Glass Harmonica Research Articles

Places as refrains: A non‐constructive alternative to assemblage thinking

AbstractOver the past 20 to 30 years, relational, post‐humanist, processual, and non‐representational approaches to space and place have gained an increasing purchase within anglophone human geography, whether underpinned by academic engagements with Western philosophy, anthropology, or indigenous thinking and praxis. One approach by anglophone geographers has been to incorporate assemblage thinking into constructivist and representational accounts of the building, settling, and/or disassembling of places, but here I argue that assemblage may not be the best way to do this if we wish to foreground process and the dynamism of places. Assemblage theories place too much emphasis on the structural logics and thing‐like qualities of identifiable places, even when they aim to focus on the processual or verb‐like qualities of places. I suggest that geographers who are keen to advance processual and dynamic understandings of place can usefully (re)focus their attention on Deleuze and Guattari's writings on the ritournelle (refrain) because they articulate many of the rhythmic, repetitive, differentiated, intensive, affective, eventful, and performative qualities of placing and emplacement, while resisting any easy assimilation into constructivist and representational ‘building’ perspectives which foreground the assembly and disassembly of worlds. I outline the usefulness of Gilbert Simondon's writings on individuation and crystal growth for understanding individual‐milieu relations, before discussing Deleuze and Guattari's description of the refrain as being like a ‘glass harmonica’, which captures the reverberative, refractive, and rhythmic aspects of the concept. I then revisit a series of well‐established debates about the relationship between place and placelessness, or places and ‘non‐places’, suggesting how placelessness and non‐places can be linked to either a failed process of individuation or to uneventful expressions of a series of circulating, deterritorialising, and territorialising refrains which have differing rhythmic effects.

Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera, by Gabriela Cruz

<i>Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera</i>, by Gabriela Cruz

Геннадий Шпаликов приходит в анимацию: материалы к истории создания фильма «Жил-был Козявин»

It is believed that Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s debut animation “There Lived Kozyavin” allowed the famous screenwriter of the Thaw era Gennady Shpalikov (“I’m Walking Around Moscow”, “Ilyich’s Gave”, “A Long Happy Life”, etc.), who first acted as an author of a script for an animated film, to reveal new unexpected aspects of his talent. In fact, upon a closer inspection of the first versions of the screenplay (“literary sctipt”) called “The Life of Kozyavin”, created on the basis of several works by Lazar Lagin, it turns out that by the time the filming was completed, little was left on the screen of the screenwriter’s original ideas. Moreover, the first film works of Khrzhanovsky (both “There Lived Kozyavin” and “The Glass Harmonica”) do not have that much in common with the ideas of Shpalikov, who, as an analysis of his screenwriting shows, had a keen appreciation of the nature of the animation language and was quite well versed in animation in general. In this article, excerpts from different versions of the screenplay “The Life of Kozyavin’ are published for the first time: they were not filmed or were significantly changed during the development of the shooting script. The article also includes excerpts from the surviving transcripts of the production’s discussions during the meetings of the Artistic Council of the Soyuzmultfilm Studio (including speeches by Shpalikov, Khrzhanovsky, Fyodor Khitruk, Lev Atamanov, Valentina Brumberg, Arkadiy Snesarev, Mikhail Valkov, and others).

Composing the Crisis: From Mesmer's Harmonica to Charcot's Tam-tam

Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

The Fourier spectrum of a singing wine glass

The phenomenon of the singing wineglass is familiar to many. Most people have run a finger along the rim of a wine glass with the right speed and pressure to get it to whistle a tone or perhaps heard a glass harmonica being played. However, have you ever noticed and wondered why the vibrations caused by a finger on a glass produce a pulsating sound, rather than a steady, constant-amplitude vibration? Further exploration reveals that the sound and pulsations of a wine glass vary depending on the way the wine glass is stimulated. In this paper, we investigate and model the characteristic sounds produced by three different cases: the pulsating sound exhibited by a finger run along the rim of a wine glass, the steady tone produced by a stationary finger on a rotating wine glass, and the decaying pulsations exhibited by a struck rotating wine glass. Analyzing the qualitative differences among these three cases provides opportunities for students to hone experimental, modeling, and data analysis skills in an intermediate level undergraduate experimental physics course.

