While in England, after my chief Business was over,
I amus'd myself with contriving, and bringing to a
considerable Degree of Perfection, a new musical Instrument.
----Benjamin Franklin, 1763

1.

The bishops in Vienna banned its music—
proscribed its sound, too sensual
for a Christ as cold as snow.
Later it was alleged that musicians who played it too much
died, lead leached through their fingertips,
or went insane from sounds that rang
the brain too piercingly.

The notes came like the music of the spheres,
though the primum mobile had shattered
to a universe of shards, lacerating the faithful,
scarring the establishments that guard the faith.

Frost paralyzed the mechanism
that pulled the sky along, divinely timed,
one globe encased within another,
the hands of deity turning the whole thing.

2.

The hand ceased, the spheres imploded, leaving
a sky of naked light
and interdiction of Franklin’s armonica.
Its sound might fuel
a further shattering,
eerie as the tones that came
from belts, pulleys, from cylinders of glass,
mathematical tonalities and points
of music like the points of stars
in the desiccated sky.

3.

In Paris one night Franklin played
"a Scottish pastoral tune,
in sweet delicate melody, which thrilled
my very soul," a merchant visiting
from Pennsylvania wrote.
Later that same night they learned
the revolution had been won:
Yorktown surrounded, the British
pulling out, the Colonies
now free to be a nation.

4.

The thirty-seven crystal bowls
that made the sounds
were color-coded:
A-notes were dark blue, B purple,
C red, D orange . . . a small amount
of powered chalk on the fingers
enhanced the tone, Franklin maintained

Mozart wrote for it, Beethoven—Strauss, Saint-Saëns.
Marie Antionette took lessons on it.
Kings and the wealthy listened.
In a Russian white night,
snow deep as the moon,
Tchaikovsky in his den
(a letter from Nadezhda von Meck
unopened on his desk) composed
"Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,"
to be played on the armoncia.

5.

It was a young-girl prodigy
who played it first in public light.

Wooden music stand and candle,
hall of frock-coats, hoop-skirts,
powdered women, gentlemen impatient
for their snuff—Marianne Davies
touched "an instrument of crystal
called the Armonico," one listener recalled.

The crowd was raptured. Marianne
and Cecilia her sister
met Johann Christian Bach,
gained commendation from Samuel Johnson.
A court-composer wrote a cantata
for them. Marianna played
and Cecilia made her voice
so much like the armonia
the two were blended in
a harmony of kind.

Later, depression and then poverty
struck Marianna. Armonica—the Italian word
for harmony; a harmony of two unmarried girls
performing for the Queen of France, the Queens
of Spain and Naples, entertained
in palaces and royalty’s drawing rooms;
late in life they gave singing lessons
to beginning students and died indigent.

6.

"Un' armoncia celeste, di', non ascolti?"
Not everyone could hear.
The bishops who might gape at Mozart’s Mass
found the glass tones uncelestial—or too much like
the long-discarded music of the spheres,
the cadences that rang no more
from a universe, since Galileo, thrown
on the trash-heap of ideas.
That something so mechanical could make
such music, like an angel’s song, like
the rejoicing in heaven when Gabriel returned
to report Mary had said, "Be it to me
according to thy word," gained their
lame censure. The sacred manufactured,
all magic lost in a world
launched into the limitless
and the unbounded; gone, old heaven,
earth, and human beings—as lost
as those sisters in their latter days,
the opulence gone out;
the harmony produced, not realized;
touch of fingers, metrics of response.

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David W. Landrum is Professor of Humanities at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has published poems in many magazines and journals, including Satire, Christianity & Literature, Shit Creek Review, Measure, and many others.
Website: http://www.lucidrhythms.com
 

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kaleidowhirl  |  spring 2007