia since Pythagoras fell silent under Newton’s pen,<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">17</span> and even God Himself was ousted from his throne guiding the physical cosmos, replaced by an impersonal and silent force called Gravity. Our understanding of the cosmos shifted from one that was more ‘metaphysical’ and ‘magical’ to one that was increasingly mechanical.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Franklin of course played a significant role in all of this. He reduced lightning from a ‘divine magic in the sky’ to a mere mechanical fluid which could be tamed with a lightning rod, and whose electrical charge could be stored in a Leyden jar to be played with like a toy. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">This is reflected in a similar shift in music. Music went from being a model and a reflection of the grand cosmic order, largely funded by the aristocracy and the Church, to being mere ‘entertainment’ funded largely by the masses. Music was increasingly reduced to essentially pleasant ‘nerve stimulation’, and nothing more. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Whereas Kircher’s <span class="Book-Title">Musurgia Universalis</span> of 1650 still tended to discuss the effects of music in terms of bringing the soul and body into harmony, in the 18th century that began to change. One of the first to emphasize nerves in an explanation of music’s effects was Richard Browne, a physician and apothecary, in his 1729 <span class="Book-Title">Medicina Musica</span>, which assumed that music’s power over emotions was experimentally verifiable, that the body worked on Newtonian principles, and crucially, identified nerves as responsible for music’s emotional impact.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">18</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Despite the increased role ascribed to the nerves in listening, there was no consensus about quite how those nerves function. The eighteenth century saw a variety of theories on the nature of the nerves coexisting, with models of animal spirits, nervous fluid, electrical, vibrating, and oscillating nerves all competing and often being combined until Emil du Bois-Reymond established the electrical character of the nervous system in the mid-nineteenth century. The idea of ‘sympathetic vibration’ between music and literally vibrating nerves was one model of the impact of sound that proved highly influential.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">However the connection between music and nerves actually worked, at the beginning of the 18th century that interaction was regarded as benign, if not beneficial. Robert Whytt, President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and personal physician to King George III, was just one of many physicians to suggest that music was good for the nerves: “By means of different musical sounds, various passions may be excited or calmed, and diseases are said to have been sometimes cured.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">19</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And as Samuel Tissot, the well-regarded 18th century Swiss neurologist, physician and professor put it: “If music can encourage virtue, still passions and heal moral and physical sicknesses, it is no wonder that it is also able to raise passions to a high level.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">20</span> Until the last decades of the eighteenth century, music was generally portrayed as a means of calming the passions, and therefore restoring health.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">And music can even cure nymphomania! At least according to Ernst A. Nicolai, professor of medicine at the University of Jena.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">21</span> (After all, we’ve seen that skill in music — including playing cups filled with water — was recommended for young ladies in the <span class="Book-Title">Kama Sutra</span> some two millennia earlier!)</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Nevertheless, as the 18th century progressed, the initially optimistic Enlightenment turned dark. I don’t think we can appreciate what a shock it was to all of Europe when Louis XVI was executed in 1793 in the French Revolution. To be sure, kings had been assassinated and replaced by new kings for millennia, but the French Revolution was different: the king was executed like a commoner by the commoners and replaced with a Republic — representative rule by the masses. (At least that was the theory — things worked out a little differently in practice.) Almost as shocking was Napoleon putting an end to the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 — a close-knit partnership between the ‘divinely appointed’ ecclesiastical and secular government that had existed for almost 1000 years.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Is it so surprising that the dark pall which hung over greater Europe in the wake of these events would affect the mood of music and science as well? Indeed, we see a shift in thinking on music and nerves from benign sensibility to harmful pathology beginning in the late 18th century — a result of music’s incorporation into medical theories that blamed over-stimulation for sickness. “Already in the seventeenth century Giorgio Baglivi, Thomas Willis and others had redefined madness, hysteria and hypochondria as diseases of the imagination and the nerves rather than spiritual ailments, and a wide variety of physical conditions were laid at the door of the nervous system.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">22</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">As Whytt put it in 1765: “All diseases may, in some sense, be called affections of the nervous system.