About four years ago, I had the privilege of witnessing a live performance of pieces by Bernstein, Beethoven, and a couple other classical composers as performed on a set of musical glasses.
What are musical glasses you may ask?
Musical glasses, also sometimes collectively referred to as a “glass harp”, are a series of stem glasses of many different sizes tuned by adjusting the water level within each individual glass.
The sound of musical glasses inspired Ben Franklin to invent his glass armonica, and also inspired one former guitarist named Robert Tiso to begin to play glass music.
Enjoy Tiso’s performance (below) of the Theme from Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky:
I found this video very interesting! I knew that sound could be made by a finger on a glass, but who knew that it could sound so beautiful? This just makes me think about how music is such an extremely broad category, and how there really is no “good” or “bad” way to play something. Anything could be considered a piece of music, from John Cage’s 4:33 to Swan Lake played using a bunch of glasses filled with water. I wonder if Tchaikovsky ever imagined his piece being played like this!
This piece does things the hard way, with a collection of crystal glasses. The glass armonica of Franklin is wuite different.
Here is a video that shows his ingenious design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQemvyyJ–g
It is like each class is fit into the next, without any stems (and the pitch does not rely on filling each glass with just the right amount of water). The solid bands identify certain pitches so that the player can find the notes needed. This is similar to the pedal harp, which has blue and red strings which identify the notes F and C.
I always found the sound of rubbing your finger on a glass extremely annoying, but this is completely different! The music is so soft and beautiful. I find it amazing that someone actually thought of playing a whole piece of music on just glasses filled with water.