BBC Promenade Concerts: Jörg Widmann, Armonica, BBC Philharmonic/Storgårds 1.8.16; Mark Simpson, Israfel, BBC Philharmonic/Mena 9.8.16; Emily Howard, Torus, RLPO/V Petrenko 25.8.16.

Jörg Widmann is a German composer who is acutely conscious but certainly not in awe of his musical forebears. His best-known string quartet, no. 3 ‘The Hunt’ makes dramatic use of – and has great fun with – Schumann. His 2011 concerto Flûte en suite, performed at the 2014 Proms, more than nods to Bach and baroque elegance. In Armonica, commissioned by the International Mozarteum Foundation to celebrate Mozart's 251st birthday in 2007, Widmann surprisingly and yet unsurprisingly features the glass harmonica, the distinctive instrument that Mozart featured in his own last chamber piece, the Adagio and Rondo for glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello, K617. Mozart teamed the instrument with the quieter representatives from the wind and string families; Widmann places it against the whole orchestra.

Who Invented the Musical Glasses? Goldsmith’sThe Vicar of Wakefieldand Cultural Cross-currents

IN chapter 9 of The Vicar of Wakefield the eponymous cleric and his rustic family, whose female members’ main interest is climbing the social scale, are introduced by the squire Mr Thornhill to two ladies from the town of supposedly great distinction. With characteristic irony Goldsmith deflates their pretensions by having one of the ladies, say that after strenuous dancing ‘by the living jingo she was all of a muck of sweat’. (The ladies’ names are later given as Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs). The naïve Primroses are taken in by the talk of high life and fashionable topics such as ‘pictures, taste, Shakespeare and the musical glasses’. The latter, also known as the glass harmonica or glass harp, was a novelty musical instrument popular at various times during the eighteenth century. Goldsmith’s editor, Arthur Friedman, is in error when he says that it was first introduced to London in 1759 and enjoyed special favour in 1761,1 for there were earlier exponents. One such, in 1746, was the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, who had achieved growing success in the theatre since presenting his first opera at Milan in 1741 and was invited to London by Lord Middlesex in the hope of reviving the fortunes of Italian opera at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. During his time in London Gluck also gave musical concerts. Patricia Howard quotes an advertisement for one of these in which Gluck was to play ‘a concerto upon twenty-six drinking glasses, tuned with spring water, accompanied with the whole band, being a new instrument of his own invention’.2 (The latter claim may be advertisers’ licence: the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians mentions a previous performer, the Irishman Richard Pockrich in 1744).

Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease by James Kennaway (review)