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">23</span> And as the nervous system became increasingly suspect as a cause of disease, music as a stimulant of the nervous system became increasingly suspect as well. In his influential <span class="Book-Title">Theory of the Fine Arts</span> (1771–1774) Sulzer portrays music as “shocks delivered to the nerves of the body.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">24</span> And in 1804 Countess Therese of Brunswick (amour of Beethoven) writes to her sister Josephine: “Do not make music so much, if it attacks your nerves too much.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">25</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">James Johnson, <span class="char-style-override-2">physician extraordinary</span> to King William IV, wrote:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">No art or science that ever was invented by human ingenuity exerts so powerful an influence on mind and body as <span class="char-style-override-7">MUSIC</span>. It is the galvanic fluid of harmony, which vibrates on the ear — electrifies the soul — and thrills through every nerve in the body.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">26</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In Johnson’s view the ‘weaker sex’ is especially vulnerable:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">The mania for <span class="char-style-override-7">MUSIC</span> injures the health and even curtails the life of thousands and tens of thousands annually, of the fair sex, by the sedentary habits which it enjoins, and the morbid sympathies which it engenders. The story of the sirens is no fable. It is verified to the letter!</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation para-style-override-2">“Their song is death, and makes destruction please.”</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Visit the ballroom and the bazaar, the park and the concert, the theatre and the temple: — among the myriads of young and beautiful, whom you see dancing or dressing, driving or chanting, laughing or praying — you will hardly find <span class="char-style-override-2">one</span> in the enjoyment of health! No wonder, then, that the doctors, the dentists, and the druggists, multiply almost as rapidly as the pianos, the harps, and the guitars! [And armonicas!]<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">27</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">It gets worse. If you thought going to hear a Handel oratorio was a safe pasttime, you are dangerously mistaken! Richard Eastcott in 1793 gave several examples of music by Handel causing fits. He also cited a famous incident of the time: at the premiere of Handel’s oratorio <span class="Book-Title">Esther</span> at Westminister Abbey, a “celebrated chorus singer” became “violently agitated” to such an extent that he died, having declared that the “wonderful effect” of the music was to blame.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">28</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Danger lurked even in Gluck’s operas: during the fourth performance of Gluck’s 1777 opera <span class="Book-Title">Armide</span> a “young and charming girl” lost consciousness after suffering several convulsions.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">29</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Beethoven was also hazardous to your health: on hearing his Fifth Symphony for the first time, the famous singer Malibran “was seized with such convulsions that she had to be carried out of the hall.”</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Music by Hector Berlioz was no safer: certain pieces led to a “strange agitation in the circulation of the blood” which in turn causes a “paroxysm” involving “spasmodic contractions of the muscles, trembling in all the limbs, a total numbness in the feet and hands, partial paralysis of the optic and auditory nerves.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">30</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Even playing the <span class="char-style-override-2">triangle</span> could be lethal! In 1794 Michael Wagner in his <span class="Book-Title">Contributions to Philosophical Anthropology</span> gave an account of an ill music lover who died from playing that most innocuous of instruments:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">An old man in ** languished with bodily exhaustion. Since he was a passionate lover of music, he joined his friends in a concert, which they gave in his room, consisting of the best and most enjoyable entertainment. One day, when they had gathered with him for this purpose, he came upon the idea of accompanying them with a triangle. He jumped out of bed and struck his favorite instrument at an increasing speed. Finally, the ecstasy reached its highest level, and his nervous system likewise received the highest voltage, and he fell down and died.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">31</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In summary:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">For most of the eighteenth century, the musical stimulation of the nerves that were the conduit for feeling was generally portrayed as a matter of refinement rather than of pathology, a view that combined an understanding of the role of nerves in listening with older traditions of music as a symbol of order and a regimen for the passions. This was challenged on several fronts around 1800: first, by a model of the etiology of disease that saw stimulation as the principal cause of sickness, whether from drugs, food, or music, and which developed into a medical critique of modern lifestyle and culture as sick. Secondly, a shift in thinking about the nature of the nerves toward a direct quasi-electrical stimulation model allowed music to be incorporated into that critique. Thirdly, the political and cultural changes unleashed by the French Revolution and the start of bourgeois modernization undermined music’s associations with order and led to a new suspicion of sensuality. Fourthly, the link between refined nerves and musical sophistication was undermined by a new Romantic aesthetics of music that emphasized the transcendental quasi-disembodied subject rather than the body. The result of this was that whereas the nerves had been a central part of Enlightenment aesthetics of music, by the early nineteenth century, nervous music was largely the province of doctors, many of whom took a dim view of it.