Glasmusik I

2005-09-08

The first of two pictures [link] of a street musician I once saw in Trier. If you recognize the exact street, please tell me

The title of this deviation is a little wordplay on the German term "Blasmusik" [link] The correct term for this instrument would be "glass harp". It is made out of wine glasses which can be individually tuned by filling each one with a specific amount of water. Oh, I love to do the dishes when there are wine glasses to wash up!

I have seen glass harpists more than once in public and there are many takes on YouTube, but videos of their performances naturally include the street noise. For this reason I rather show you a clear studio recording of Robert Tiso playing the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker": [link] . Magical, don't you think?


PS: I linked to the wrong video first [link] , sorry for that. But you can take a look at that one, too. It shows a street performer playing the Harry Potter theme I also had a good laugh at the description text:
I asked Ilya if it's difficult to play the glasses. "Nowhere NEAR as hard as playing the contact lenses!" he replied. I'm just kidding.