- Date: 1994
- Composer:
Jean-Claude Chapuis - Period: Contemporary (1950- )
Review
A composer and science historian with a specialty in eighteenth-century biology, Chapuis is also an instrument builder who has contributed new designs to the seldom played but ancient line of glass instruments. In eleventh-century Persia, glass bowls were played as percussion (as ceramic and glass bowls are today in India); musical glasses were both struck lightly and played with a wetted finger in Europe as early as the fifteenth century, and in 1761 Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica by adding a treadle to rotate the glasses which the performer(s) then play with wetted fingers, and many composers, including Mozart (Adagio and Rondo, K. 617, Adagio, K. 617a), Reichardt (Rondo), Röllig (Quintet), Schulz (Largo), and Naumann (Quartet), wrote for them. The glass harmonica has been undergoing a renaissance lately at the hands (or fingers) of performers such as Bruno Hoffmann. Besides Chapuis' compositions for his group called Transparences, there are other contemporary works for glass, such as Annea Lockwood's wonderful pieces for glass orchestra from the 1960s.Chapuis has invented and constructed several new glass instruments for his group: a marimba-like instrument known as the glass balafon with tuned glass rods mounted above a resonating chamber; the crystallophone with tuned flat bars of plate glass, mounted like a vibraphone, which comes in a version with individual resonators and one with a single resonator for all the bars; the séraphin is the Chapuis version of tuned water glasses -- they do not require any water for tuning, having had their pitch set during the glass-blowing stage.
The brief composition, Luminesences (1994), lasting slightly less than three minutes, is scored for the crystallophone and the séraphin. A lovely, angelic ascending whole-tone scale opens the piece. The two instruments then explore the same scale in contrary motion and in free patterns creating a deeply resonate field. ~ All Music Guide