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">32</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">The Armonica: “Weapon of Glass Destruction”</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">So, in this context, it’s not very surprising that the uncanny glass armonica, with its associations with electricity (via Franklin) and Mesmer’s ‘animal magnetism’ should become the poster child for musical nervous disorders.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">We’ve already seen many specific examples of the dangers of the glass armonica, so I close with a summary by Dr. Willich in his 1799 <span class="Book-Title">Lectures on Diet and Regimen</span>:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">There are other kinds of musical instruments which, in a dietetical view, deserve to be condemned. Such is the harmonica, which, by the rotation of the glasses on the fingers (a kind of negative electricity) induces a great degree of nervous weakness. And this effect is much accelerated by the acute and vibrating sounds of this instrument, by which the organs of hearing are intensely affected. Perhaps all stringed instruments, which are played by the touch of the fingers, such as the harp, the guitar, and the violin, produce a similar effect on the nervous system, especially if it be true, that the papillae, or the points of the fingers, are the strongest conductors of the supposed nervous fluid. It is at least probable, that to be able to play on such instruments, with expression, requires a more than common sensibility of the nerves, which indeed may be sometimes artificially acquired, but to the detriment of health. For it cannot be doubted, that a local excitement of irritability may be gradually propagated over the whole nervous system, and that, from raising some parts of the body to a preternatural state of sensibility, the common character of those who are called Virtuosi, is generally marked with nervous debility.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">33</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-2">Lead Poisoning</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">A modern variation on the hazards of playing the armonica blames armonica player maladies on lead poisoning contracted by touching the lead glass used to make their instruments. </p>
|
||
<div>
|
||
<div class="Basic-Text-Frame">
|
||
<ol>
|
||
<li class="Figure-Caption"><span class="char-style-override-3">Figure 45: </span><a id="Anchor-2" />An armonica from Bohemia, built by C.F. Pohl c. 1818–1830 of non-lead glass. (Courtesy Corning Glass Museum)</li>
|
||
</ol>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<div class="frame-7">
|
||
<img class="frame-8" src="12-TheArmonicaWanes-web-resources/image/Armonica-Pohl_fmt.png" alt="Armonica-Pohl.psd" />
|
||
</div>
|
||
</div>
|
||
<p class="Normal para-style-override-2"></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">That assumes that armonicas were made of lead glass in the first place. Lead glass was a high-end and expensive type of glass — then and now — whereas ‘soda-lime’ is far more common and inexpensive. Even today, soda-lime glass accounts for the vast majority of uses of glass: windows, common glassware, etc., and ‘lead glass’ is still reserved for more expensive and luxurious uses. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Franklin’s armonica was made of soda-lime glass (no lead).<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">34</span> Presumably Marianne Davies’ instrument was likewise. This in spite of the fact that lead glass was a specialty of England at the time. And, as we have seen, lead glass was difficult to make outside of England due to raw materials found in England uniquely suited to that purpose. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In <a href="#Anchor-2">Figure 43</a> we see another armonica, from Bohemia — the opposite end of Europe from London, and it too is made of non-lead glass.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">So, were armonicas of that era (especially outside of England) made of lead glass? That’s a good question! For the theory that glass armonica players were contracting lead poisoning from playing lead glass instruments, we first need to establish who was playing lead glass instruments in the first place.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Meanwhile, suppose they were playing lead glass instruments after all. What do we know about lead poisoning by merely touching lead glass?</p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">What We Now Know About Lead Poisoning</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">There are two basic categories of lead poisoning: ‘acute’ when you are exposed to a lot all at once, and ‘chronic’ when you are exposed to a lesser amount over a long period of time. The symptoms of lead poisoning include irritability, loss of appetite, weight loss, sluggishness and fatigue, abdominal pain, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, high blood pressure, declines in mental functioning, pain, numbness or tingling of the extremities, muscular weakness, headache, abdominal pain, memory loss, mood disorders, and miscarriage or premature birth. Lead is nasty stuff, and has no use in our physiology (unlike other metals like iron), so the only truly safe level of lead exposure is zero — none whatsoever.