The Glass Harmonica: Liminal Instrumentation, Affective Harmonics and the Dubjective Absence of Hauntology
I was having a coffee in central Brighton yesterday when I stopped mid-conversation to try to hear more of what sounded like tiny bells, high-pitched organ notes or a soft but insistent soprano voice — but not quite any of those things — cutting through the industrial noise of a busy coffee shop. Having worked out that it was music playing, rather than the sound of my soul, I asked at the counter.
The woman operating the froth machine didn’t know what the tune was, saying they just played the CDs given to them by HQ. So I went to the Classical Longplayer in Duke Street, where I always go to ask about music I don’t know much about. I still prefer this method of finding out — drifting towards someone who’ll know — to searching the internet. The owner told me immediately what it was: I’d been hearing the sound of the glass harmonica. But he didn’t have anything to sell me.
Back in the dry indoors, a few minutes of searching hooked me up with loads of weird trilling and head-aching harmony. As you’ll see, the sound is much as you’d expect: it’s the high chime of fingers rubbing glass rims.
William Zeitler’s Hong Kong performance of “Venus” has got the lot: exoticism, Orientalism and even hauntiquarianism in the shape of re-enactment in sound, vision and language (he prefers to call his instrument it by its alternate olden name, the glass armonica).
His version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” melds weird camp and popular musical historicism. Adorno would have loved this.
“The Glass Harmonica” (1968), an allegorical short feature by Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky, silently ventriloquises the affectivity of the human will amplified through creative interventions (see part one and part two on Youtube). Khrjanovsky refigures the instrument as a glass lyre, virtually dematerialising the glass harmonica as constructed by Benjamin Franklin and replacing it with a portable cipher suitable for an itinerant bard. Its harmonics are reimagined in a score written by Alfred Schnittke, with the unique and unwieldy industrial instrument represented by more accessible and versatile instrumentation, including flute, violin, celesta, organ, piano, tubular bells, tape effects and, way down in the mix, a suspicion of glass harmonica.
Vera Meyer’s folksy renditions of the glass harmonica “pops” keep her feet firmly on the street, from where she presents a pleasing mix of music and historical factoids.
Not affected by the keening of glass vibrations, Meyer tells her ever-changing audience that the weird harmonies of the glass harmonica might cause “convulsions in dogs and cats, marital disputes and wake people from the dead.” The pitch and harmony of Meyer’s performances are significantly different from Zeitler’s: Zeitler makes melifluous sounds, while Meyer produces tones that are hard to endure. I can believe that the dead would wake up if Meyer was playing outside their place.
Some 18th century critics suggested that exposure to the glass harmonica’s harmonics might be injurious to nervous people and could potentially induce morbid feelings and depression. The same could be said of any musical instrument. If you’ve a tendency towards depression or obsessions, you’ll find a focus for those feelings in your environment.
The weird sound of the glass harmonica produces an effect in the listener beyond the movement of air. As a recorded sound, it’s familiar due to its nearness to the noise made by a wet finger on a wine glass. But with such clarity of tone and available combinations of harmonics, it’s the sound of nothing you’ve ever heard before. It’s not the start-up sound of a difference engine. It’s a recalibrated machine from The Past that affects the weirdness of our immediate perception. It is being and becoming and was and is the sound of the thing that it is. Familiar, yet unknown, its sound lies a little further off in experiential space.
Now play the brittle armonica yourself, courtesy of The Franklin Institute Science Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
Posted by Neil
on October 2, 2007 at 7:20 am
Tags: Music, Sound, hauntiquarianism, hauntology