New Mexico woman among few playing glass armonica

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - Listening to the glass armonica is “so beautiful, you could cry,” Mayling Garcia says.

Garcia is one of about a dozen people in the world who regularly perform on the instrument, a musical invention of Benjamin Franklin. Its haunting tones once delighted 18th-century audiences but were also believed by some to bring on insanity, nervous disorders, animal convulsions and marital disputes - and even cause the dead to awaken.

Invented by Franklin in 1761, the instrument originally was made out of lead crystal. It fell out of favor, perhaps in part because of its link to insanity.

Garcia’s instrument - lead-free - has 45 tuned crystal bowls of different sizes, which are threaded on a shaft that is turned by a motor. She touches the turning edges of the quartz bowls with wet fingers to create a mesmerizing sound, much like rubbing a wet finger on a wine glass filled with water.

Her usual gigs are elementary schools, sporting events and senior centers in New Mexico, although in 2013 she performed at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe during a program on Franklin, and she’s been on Sábado Gigante, the popular Spanish language television program, five times. She’s also been featured in People en Español and in other magazine articles. Despite this exposure, however, the 50-year-old Corrales resident has never really gained the fame she sought as one of the world’s few glass armonica players.

This year, the New Mexico native auditioned for a spot on the long-running hit TV show America’s Got Talent, hoping to build interest in the glass armonica and still longing to become famous all over the country - and the world. While she was hoping to be a contestant on the show, she also wanted to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” on her glass armonica for the July 4 episode. So she was pitching two separate plans to the producers.

The audition, however, was a little rough, she admitted.

First of all, there was the sheer number of other hopefuls at the downtown convention center in Los Angeles on Feb. 6. Garcia got there at 3 p.m. and took number 933. The producers saw a new act every 90 seconds, she said. She didn’t get to perform until 11:30 p.m. And the atmosphere was tense as people waited hours to be seen. One mom moaned, “I don’t have the heart to tell my son he can’t be a magician anymore.” A girl complained to her mother, “I can’t believe you forgot my hula hoop.”

When it was her turn to audition, Garcia was not able to get enough friction on her glass armonica to play the instrument well because she had washed its valves with a cloth containing Clorox. She was only able to play a little bit of “Amazing Grace.”

Leaving at midnight, Garcia said, she saw a disappointed young comedian crying in the parking garage and saying, “I’ll never do stand-up again.”

But she didn’t give up. When she got home from L.A., Garcia submitted an online audition, performing the national anthem while giving the same introduction and wearing the same dress, makeup and hairstyle that she’d presented to judges in L.A. She expects to learn in the next few weeks whether she was accepted.

Garcia’s sister Goldie, known for her bottle cap art, also auditioned for American’s Got Talent, performing a comedy routine.

Members of Garcia’s family were always hoping to make it big in the entertainment business. All five girls and four boys were talented in some way, she said. Mayling, who was No. 7, was named for Mei Lin in the 1961 movie Flower Drum Song, who also wanted to work in Hollywood. Her brother Mario was in the movie Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. And Goldie once had a deal in Los Angeles with Pepsi Co.

But they all have regular jobs. Along with her armonica gigs, Mayling is a waitress at a popular Corrales restaurant and makes pressed flower art. She creates collages out of pressed flowers that resemble stained glass. She was accepted into this summer’s Contemporary Hispanic Market in Santa Fe. Getting into the market was a huge step for her, she said, “because it validates you as an artist.”

Her husband, Richard Trujillo, is also an artist, known for his Day of the Dead pieces and paintings with Amazonian and Mayan tribal symbols.

Garcia’s family has deep roots in New Mexico. She said she is related to Jake Gold, who had a curio shop near the Santa Fe Plaza in the second half of the 19th century. The shop advertised for sale the last trousers worn by Christopher Columbus, a hat belonging to 16th-century explorer Cabeza de Vaca and a silver breastplate owned by Hernán Cortes. Gold died in the state prison, where he was incarcerated for abandoning his wife.

Wildly outgoing and obviously persistent, Garcia first came across the glass armonica, also known as the glass harmonica or glass piano, more than two decades ago in Harvard Square. She was visiting her sister, Goldie, then a student at Harvard, and saw Vera Meyer playing for tips from tourists. It was 1987, and Garcia was 21 years old. “Every summer, I visited Goldie and would watch Vera play in the square,” she said.

Garcia asked Meyer for help finding an instrument, and Meyer connected her with Gerhard Finkenbeiner, a German glassblower who was building lead-free glass armonicas in Waltham, Massachusetts. Finkenbeiner said he believed in her dream to play the glass piano and sold her one made of crystal and gold for a deeply discounted $2,500.

Then he taught her to play it over the phone.

Since then, Garcia has learned to play many classics and popular favorites on the instrument, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” ’’Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” ’’Edelweiss,” ’’Ave Maria,” ’’Ode to Joy” and even Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”

The instrument was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in Europe, and composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig von Beethoven wrote hundreds of pieces for it. Marie Antoinette even took lessons on the glass armonica.

“It was the biggest thing on the planet,” Garcia said.

But then it became linked to mental illness and began losing its popularity. Some towns in Germany even banned it. But it also faced another problem: Music was beginning to be played in larger auditoriums, rather than the small concert halls of Mozart’s day, and the sound of the armonica was too soft to be heard in bigger venues.

Today, there seems to be a renewed interest in the armonica. It was featured on a Linda Ronstadt album and has been used in concert performances by the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. G Finkenbeiner Inc. is still making the lead-free glass armonica. In fact, a company representative said recently that one had just been sent to California and another is being completed for the music department at the University of Notre Dame. The cost of an instrument depends on its size, but they start at nearly $8,000.

Finkenbeiner is no longer with the company. He disappeared one night in 1999 while flying his Piper Arrow airplane over the Massachusetts cranberry bogs. Garcia said she had been visiting with him just before he vanished. They stayed up all night talking, she said. He told her the story of how he became a glassblower in Nazi Germany and that in the process he was able to “bring something beautiful back to the world.”

They talked again at his shop the next day, she said. Then he left, telling no one where he was going. He was never heard from again.

Two months earlier, Garcia said, Finkenbeiner had told her that all the makers of glass armonicas had experienced strange deaths.

Garcia also believes there is a strong association between the first glass armonicas and the unexpected early deaths of some musicians who played them. Mozart, for example, died at 35. Garcia believes Mozart suffered from lead poisoning, though the cause of his death is still widely debated.

“This instrument is a trip,” Garcia said. “I am Franklin’s American dream. He desired a country where I, Mayling, of Mexican, Polish and Italian descent, could grow up and take a shot at being one of the world’s (few) glass armonica performers. A shot at your dreams, wherever they may be.”

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Information from: The Santa Fe New Mexican, https://www.sfnewmexican.com