Reviewed by: Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease by James Kennaway Peregrine Horden James Kennaway. Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012. xii + 213 pp. Ill. $119.95 (978-1-4094-2642-4). “Child!” Richard Wagner wrote to a friend in 1859, “this Tristan is becoming something terrible! The last Act!!! ... Perfectly good [performances] must drive people mad” (p. 65). Wagner did not know the half of it. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, his music became a byword for sickness, perversion, and degeneration—ironically, given its later promotion as an art of virile health by Adolf Hitler. For its critics, the blatant eroticism of Wagner’s music would overpower vulnerable female listeners, turning them “neurasthenic,” inducing premature menarche in the young and orgasms in the mature. In men, it would bring out latent homosexuality. In a privately printed book of 1908, called The Intersexes, Xavier Mayne (pseudonym of Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson) appended a questionnaire by which the reader could self-diagnose homosexuality. Alongside being unable to whistle and enjoying cross-dressing, it offered, as a clinching symptom, an especial fondness for Wagner (p. 89). Nietzsche summed it up well in The Wagner Case: “Is Wagner actually a man? Is he not rather a disease?” (p. 73). You could not make it up. And, in this scholarly, well-written, absorbing monograph, James Kennaway has no need to make anything up even if he had ever felt like doing so. The pathological effects attributed to music in the eighteenth to late twentieth centuries—the subject of his book—exceed the wildest imaginings. Although his title (presumably) derives from a song by The Beach Boys, Wagner’s music is the book’s centerpiece. A substantial chapter on him is flanked on each side by two others. The first, introductory, chapter looks briefly at music as therapy, and asks the interesting question of whether pathological music, the very special case of musicogenic epilepsy apart, really exists. The main story begins, however, with the Enlightenment. Anecdotes about music as a threat to political order and about its supposed capacity to drive players or performers mad began in Greco-Roman antiquity, but, Kennaway shows, their background was cosmological or ethical, not medical. A specifically medical view of music as pathogenic did not emerge until the later eighteenth century, in the notion that illness could be caused by overexcitation of the nerves. Music joined tea, coffee, and tobacco as stimulants from which the refined sensibility needed protection. As later, women were deemed especially at risk, not least from ethereal sounds of the glass harmonica. After the Wagner centerpiece, the next chapter traces the entry of race into an already toxic blend of ideas about degenerate music. Kennaway fascinatingly juxtaposes the two earlier twentieth-century societies in which race was a dominant political theme: Nazi Germany and the United States. “Does Jazz put the Sin into Syncopation?” asked Anne Shaw Faulkner in 1921 (p. 121). Yet it is an image that really epitomizes this transnational chapter: a poster for the 1938 Nazi Degenerate Music exhibition which shows a black saxophonist wearing a Star of David on his lapel. A final chapter examines developments since 1945. Beyond intensified concern with long-standing musical issues surrounding race, gender, and modern [End Page 607] technology, it finds two novel ingredients: first, music as a supposed means of brainwashing and, second, music as a form of torture. It thus ranges across the Cold War, Beatlemania, Apocalypse Now (Wagner again of course), the conversion to Satanism supposedly induced by heavy metal, and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of Guantánamo. This is a relatively short book, with an even shorter text, so ample are the footnotes. It encompasses a vast range of material—medical, psychiatric, and neurological works, but also music criticism and aesthetics and journalism, art and literature—mostly Anglophone, German, and French. There are excursuses into the Soviet world and into contemporary Islamist views on music. I have just two criticisms. One is that, although vivid particulars are quoted on almost every page, the author writes under the sign...

Measurements of friction instruments with high-speed camera and subpixel tracking

Instruments working with stick-slip interactions not using a string were popular in the West since the invention of the glass harmonica by Benjamin Franklin in 1751. The Terpodion investigated was built by Buschmann in the mid-19th century as a friction instrument with a keyboard, where bars are pressed against a wooden rotating cylinder producing a sound. Using high-speed camera recordings, the only playable instrument today at the Viadrina museum in Frankfurt a.O. shows sinusoidal vibrations of the bars determining the played pitch while the radiated sound is highly complex. Therefore the instrument shows a fundamentally different stick-slip action compared to bowed instruments. Friction instruments of the East, like the singing bowls also show very sinusoidal-like sounds again caused by the stick-slip interaction. The New Ireland Lounuet, a finger-rubbed wooden block has both, a sinusoidal motion as well as a highly complex one which is to imitate bird and frog sounds. A systematic view on the different stick-slip interactions is suggested.

