I have a weakness for pretty much anything made of glass and (obviously) for unusual sounds, so the intriguing family of glass instruments is a total shoo-in.
Most of us, at one time or another (possibly after a long and relaxed dinner…) will have dipped a drunken finger into a wine glass and moved it around the rim to hear the noise that it makes.
But, far from being just tipsy after-dinner shenangians, glass instruments have a surprisingly illustrious and colourful history stretching as far back as the Renaissance in Europe and, in other parts of the world, possibly a lot further.
The first ‘organised’ system of a set of tuned wine glasses was conceived by an Irish musician and inventor by the name of Richard Pockrich (or Poekrich, or Puckeridge) in the early 18th century. By some accounts he was a bit of a rogue, but his ‘angelick organ’ became highly celebrated and the German composer CW Gluck was so taken with it that he wrote a concerto for “26 drinking-glasses tuned with spring water”.
The instrument caught the attention of Benjamin Franklin (yes, that Benjamin Franklin) who went on to develop a mechanical version using nested tuned bowls in place of glasses. Heavyweight composers including Beethoven, Mozart, Donizetti and Tchaikovsky composed work especially for the instrument before it fell out of favour in the early 19th century.
Glass harmonica maestro, Robert Tiso, has written a very good concise history of the instrument here and this video of him plus pendulum waves is a mesmerising thing of beauty. I do love a good pendulum wave
And on a slightly different note…
This is a glass xylophone or a crystal marimba played by renowned Japanese marimba player, Michiko Takahashi. Clearly it’s a struck instrument rather that a friction one, but it belongs in the glass family. And although Crystal Marimba possibly sounds more like a lap dancer than an ethereal-sounding instrument, the sounds is beautiful.