Musician makes wineglasses sing with touch of finger

Brien Engel's hands glide over the mouths of 50 wineglasses, alternately rubbing and tapping the rims to coax out a haunting, sweet-sounding melody.

The instrument is called a glass harp. It has roots in Benjamin Franklin's time, and Engel has brought it to the Sonoma County Fair for the first time.

"I play classical, gospel, jazz standards, popular tunes. I play ice cream truck music, and nobody does that, no one on any instrument," Engel said. "It lends itself to that."

It is an unusual, handmade instrument played by only a small number of musicians worldwide, said Engel, 47, of Atlanta.

"It's a challenging musical instrument, but happily I am paid to do this unusual form of work and take advantage of this fun work," Engel said. "It is a small community -- there are 10, 15, 20 people perhaps."

Engel has about 200 performances a year at corporate events, school assemblies, retirement centers and churches. He has played in Singapore, Hong Kong and Germany.

He is performing at a county fair for the first time, catering to an audience that sits on hay bales and smiles and applauds in amazement.

It's a long way from Underground Atlanta, where he was a street performer 13 years ago. "There is no really good story how I got started in this," Engel said.

Engel is a musician by nature, also playing the guitar and the mbira, an African instrument made up of a board with staggered metal keys.

He said that wineglass sounds have always interested him. So, in the early 1990s, when he was living in Olympia, Wash., and had time to devote to a new hobby, he began collecting wineglasses from restaurant suppliers.

To make the glass harp, Engel uses glasses of different sizes and shapes, which he will shave at the base to create the resonance and musical note he wants.

The glasses are mounted on PVC pipe to get the rims at the same height and secured to a board. He creates music with the pressure of his fingertips.

It is the same principal as Franklin's glass armonica, which was a wineglass mounted sideways and spun with a treadle, the note produced by rubbing the side of a glass.

Engel realizes that most people "regard this as a really bizarre hobby."

"I have to remind myself it is a really strange thing to do," he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Bob Norberg at 521-5206 or bob.norberg@pressdemocrat.com.