SENSATION AND SENSIBILITY AT THE KEYBOARD IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: CELEBRATING THE TERCENTENARY OF C. P. E. BACH CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 2–4 OCTOBER 2014

This conference-festival at Cornell University was a highlight among the many events held worldwide in connection with C. P. E. Bach's tercentenary. In addition to an international line-up of visiting scholars who descended upon Ithaca (only then, it might be added, to ascend the formidable hill atop which Cornell is perched), the occasion drew together from within the university the Department of Music, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Atkinson Forum in American Studies. The conference was conceived around Christopher Hogwood's appointment at Cornell as A. D. White Professor-at-Large. Hogwood had been expected to attend and preside over the conference as honorary chair, but in the wake of his death on 24 September 2014 the proceedings were instead dedicated to him. Performances of C. P. E. Bach's music were interwoven with paper sessions and other events throughout each day: in all, two keynote lectures, four paper sessions, four solo keyboard recitals, two vocal-instrumental concerts, a standing exhibition, a clavichord masterclass and even a glass harmonica demonstration filled out the whirlwind, three-day schedule.

The Origins of the Orchestra Machine

During that summer, the music of the changing of the guard delighted him more than before. When they passed by his house, he would open the middle door of the room in the back in which he lived, where he listened attentively and with pleasure. One might have thought that the profound metaphysician would have derived pleasure only from music character­ ized by pure harmony, bold transitions, elegantly resolved dissonances, or from the works of a serious composer such as Haydn. But this was not at all the case, as the following circumstance demonstrates. In 1795, accom­ panied by the late G. R. von Hippel, he paid me a visit to hear my bogenflugel. An adagio with the flageolet stop, which is similar to the tone of the glass harmonica, seemed rather disagreeable to him, but the instru­ ment gave him uncommon pleasure when the lid was opened and its full force unleashed, especially when it imitated a symphony with full orches­ tra. (quoted in Drescher 1974:268) The eager listener described above is none other than Immanuel Kant, af­ fectionately chronicled by philosopher and theologian Ehregott Wasianski. This colorful description of Kant's fascination with loud military music is suggestive on many levels. Most obviously, it tells us something of his lis­ tening habits, inviting us to smile at the great metaphysician's somewhat unsophisticated musical taste. We could use Wasianski's sketch to begin deconstructing Kant's own musical upbringing and shed light on the infa­ mously negative valuation of music in his third Critique. This passage, how­ ever, also encourages us to consider the surrounding context and examine what Wasianski implies about contemporary musical aesthetics. First, he distinguishes between an intellectual mode of listening-the kind that ap­ preciates daring modulations and the nuances of Haydn's compositional style-and a more immediate mode that takes pleasure in the sheer noise generated by military music. Second, Wasianski makes casual reference to a bogenflugel;' one with various stops. Given the variety of musical instru­ ments invented during the eighteenth century, and the fact that so many of them are lost to us, we might ask exactly what he used to entertain Kant and von Hippel in 1795. Last, we can examine what it means for Wasianski sim­ ply to be able describe an instrument as imitating an orchestra, confident that his readership would know what he means. When interrogated in this way, this passage can be the starting point of investigations that help us

“The Expressive Organ within Us”

Abstract A variety of harmoniums populate Honore de Balzac9s novels, including the physharmonica, the orgue expressif , the panharmonicon, and the accordion. The sounds of these instruments typically illustrate unusual mental states. Balzac9s musical fantasies drew on contemporaneous medical practice, which between 1820 and 1850 used the harmonium regularly to help treat nervous disorders. The linking of the harmonium with nervous effects resembles earlier associations of the glass harmonica with pathology. However, the medical implementation of the harmonium differs from this tradition both in the instrument9s generally positive connotations and in the later trajectory of its use. Studying the discourse of ethereal mediums helps explain why certain types of sounds were thought to have privileged access to the nerves. The unusual timbres and swelling dynamics of newly popular musical instruments, including the glass harmonica, the Aeolian harp, and the Jew9s harp, were conflated with ideas about a vibratory nervous system and an ethereal world spirit. Both ideas were essential to the formation of the culturally determined ideal of ethereality in the eighteenth century. Closely linked to contemporaneous ideas about physiology and nervous transmission, the sounds and their presumed access to the nervous system continued to influence the design and reception of instruments, most notably the harmonium, during much of the nineteenth century.