<span class="char-style-override-8"></span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">It is now well understood that lead poisoning occurs by ingesting it or inhaling it — the scientific literature on this is massive.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">A typical example is from the U.S. Center for Disease Control:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">Workers can be exposed to lead through inhalation of fumes and dusts, as well as through ingestion as a result of lead-contaminated hands, food, drinks, cosmetics, tobacco products, and clothing. Furthermore, workers can take lead home on their clothes, skin, hair, tools, and in their vehicles , potentially exposing their families to harmful health effects.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">35</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">No mention of lead poisoning by skin contact. </p>
|
||
<p class="Normal"><span class="Book-Title">Casarett and Doull’s Toxicology</span> (6th ed.), a respected reference work in the field and weighing in at 1200 pages, devotes six pages to lead. “The principal route of exposure for people in the general population is food” and proceeds to enumerate a long list of ways we can ingest it.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">36</span> Later: “Lead can also be absorbed by the lungs” and a discussion of <span class="char-style-override-2">that</span> ensues.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">37</span> There is one paragraph describing one way lead can be absorbed through the skin: when it’s in leaded gasoline — the gasoline transports the lead across the skin barrier.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">38</span> That’s it!</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Now mind you, in lead glass, the lead is part of the matrix of the glass. In spite of many hours wading through a lot of science about lead poisoning, I haven’t found anything supporting the idea that you can get lead poisoning through the skin even by touching <span class="char-style-override-2">raw pure lead </span>(such as fishing weights available at your local sporting goods store), much less lead embedded in lead glass. So for the ‘lead poisoning by touching lead glass with wet fingers’ theory, I’d honestly like to see some science supporting the possibility!</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In another variation of ‘lead poisoning from lead glass instruments,’ Hadlock has suggested that players got lead poisoning because they moistened the glasses by licking their fingers.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">39</span> But I haven’t found any mention in the historical literature of playing the armonica this way — probably because it wouldn’t work: short of rabies, a human being simply cannot produce enough saliva to sufficiently moisten the rims of three dozen glasses and keep them moist enough to play. As a player myself, I can’t imagine why someone would even try, when a simple bowl of water is so much easier and sanitary! It’s a bit unsavory even to imagine the spectacle of an armonica concert in which the player constantly licks their fingers while playing. (Try it! Yuck!)</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Meanwhile, lead poisoning was indeed a major problem in the 18th century (and still is today) — via the now well-known avenues of ingesting and inhaling it.</p>
|
||
<p class="Heading-3">Lead Poisoning in the 18th Century</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Lead poisoning was poorly understood in Franklin’s day. We shouldn’t be surprised that Benjamin Franklin played a major role in understanding and publicizing the dangers of lead.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">During the 1700s, lead was a problem of enormous proportions, a danger they simply did not understand. Apple cider and distilled alcoholic beverages were processed in stills made with lead fixtures and tubing, and lead oxide was deliberately added to wines to improve the flavor. “Prior to the twentieth century, lead-adulterated wines and spirits probably caused more plumbism [lead poisoning] than any other non-occupational source.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">40</span></p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">Lead oxide was also used to whiten bread and was sometimes added to snuff. Lead may also have played a role in accusations of witchcraft since those suffering from lead intoxication often exhibit ‘weird behavior’.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">41</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Lead or pewter (then containing about 25 percent lead and 75 percent tin) could be found in a myriad of household items for cooking or storing foods including casserole pans and storage containers for milk. Lead was also present in glazes, crystal glass decanters, and even some candle wicks.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Lead salts were prescribed by doctors for hemorrhages, epilepsy and diarrhea. Indeed, one of the symptoms of lead poisoning from drinking tainted beverages is severe stomach cramps (the ‘dry gripes’ or ‘dry belly-ache’), for which some physicians prescribed swallowing lead bullets, the theory being that because lead is eleven times heavier than water, the heavy lead pellet would push out ‘the obstruction’.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">42</span> In other words, some doctors were treating lead poisoning by giving the patient more lead!</p>
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<p class="Normal">Lead oxide was used as a makeup for women, who liberally applied the fine powder to their faces. Naturally they breathed the dust, and lead oxide dust would fall on their food.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">43</span> It's hard to say how much this contributed to lead poisoning, but it can’t possibly be good.</p>
