Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 14, 1994 TAG: 9411140044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICK K. LACKEY THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG LENGTH: Medium
One of the things they never taught you in high school is that Benjamin\ Franklin invented a musical instrument that later was thought to kill people - and probably did.
The instrument, called a glass armonica, was played for about 70 years after its invention in 1761. But performers kept becoming terribly ill, and even listeners became afraid.
After a baby died during a concert in Germany early in the 19th century, the instrument was banned from some European cities. By about 1830, fear of the instrument killed it. After a generation or two, people forgot how to make one.
The instrument was reinvented in 1982 by a master glass blower in Boston.
Now, a Colonial Williamsburg musician has recorded the first Christmas album on the instrument - something a little different for the coming holiday season.
The glass armonica consists of crystal bowls mounted on a horizontal rotating spindle. The musician wets his fingers in water and sets the crystals to vibrating by touching the rotating bowls.
The big bowls make low notes; the little bowls, high ones. The firmer the touch, the louder the note.
The original instrument's fatal flaw was that the crystal contained lead, as did paint used on the bowls. Many performers suffered lead poisoning, but others, including Franklin, seemed unaffected.
Lead poisoning, of course, was unrecognized in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The glass armonica sound is so eerie that many people blamed it for the performers' illnesses and the baby's death in Germany. Some people believed the music could wake the dead and make dogs go rabid.
Franklin got the idea for the instrument in 1759 when he attended a London concert in which a performer made music by running wet fingers around wineglass rims.
He first played the glass armonica for his wife while she slept. Upon awakening, she said she thought she had died and heard baby angels singing.
Dean Shostak of Williamsburg, one of four or five glass armonicists performing professionally, said 6,000 of the instruments were made over half a century. It is arguably the only musical instrument invented in America, he said.
Beethoven and Mozart composed music for it. George Washington traveled to Williamsburg in 1765 for a glass armonica concert. Thomas Jefferson, an accomplished violinist, failed in an attempt to connect a keyboard to it.
The glass armonica was reinvented in Boston by German master glass blower Gerhart Finkenbeiner, a leading maker of scientific glassware. He uses lead-free pure quartz crystal, heated to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. The small bowls cost $250; larger ones $800.
He used Franklin's letters about the instrument as an aid in making his first one. Finkenbeiner's instruments come with electric motors to turn the spindle.
``I think Franklin would approve of using electricity,'' Shostak quipped, but he knew the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation would never permit a musical instrument employing a 20th-century device. Colonial Williamsburg is a living history museum, authenticity its reason for being.
So Shostak had to reinvent a mechanical method for turning the spindle.
Fortunately, Shostak, 30, has a scientific background. After growing up in Newport News, he graduated from the University of Virginia in 1986 with a double degree in music and chemistry. He went on to get a master's in forensic science from Virginia Commonwealth University, though he now supports himself full time with music.
After considerable experimentation employing both mathematics and trial and error, he devised a flywheel attached to a foot treadle.
The glass armonica is complicated to play, Shostak said, because each bowl responds differently to touch, and each of his fingers affects each bowl in a different way.
The notes, Finkenbeiner observed, seem to have neither beginnings nor ends. They float through a room.
``If you listen to a trumpet,'' Finkenbeiner said, ``you hear the metal of the instrument. If you listen to a violin, you hear the bow and the string. If you listen to the glass armonica, it is the sound itself you hear.''
Shostak's Christmas album, titled ``Crystal Carols,'' is available through Colonial Williamsburg and at some record stores. He frequently plays at Colonial Williamsburg, where he first performed as a strolling violinist in its taverns when he was 15.
This year, the glass armonica was used in the sound track for the movie ``Interview With a Vampire.''
by CNB