The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre by Emily I. Dolan (review)

Reviewed by: The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre by Emily I. Dolan Paul Christiansen The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre. By Emily I. Dolan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xiii, 290 p. ISBN 9781107028258. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. “What still remains to be contributed to Haydn studies?” is the question one always poses when seeing that a new book has appeared about the composer. Along with the steady trickle of biographies, subjects of recent books tend to focus on lesser-studied aspects of his life and works, such as the place of Jews in his operas (Caryl Clark, Haydn’s Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009]) and the composer’s time in Britain (Richard Chesser and David Wyn Jones, The Land of Opportunity: Joseph Haydn and Britain [London: The British Library, 2013]); one book touches on everything from string quartet fingerings to Haydn’s reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Mary Hunter’s and Richard Will’s edited volume of essays Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012]). Emily Dolan’s The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre is one of the latest additions to the groaning shelves of Haydn scholarship. Overall, it is a welcome one. There is much to admire in the book, though it is not without shortcomings, as I note below. Well written throughout and richly illustrated, Dolan’s volume is a pleasure to read. Its thesis is as yet relatively unplowed ground in Haydn scholarship (which is certainly saying something)—unplowed ground because it counters prevailing notions of Haydn and his music. In a forceful and compelling introduction, Dolan charges that scholarship on Haydn has for too long been removed from the materiality of music as sounds produced by humans playing instruments—that is, writers have tended to regard his music as intellectually satisfying aesthetic forms that can be fully appreciated even divorced from the processes that produce sound. Dolan’s book is of a piece with studies published in the past few decades that have challenged dominant discourses of Haydn’s music as intellectual art, as Hanslick’s abstract “tonally moving forms.” Dolan contends that by conceiving of his music as abstract form to be seen in score and thought about rather than as immediate materiality of sound to be heard and felt in the moment, most scholars and critics up to now have distorted the view of his music and its legacy. The conventional view implies that Haydn cannot be perceived as being overly concerned with surface effect—as, say, Rossini might be accused of—but rather with underlying structure and form. There seems to be an unstated assumption for some musicologists and music theorists, even in the present day, that analysis should be done without “resorting to” discussions of timbre or other sensuous qualities of music, as if those musical aspects were less worthy of consideration than formal analysis and Schenkerian graphs. Her point is well taken: anyone attending university music history courses in the U.S. can attest to this fact, and this view of the composer is rarely challenged. [End Page 460] As the book progresses, Dolan illustrates more broadly that Haydn’s career coincided with a new interest in sonority in the eighteenth century reflected in writings by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and subsequent acoustic studies in the nineteenth century by Hermann von Helmholtz. In this context she posits the notion that we must reexamine Haydn’s oeuvre with an eye to the emergence of interest in instrumental timbre. Offering examples such as the ocular harpsichord, the piano de chats, and the glass harmonica, Dolan shows how the eighteenth-century public was enamored of novelty instruments of unusual timbre and how attentive they were to tone color. Of course, Berlioz turns up in relation to his treatise on orchestration, but the author rightly calls into question his usually unchallenged role as originator of modern orchestration. Dolan presents ample evidence of eighteenth-century fascination with, and argument over, instrumentation. Somewhat less convincingly, in chapter 4, “The Republic of Sound,” Dolan attempts through contemporary philosophical thought to connect...