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<p class="Normal">This author saw a 19th century baby bottle with lead fittings (through which the baby’s milk passed) at the Pharmacological Museum in New Orleans in 1995.</p>
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<p class="Normal">A rather extraordinary confirmation of all this comes from a locket of Beethoven’s hair. A locket was clipped on his death bed, and a few strands were recently analyzed. They showed that he suffered from high levels of lead in his system — approximately 100 times greater than current norms.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">44</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">But in the late 18th century the dangers of lead were beginning to be understood — and Franklin played a significant role.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Franklin received an early introduction to the hazards of lead as a teenager. Franklin would later recollect that there “was a general discourse in Boston, when I was a boy, of a complaint from North Carolina against New England rum, that it poison’d their people, giving them the dry bellyach, with a loss of the use of their limbs.” He explained, “The distilleries being examin'd on the occasion, it was found that several of them used leaden still-heads and worms [the ‘condenser’, a coil of tubing], and the physicians were of the opinion, that the mischief was occasioned by that use of lead. The Legislature of Massachusetts thereupon pass'd an Act, prohibiting under severe penalties the use of such still-heads and worms thereafter.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">44</span> “An Act for Preventing Abuses in the Distilling of Rhum, and Other Strong Liquors with Leaden Heads or Pipes” was made into law in 1723.</p>
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<p class="Normal"><span class="Book-Title">Poor Richard</span> included several entries on the ‘dry-bellyach’ or ‘dry-gripes’ in his <span class="Book-Title">Almanack</span>: in 1734 he warned: “Drink Water, Put the Money in Your Pocket, and leave the <span class="char-style-override-2">Dry-Bellyach</span> in the [Rum] <span class="char-style-override-2">Punchbowl</span>.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">46</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">In addition to a firm grasp of the dangers of rum made in stills containing lead parts, Franklin also had developed a profound respect for manually handling lead before he set sail for England. This occurred in his teens. He was stranded in London, having never received the letters of credit promised by Governor Keith to purchase printing equipment to start his own business.</p>
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<p class="Quotation">In 1724, being in London, I went to work in the printing-house of Mr. Palmer, Bartholomew Close, as a compositor. I then found a practice I had never seen before, of drying a case of types, (which are wet in distribution) by placing it sloping before the fire. I found this had the additional advantage, when the types were not only dry’d but heated, of being comfortable to the hands working over them in cold weather. I therefore sometimes heated my case when the types did not want drying. But an old workman observing it, advis’d me not to do so, telling me I might lose the use of my hands by it, as two of our companions had nearly done, one of whom that us’d to earn his guinea a week could not then make more than ten shillings and the other, who had the dangles, but seven and sixpence. This, with a kind of obscure pain that I had sometimes felt as it were in the bones of my hand when working over the types made very hot, induc’d me to omit the practice. But talking afterwards with Mr. James, a letter founder in the same [Mr.] Close, and asking him if his people, who work’d over the little furnaces of melted metal, were not subject to that disorder; he made light of any danger from the effluvia, but ascrib’d it to particles of the metal swallow’d with their food by slovenly workmen, who went to their meals after handling the metal, without well-washing their fingers, so that some of the metalline particles were taken off by their bread and eaten with it. This appear’d to have some reason in it. But the pain I had experienc’d made me still afraid of those effluvia.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">47</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Two decades later, when promoting his new Pennsylvania fireplaces, Franklin made sure to include the statement that “Iron does not, like lead ... give out unwholesome vapours.” He supported his statement by pointing out the “general health and strength” of ironworkers, and the results of experiments on birds forced to breathe fumes of iron (which didn’t harm them) or fumes from lead alloys (which killed them). “When hot,” stated Franklin, lead “yields a very unwholesome steam.”<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">48</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">And later, when he was in Paris, he tried unsuccessfully to obtain lead-free cooking pots.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">49</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Thus Franklin had a wealth of knowledge about lead poisoning before sailing for London in 1757, where he met George Baker at the Royal Society and Royal Society Club. Baker was a physician who was studying the ‘dry-gripes’.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">In 1767, Baker published a treatise on lead poisoning, “An inquiry concerning the cause of the endemial colic,” and Franklin was one of Baker’s major sources. Franklin shared with him the story of the Massachusetts Rum Law of 1723, his own experiences with lead type as a printer, and the experiments with lead fumes and birds. He also pointed out his observations that workers who worked with lead such as painters and plumbers were particularly prone to the ‘dry-gripes’ and ‘dangles’. </p>
