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Rare concert comes to Mountain Home
It took Helen Peters a few minutes to get the musical instrument to play. Her frail hands glided gently over the spinning glass bowls as her teacher helped adjust her finger pressure -- not too hard; not too soft.
A smile of delight washed across her face as she finally got the elusive deep note to resonate from the glass. For Peters, the lesson taught by William Zeitler also illustrated just how challenging it is to make such an instrument work.
Earlier that evening, Peters and more than 120 Mountain Home residents packed into a local church and listened to a rare concert featuring a form of classical music seldom heard over the past 200 years. Zeitler, a composer and musical virtuoso, came here for one performance Friday evening featuring an instrument known as an armonica.
Created by Benjamin Franklin nearly 250 years ago, the instrument premiered in 1762 and became an overnight sensation. It's capable of playing 44 notes -- half the total keys of a standard piano -- complete with sharps and flats. For years, the instrument remained especially popular in Germany, where Mozart and Beethoven wrote music for the armonica.
Before last week's concert, Zeitler showed the audience how the piano-like instrument works. Standing at a table with a dozen wine glasses, each filled with different levels of water, he rubbed a wet finger around the lip of each glass to produce different tones. The armonica uses the same basic principle, he said.
The son of a Navy sailor that started his lifelong love of music at age 5, Zeitler discovered this form of music completely by chance. Listening to a music disc featuring classic Mozart works, he "tripped over" several tracks featuring an armonica, he said.
Zeitler was instantly hooked.
"I said this is great. I'm doing this," he recalled.
The professional musician already had years of experience building and repairing pianos and harpsichords, which paid his way through college. However, nothing could prepare him for the challenge of building an instrument with little information to work from.
He needed each of the 44 glass bowls individually created by hand. He hired a glassblower for this step since each piece needed to fit comfortably within the others.
If Zeitler was lucky, the hand-blown glass was within a semi-tone of its intended note. Precision grinding of each piece of glass finished the tuning.
Modern advances in Zeitler's version took Franklin's original design and added some polish to its level of precision. An electric motor replaced the foot pedal needed to turn the glass bowls. Meanwhile, ball bearings keep the instrument's metal parts from grinding, making it much quieter. Aside from that, the design and concepts haven't changed much, he said.
Following a year of work, the Los Angeles-based musician finally had his hand-made instrument. But then Zeitler faced his next challenge -- learning to play it.
That process "went painfully," he said. With only a handful of people across the United States qualified to play such an instrument, finding a teacher was out of the question, he said.
Playing the armonica, like a piano, involves pressing down on each glass bowl to produce each note. But that's where the similarity ends. During each performance, Zeitler keeps the glass and his fingers constantly moistened to allow the glass to glide beneath his fingers and allow the music to chime from each bowl.
"On a piano, even a three year old can press down on a key and get a note," he said. "There's a certain amount of finesse required to get an armonica to 'speak.' "
After 15 years, Zeitler admits he still has a lot to learn from his armonica. But that didn't stop him from creating his own compositions for the musical instrument. About half of last week's concert included a selection of his new age classical music.
"I figured after a couple of hundred years, it was time for some new chart hits," he said.
In recent years, Zeitler keeps his performances to just a couple per month. At one time, he tried scheduling 30 concerts within one month, which proved too exhausting, he said.
Despite his limited schedule, he enjoys playing venues like Mountain Home.
Even with just one performance, he knows he can reach out to hundreds of people.
People like Helen Peters.
More photos available in the Mountain Home News photo gallery