Kennaway, J. (2012). Bad vibrations: The history of the idea of music as a cause of disease (The history of medicine in context). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 213 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1409426424 $44.95

Kennaway, J. (2012). Bad vibrations: The history of the idea of music as a cause of disease (The history of medicine in context). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 213 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1409426424 $44.95.Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease is an historical exploration of ''the notion that music can be pathogenic, a cause of real physical and mental conditions'' (p. 1). A historian of medicine, James Kennaway provides a comprehensive investigation into the idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment through the present day. While knowledge of the beneficial aspects of music has been traced back to early Greece, the idea of music as a cause of disease remains rarely explored. Kennaway's book offers an original and enlightening contribution to the subject. After the introductory chapter, the remainder of the book is divided into historical periods, covering the development of the concept of pathological music in chronological order. The book includes detailed footnotes as well as photographs that give historical context to the development of music as a cause of disease.Chapter 1 offers a strong introduction and overview of disorders thought to be caused by music. The popularity of the idea of pathogenic music, which Kennaway defines as ''a cause of real physical and mental conditions'' (p. 1), began in the late eighteenth century. During this time, physicians believed over-stimulation of the nerves to be the root of illness. Therefore, the impact of music on the nervous system was of utmost importance. In this first chapter, Kennaway thoughtfully suggests how music can indeed be pathogenic, such as when played at an extremely loud volume. The real potential damages of music are further explored in the last chapter.The second chapter reviews the early days of the concept of pathogenic music, mainly during the 18th century. By 1800, the idea that music caused overstimulation of the nerves, illness, and even death was widespread. Women were thought to be highly vulnerable to overstimulation of the nerves due to music. Therefore, music became associated with social discourse on gender and class, ''since the idleness and conspicuous consumption synonymous with Enlightenment conception of sensitive, genteel femininity had a socioeconomic basis'' (p. 41). Publications on ideal female behavior warned against listening to music for fear of sexual 'excess'. By the late eighteenth century, anxieties spread to playing an instrument known as the glass harmonica. One lady's death was documented to be the direct result of playing this instrument, which could also cause ''shaking of the nerves, tremors in the muscles, fainting, cramps, swelling, paralysis, ... and seeing ghosts'' (p. 46). The acceptance of music as a cause of medical and moral malaise was growing.Chapter 3 covers the period of 1850 to the First World War, and continues to explore the beliefs of pathological music within medical, political, and cultural contexts. The ideas of the eighteenth century progressed: references to 'nervous music' remained commonplace in the fields of psychiatry, music criticism, philosophy, and literature. Music was viewed as a cause of hysteria, loss of self-control, and 'neuroasthenia,' which was a condition of 'nervous exhaustion'. In particular, the music of Richard Wagner was widely controversial. Wagner's music, including his rhythms and staging, were felt to be 'over-stimulating'. His music was thought to be the root of musical and moral malady. Increased hostility towards women also continued to develop. Women were viewed as predominantly at risk of becoming nervous and ill due to listening to music composed by Wagner. Kennaway cites examples from eighteenth century gynecology publications warning females of the dangers of musical excitement to reproductive health. In addition, music was viewed to weaken willpower, which could lead to homosexuality and hypnosis. Manhood entailed the ideal use of willpower, and ''music's apparently quasihypnotic powers seemed yet another challenge to the idea of the rational, implicitly masculine autonomous subject'' (p. …

Lydia Syson, Doctor of love: James Graham and his celestial bed, Richmond, Surrey, Alma Books, 2008, pp. 331, illus., £20.00 (hardback 978-1-84688-054-4).

