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."

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

"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.

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?

Benjamin Franklin was a 17-year-old runaway when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1723. Yet within days he'd found a job at a local print shop, met the woman he would eventually marry, and even attracted the attention of Pennsylvania's governor. A decade later, he became a colonial celebrity with the publication of Poor Richard: An Almanack and would go on to become one of America's most distinguished Founding Fathers. Franklin established the colonies' first lending library, volunteer fire company, and postal service, and was a leading expert in the study of electricity. He represented the Pennsylvania colony in London but returned to help draft the Declaration of Independence. The new nation then named him Minister to France, where he helped secure financial and military aide for the breakaway republic. Author Brandon Marie Miller captures the essence of this exceptional individual through both his original writings and hands-on activities from the era. Readers will design and print an almanac cover, play a simple glass armonica (a Franklin invention), experiment with static electricity, build a barometer, and more. The text also includes a time line, glossary, Web and travel resources, and reading list for further study.

FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOKSELLERS CHOICE AWARD (POETRY) A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways—unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. On September 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven men and began what would become the largest oil spill ever in US waters. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, leading to a death toll that is still unconfirmed. And in April 2014, the Flint water crisis began, exposing thousands of people to lead-contaminated drinking water. This is the litany of our time—and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral. In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources—poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where “I can’t see the bugs; I don’t hear the birds”—Dunham invokes the poet as moral witness. “I owe him,” she writes of one man affected by the oil spill, “must learn, at last, how to look.” Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can—and, perhaps, should—be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.

Compiled by Alwin Schroeder, a former cellist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and an experienced teacher, this collection of 80 exercises constitutes the first book of a three-volume set. Schroeder drew upon his extensive experience to create original études for instructing students, and in this work he combines them with several others by his distinguished nineteenth-century European colleagues: Karl Schröder. Ferdinand Büchler, Friedrich Dotzauer, Auguste Franchomme, Friedrich Grützmacher, and Sebastian Lee. The carefully selected studies are arranged in order of increasing complexity, and Schroeder provides suggestions for fingering, bowing, and dynamics. Cello students and teachers will find these exercises a splendid resource for the improvement of technique and performance.