Re: glass harmonica

[Paul M. Gifford <PGIFFORD...>]

This has a vague connection to old klezmer music. Here it is:

"Harmonicon" or "harmonica" was a word used in the 18th and early 
19th centuries in English-speaking countries to describe certain
instruments, mainly what the Sachs-Hornbostel system would call
idiophones. There was a glass harmonica, but there was also a wood 
harmonicon and a stone harmonicon. The wood harmonicon was a 
xylophone, while the stone harmonicon consisted of slabs of jade or 
other stone and struck. There was also an instrument called a 
sticcado pastorale, which Thomas Jefferson and Charles Willson Peale 
fancied, which was a metallophone of some sort.

Anyway, these all were sort of experimental instruments of interest 
to scientifically minded men like Franklin and may have resulted from
British voyages of travel to Africa and Asia. 

Somehow Samsun Jakubowski, a Lithuanian Pole who had studied at 
Koenigsberg University, learned of the "wood harmonicon" at St. 
Petersburg in the early 1820s. Albert Sowinski relates this in his 
1857 book (in French), and refers to the instrument by this name. 
Anyway, the English name and the sort of Royal Society atmosphere in 
St. Petersburg would seem to indicate that Jakubowski got the 
instrument from this social group (maybe British diplomats?). 
Jakubowski then toured, playing fantasies on Polish themes, operatic 
themes, etc. According to Sowinski, Guzikov heard Jakubowski and was 
inspired to learn to play it. I don't know if it's true or not, but 
it seems entirely plausible. So there's the connection...

Paul Gifford

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