It is no easy matter to situate a man who cared more for celebrity and marketing than science or medicine within the history of medicine. Yes, James Graham (1745–94) was a quack, but this epithet hardly captures his ability to exploit scientific ideas for commercial gain. And how does one take seriously his use of medical ideas? More critically, how does one recognize how Graham was shaped by and shaped the science of his time? In her canny and erudite new book, Lydia Syson presents Graham as the first sex therapist, showman, and entrepreneur. She navigates a tightrope between Graham as huckster and Graham as physician, and in the process, raises important questions for the history of medicine. At a time when the grand narratives of science are being replaced by more contingent and localized public cultures of science, the career of James Graham is ripe for reconsideration. Syson’s early chapters usefully detail James Graham’s medical training and education. Doctoring, she reminds us, was a business and a profession, and payment was the only requirement for taking classes if one did not expect to graduate. Most did not. Even when one graduated, it was possible simply to pay someone to write your dissertation. She speculates that Robert Whytt, a teacher at the University of Edinburgh, was the source for Graham’s fascination with the body’s influence on the soul. Graham managed to get William Buchan, author of one of the most widely sold medical reference books, to act as his patron. In America, Syson argues, Graham would turn to Ebenezer Kinnersley, a Baptist minister, to learn about the medical uses of electricity. Syson’s piece de resistance is, of course, Graham’s famous celestial “medico, magnetico, musico, electrical” bed (p. 181), the one that cost £50 per night and guaranteed conception. She shows London awash in visible spectacle. Deciding to expand to the West End, Graham took on Schomberg House, then quickly renamed it the Temple of Prolific Hymen. To link it with fine art as opposed to vulgar showmanship, Graham borrowed Philippe De Loutherbourg’s use of lighted transparencies. He surrounded the bed with 1500 pounds of magnets, taking advantage of longstanding connections of magnets with sexual attraction, including William Harvey’s idea that semen had magnetic force. To bolster the science behind the bed, Graham published alleged accounts of successful treatment in his Medical Transactions; Syson does not mention that he stole the title from the Royal Society’s official publication. His lectures on generation, moreover, straddled the highly permeable line between medicine and erotica. Eventually he was jailed for promoting lasciviousness. Syson’s limpid prose whets the appetite for more. How did Graham persuade his audiences of his therapeutic effects? While Syson deftly shows how Graham sought to use every resource in his powers to overwhelm the senses of his patients, including chemicals like laughing gas, the music of Franklin’s glass harmonica, and the svelte beauty of Emy Lyon (later Emma Hamilton), playing the Goddess of Health, she might have considered more the gap between sensuous effects and belief in a cure. Coleridge, of course, invented the term “psychosomatic,” and although she uses this term, she might have done more to think about why the psychosomatic acquires such influence during this period. Likewise, recently historians of science have begun to credit this period with the development of controlled experiments, and Graham’s commercial success certainly fuelled a desire to subject therapies to rigorous proof. Finally, much more could be said about the notion of health in this period, especially since Graham advertised his place as the Temple of Health. Despite these lapses, this entertaining and thoughtful book reminds us of the strangeness and familiarity of the eighteenth-century medical world. In so doing, it shows the costs and benefits of our grand narratives which have long relegated Graham to the fringes of the Enlightenment.

Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (review)

Reviewed by: Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany Deborah Jean Warner (bio) Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Myles W. Jackson . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. x+395. $40. In this ambitious, demanding, and fascinating book, Myles Jackson examines the intersections of three ostensibly independent communities and shows the several ways in which they helped shape one another. He terms this work a "socio-cultural history of science," but actually presents much material relevant to the history of technology. Jackson begins with the cultured upper-middle class that was striving to shape a liberal and united Germany, noting that musicians and scientists were part of this culture, and often members of the same family, and were thus expected to know and understand one another. He then moves on to E. F. Chladni, a nomadic acoustician who is best remembered by historians of science for having devised the acoustic plates that were long a standard fixture of physics laboratories. In his day, however, Chladni was also known for having devised two musical instruments: the euphone, a modification of the glass harmonica, and the clavicylinder. In a chapter on "Singing Savants," Jackson describes the music at the inaugural (1822) meeting of the Association of German Investigators of Nature and Physicians, the first large-scale German scientific society. Not just pleasant entertainment, this music was understood as a mechanism for building a community of savants who could see each other only on rare occasions. Similar musical performances would be found in many subsequent scientific conferences. Jackson devotes one chapter to exploring the often tense relationships between various musical ideologies. In an account of the new instruments that produced the romantic music favored by audiences who expected to be moved, Jackson notes, ironically, that the free vibrating reeds that made [End Page 856] these instruments so expressive had been developed for use in automata, in many ways the epitome of the mechanical. The second half of the book addresses the various attempts to make music more precise. William Weber, a physicist known to historians for his precision measurements and his work with electrodynamics, had a close relationship with Chladni, and his "experimental prowess and his introduction to wave theory originated in his early fascination with acoustics" (p. 111). He undertook his investigations of adiabatic phenomena in large part to improve the manufacture of German musical instruments, and his work was later used by physiologists and anatomists who hoped to understand the human voice. Johann Heinrich Scheibler, an industrialist and amateur musician, sought mechanical means of simplifying the work done in his silk factory as well as the work of organ and piano tuners. After a lengthy discussion of musical temperaments, Jackson addresses the many efforts that were made to standardize musical tempo by means of such devices as the metronome, and to standardize pitch by means of the tuning fork. The final chapter concerns musical pedagogy, calling attention to a number of mechanical contraptions that were designed to discipline the hands of young piano players. It also addresses physicists' efforts to analyze and quantify virtuosity. To help Anglophone readers appreciate the culture of which he writes, Jackson uses many original words and phrases (usually German, but occasionally French) and follows them with an English translation presented in inconsistent typography. If there is a pattern controlling the use of italics and quotation marks, I could not figure it out. I would also note that the images, though well chosen and well reproduced, lack suitable bibliographic information. Deborah Jean Warner Deborah Warner is curator of physical sciences at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Copyright © 2007 The Society for the History of Technology

