I See Through You

First, Do No Harm(onica)

Welcome to our Musical Zodiac, in which we arbitrarily match instruments to personality types and use that as an excuse to talk about our favorite musickers.

Pisces is the 12th sign of the zodiac, considered to run from about February 19 to about March 20. I did a lot of deep, scientific research to find the right match-up of sign to instrument, and I settled on Idiophones for Pisces.

Last week, when I introduced idiophone month, I pointed to some of the most widely recognized examples: marimba, xylophones, and the PVC tube constructions used by the Blue Man Group. But there is more to the idiophone family than percussion.

In 1761 Benjamin Franklin invented a musical instrument he called the “glass harmonica” — an idiophone built on the idea of using graduated sizes of wine glasses to make a sort of “keyboard” layout. Here’s a quick demonstration:

Here is an expert in these types of delicate instruments, Dennis James, performing the Mozart piece mentioned above:

In this video, Dennis demonstrates another version of the instrument, the Cristal Baschet, which is a resonating sculpture. Note the use of resonator cones that amplify the sound:

From that extreme, you can go back and find examples of people using arrangements of actual wine glasses to create the instrument, here being played in the Basilica of Santo Stefano in Bologna, Italy, where the acoustic design of the building acts to amplify the quiet instrument.

Due to the delicacy of these glass instruments and the difficulty in amplifying them, they haven’t found their way into a ton of popular music. Artists like Björk are credited with featuring versions of this kind of idiophone in studio recordings, but finding examples where they are played live is very difficult. But thanks to Wikipedia, we know that James Horner used a glass harmonica and pan flute for Spock's theme in 1982 for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and that KoЯn used the armonica on one of their songs.

Here is KoЯn’s performance of “Falling Away From Me” on MTV Unplugged in 2007.

One other notable thing I discovered while researching this instrument family was a 1968 animated film from the Soviet Union called Стеклянная гармоника (Glass harmonica). The instrument that appears in this film doesn’t resemble the designs above, and it’s hard to tell if you actually hear one in the soundtrack, but it’s worth taking a look at the film for its historical value.

You don’t need to know Russian to understand the story; once you pass the title cards, there is no dialogue or written speech. But this is notably the only animated film censored by the Soviet Union, and it is interesting to compare the figure of the authoritarian censor in the film with modern capitalist villains who use their control over money and intellectual property to suck the joy out of art and humanity.