THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411100639
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B01 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG LENGTH: Long : 121 lines
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, a glass armonica, was played for about 70 years after it was invented 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 them.
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. While many performers suffered lead poisoning, others, including Franklin, seemed unaffected, even as some smokers live to ripe old ages.
Lead poisoning, of course, was unheard-of 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. Lonely people in bars do the same thing.
Franklin, who was nothing if not inventive, had a London glass blower help him make the first 13 glass armonicas, one of which worked. Now the performer could play chords, like a pianist.
Franklin 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 M. 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, succeeding where many others this century had failed.
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 a get a master's in forensic science from Virginia Commonwealth University, though he now supports himself full-time with music.
After considerable experimentation, employing mathematics and trial and error, he devised a flywheel attached to a foot treadle. In the spirit of Franklin, who argued for the sharing of inventions and against patents, Shostak has not patented his method and in fact has shared it with Finkenbeiner, so he can produce it for other performers.
It's complicated to play the glass armonica, 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 album of Christmas carols, titled ``Crystal Carols,'' is available on tape or CD through Colonial Williamsburg and at some record stores. He is accompanied on the album by Carol Rose Duane on harp and Jacqueline Schwab on piano. Schwab was the pianist for Ken Burns' acclaimed series ``The Civil War'' and ``Baseball.''
Shostak first performed at Colonial Williamsburg as a strolling violinist in its taverns when he was 15. The summers after his junior and senior years of high school he played country fiddle at Busch Gardens with some of the fabulous Wooten brothers, including Victor, now bassist with acclaimed jazz banjo player Bela Fleck.
This past winter, Shostak gave 50 glass armonica concerts at retirement communities in Florida. Since receiving the instrument two years ago, he has performed on it in several states and throughout Virginia. He frequently plays the glass armonica at Colonial Williamsburg.
He believes the glass armonica will prove particularly attractive to New Agers who attribute special qualities to quartz.
This year the glass armonica was used on Linda Ronstadt's recording ``Winter Light'' and in the sound track for the upcoming movie ``Interview with a Vampire.''
Shostak noted that he was the first person to use a foot treadle with the instrument in a century and a half.
``One thing that is really exciting for me,'' he said, ``is that I am actually part of the history of the instrument.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo by JIM WALKER
Dean M. Shostak plays an armonica at Colonial Williamsburg.
TO BUY THE MUSIC
The album ``Crystal Carols'' is available in Colonial
Williamsburg at Visitors Center Bookstore and Wallace Gallery Shop,
priced at $10.95 for a tape and $17.95 for a CD. The album will be
available soon by mail from Colonial Williamsburg. That phone number
is 1-800-446-9240.
by CNB