Chladni's clavicylinder and some imitations

Chladni's accomplishments in the field of instrument making were until recently not nearly as well-respected as his studies on the modes of vibration of plates and rods. However, he had developed his own friction instruments based on the glass harmonica, a popular instrument of his time. The instruments, which he partially built himself, had keys, which distinguished them from the glass harmonica. Additionally, these instruments differed from traditional keyboard instruments as they enabled the crescendo and decrescendo of individual notes after the key had been struck. Although Chladni's clavicylinder fascinated audiences and prompted imitations by many instrument makers, it was largely ignored by composers and pianists and therefore never became part of standard orchestration. The Museum of Musical Instruments of the University of Leipzig features three rare examples of friction instruments which have outlasted the centuries. These instruments were built according to the Chladni principle. After a thorough analysis, including the production of individual notes, these instruments will be presented in their cultural-historical as well as their technical context, followed by a discussion of their advantages and disadvantages. These originals exhibits allow for a conclusive comprehension of Chladni's ideas and his quest for new, unusual tone colors.

Acoustics of glass harmonicas

Glass musical instruments are probably as old as glassmaking. At least as early as the 17th century it was discovered that wine glasses, when rubbed with a wet finger, produced a musical tone. A collection of glasses played in this manner is called a glass harp. Another type of glass harmonica, called the armonica by its inventor Benjamin Franklin, employs glass bowls or cups turned by a horizontal axle, so the performer need only touch the rim of the bowls as they rotate to set them into vibration. We discuss the modes of vibration of both types of glass harmonica, and describe the different sounds that are emitted by rubbing, tapping, or bowing them. Rubbing with a wet finger tends to excite only the (2,0) mode and its harmonics through a ‘‘stick-slip’’ process, while tapping excites the other modes as well.

Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica

In the 1760s, Benjamin Franklin modified the traditional "musical glasses" into the more elegant and playable "glass harmonica." Its gentle yet irresistibly resonant sound inspired analogies with feminine voices and souls: the instrument was represented as a "sister" and even as a physical extension of the woman performer. By the late 1780s, enthusiasm for its sound was tempered by concern over physical and moral dangers it posed to listeners and players. Its reputation waxed and waned with that of Dr. Franz Mesmer, who used it in his "magnetic" therapies. For the Gothic and early Romantic era, the armonica was no mere object for making music, but a focus for fantasies about ideal music itself. Yet while its sound remained a literary sign of inspiration and esoteric knowledge, the instrument lost its prestigious place in musical practice. Its feminine associations, once the secret to its magical potency, ultimately became a liability.

Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica

Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica