Three years afterwards Kirchgässner came to London, and there played on a new harmonica built by Fröschel. At Darmstadt the harmonica held its place in the Court orchestra, and C. F. Pohl ‘professed’ it. Beethoven even condescended to write for ‘the glasses,’ and Naumann’s half-dozen sonatas for them still exist.
The instrument, however, has been laid on the shelf—or rather consigned to its case as a curiosity—and the musical glasses of to-day are the harmonicon we have described, and the tumblers about which we may now say a word.
II.—MUSICAL TUMBLERS.
Musical glasses have been arranged in many ways. Sometimes they have been all of one size, and the different tones have been produced by varying quantities of water placed in them. This, however, was a troublesome and clumsy way of getting effects.
Another method was to place forty-one parallel glass cylinders of equal length and thickness on a perpendicular sounding-board. These tubes were wetted and stroked, the music varying by the greater or less pressure of the performer’s fingers. This, it is obvious, must have been a difficult instrument to play.
The musical glasses originally arranged by Dr. Arnott are undoubtedly the best, and with a little patience can be easily and cheaply made by anyone. The patience is required to hunt up glasses having the required notes on them.
We give a [drawing] of this above. The open circles represent the mouths of the glasses standing in a wooden case. The relation of the glasses to the written musical notes is shown by the lines and spaces which connect them. The learner will see at once that one row produces the notes written upon the lines, the other row those in the spaces. There are two octaves, and the player stands by the side of the case, with the notes ascending towards the right hand, as in the pianoforte. The sounds are produced by passing the moistened fingers round the edges of the glasses. A little gum dissolved in the water makes the fingers ‘bite’ better, and produces a greater volume of sound.