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<p class="Normal">Baker combined Franklin’s insights with other sources and his own experiments and observations, and in 1767 Baker published a treatise which laid the foundation for understanding and preventing lead poisoning. His treatise included observations that children were particularly susceptible and that therefore their toys should not be painted with lead paint. He also pointed out that sufferers could recover in time if any further contact with lead was eliminated.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">51</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Because of his advances in understanding lead poisoning, and his ability to communicate his findings and convince other physicians and the public, Baker was appointed a physician-in-ordinary to the queen and later King George III himself. He was also made a baronet and was repeatedly elected president of the College of Physicians. </p>
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<p class="Normal">So, were armonica players suffering from lead poisoning? It looks like the answer is Yes — just like NON-armonica players were suffering from lead poisoning. Lead was just everywhere.</p>
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<p class="Heading-2">Impracticalities of the Armonica</p>
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||
<p class="Normal">We have already seen Rochlitz list many of the challenges of the armonica even by 1798: its high cost, the rarity of teachers and compositions for it, and its reputation for causing health problems.</p>
|
||
<p class="Normal">James Smith’s <span class="Book-Title">Tutor for the Musical Glasses</span> (1829) also describes the disadvantages of Franklin’s glass armonica:</p>
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<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">52</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">As a professional armonica player myself, I would like to add a few more observations.</p>
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<p class="Normal">One challenge to playing the armonica is safely transporting it. It is hard enough in modern times with air-filled tires on paved roads, but I cringe imagining 18th century players like Davies, Frick and Kirchgessner transporting their instruments throughout Europe by horse-drawn cart over what passed for roads in those days.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Another is the challenge of how quiet it is. If you’ve played the wet finger around the wine glass — that’s how loud an armonica is. Unamplified, the armonica can be heard only in smaller venues, and preferably unaccompanied — or accompanied by a contrasting and quiet instrument like the harp.</p>
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||
<p class="Normal">The Mozart armonica quintet (K617 for armonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello) is a good example. Even when I perform this with Mozart-era instruments (which are quieter than their modern versions), the musicians still struggle to play softly enough — unless we amplify the armonica. Which is generally what we do: just a little tasteful boost so it can be heard by the audience in the back row — if not the front!</p>
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<p class="Normal">Matters are even worse for a piece like Donizetti’s opera <span class="Book-Title">Lucia di Lammermoor </span><span class="Book-Title char-style-override-9">(1835)</span>, scored for full orchestra. As lightly as Donizetti scores the orchestral accompaniment to the armonica, without amplification even the <span class="char-style-override-2">conductor </span>— a mere 7 meters / 20 feet away — can barely hear me, to say nothing of the audience. When Lucia herself is singing at the same time, with the unamplified operatic voice she needs to be heard in an opera-sized venue, the armonica is completely lost without amplification.</p>
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<p class="Normal">Kirchgessner struggled with the same problems, as we saw in a review of a Vienna concert in 1791:</p>
|
||
<p class="Quotation">She could also be heard accompanied by several instruments, which however must be played extremely quietly.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">53</span></p>
|
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<p class="Normal">And another, from a London review of a performance in 1794:</p>
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<p class="Quotation">... the dulcet notes of the instrument would be delightful indeed, were they more powerful and articulate; but that we believe the most perfect execution cannot make them. In a smaller room, and an audience less numerous, the effect must be enchanting. Though the accompaniments were kept very much under, they were still occasionally too loud.<span class="Endnote-Reference char-style-override-1">54</span></p>
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<p class="Normal">Nowadays a little tasteful amplification is easy to do. But amplification didn’t exist until the early part of the 20th century. In fact, glass music largely ceased to exist in the latter half of the 19th century — its revival in the 20th century by Bruno Hoffmann (1913–1991) roughly corresponds to the availability of amplification. What a coincidence...</p>
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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> ‘Catholic’ means ‘universal’</p>
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