Mozart's Walk through the Crystal Garden

Those of you who a.) saw the Golden Globes last Sunday and b.) are awesome might have noticed that the excellent Mr. Holmes was completely shut out, a doubly heinous crime considering that it featured one of the great stunt instruments of musical history, the glass harmonica.  It's part of a major turn of one of the film's main plots and is one of the only times it has appeared in a film, and considering the time period when the plot takes place (the turn of the 20th century) it's surprising that anybody would be playing it, much less teaching lessons on it.  The instrument is the most famous member of the crystallophone family, instruments that produce sound with glass, and is part of a larger family of friction idiophones, operating by the same mechanism of someone creating a tone by rubbing a wet finger on the rim of a wine glass.  The latter device became something of a vogue technique for composers writing for percussion in the late 20th century, specifically inspired by the use of crystal glasses in pieces by George Crumb and Joseph Schwantner, but that hasn't inspired a revival of the full glass harmonica, or armonica.  The most common form of the instrument is one designed by America's favorite renaissance man and horndog Benjamin Franklin - a set of concentrically-arranged glass bowls, each one a half-step apart in Western equal temperament, are partially submerged in a tub of water and turned with a foot pedal, allowing the player to simply touch their fingers to the bowls' rims to produce the notes.  Oddly enough, one of the biggest proponents of crystallophones in our time is Linda Rondstadt, and she produced an all-crystallophone album in the early Oughts performed by Dennis James.  The heyday of the instrument was in the late 18th century and use of hit virtually disappeared by the 1820's, as it was seen as an impractical novelty instrument and hardly any music was written specifically for it.  One of those pieces, however, was written by none other than Mozart himself, and it's actually quite lovely.

As producing sounds via glass friction is somewhat difficult Mozart's piece here is mercifully slow, though there are a few 16th-note passages to keep the performer on edge.  The mood is reverent and nostalgic, rife with suspensions and a handful of surprising harmonic twists, all made all the more enchanting coming from the glass harmonica's unearthly sound.  Both metallic and intangible, one can imagine that its tone quality is what one would hear walking through a greenhouse on a distant planet.  The performance here is a little incomplete, as the performer Martin Hilmer doesn't bother with the recap of the B section, but the technique is excellent as there are only a few notes that don't sound (and understandably so; I've never been able to make a note on a crystal glass).  Now, if there was only a leaf written for the cristal baschet...

~PNK