Describes the new musical instrument invented by Ben Franklin for which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven composed music.

"A history of glass music from the Kama Sutra to modern times, including the glass armonica (also known as the glass harmonica), the musical glasses and the glass harp."

"A jewel of musical history-- the story of Ben Franklin's favorite invention, the glass armonica-- including the composers who wrote for it (Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, among others); Dr. Mesmer who used it to hypnotize; Marie Antoinette and the women who popularized it; its decline and recent comeback"--Amazon.com.

The “exquisitely crafted poems” of this prize-winning collection weave together past and present to explore touch, trauma, and the female body (G.C. Waldrep). The eighteenth-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song—which was once thought to induce insanity—wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female “hysterics” and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic—from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud’s famed patient Dora. Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited contact—of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric’s “locked jaws.” Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry

Poetry. When does the song become the singer? Is the instrument the conduit of the song, or of the one who sings? In each of GLASS HARMONICA's rigorous texts, an intense formal density of aural, grammatical, cultural, and structural echoes takes on how the presence of an appreciating but critical "I" can alter the expressive registers of what might be called the "language of information." Prosaically clear and direct, yet also poetically motivated and performed, this verbal music shows us how prose can speak an almost colloquial lyricism, creating imaginative locations where an "I" might reside, make sense, and finally even sing its own individual songs, with the aim of transforming otherwise impersonal codes and signs into the real sights and trued sounds of a more civilized humanity.

Mozart's Adagio and Rondo (K. 617) was written for the armonica, or musical glasses (a set of tuned glass bowls) and a quartet consisting of flute, oboe, viola, and cello. The music is effective played as an organ solo. The Adagio may be registered "forte," in the style of Mozart's Fantasia (K. 608). The Rondo should be played on the flute stops. Arranged for organ by E. Power Briggs.

Young Chjara Vallé, full of irrepressible music and sensuality, is exiled from Corsica, and sold as a servant to an opium addict in Paris. Music paves the way for her to flee with Henry, her love, to New England. There the new freedoms and Puritan vigor vie for ascendancy. What will the Americans make of this throat-singing, glass harmonica-playing exotic who lives to make a virtue of pleasure?