Glass Harp

Morning Mood and Anitra's Dance by E.Grieg - Glass Harp LIVE
GlassDuo - Glass Harp

Very pleasant tune and a wonderful performance, but me being me I'm wondering about the glasses. It doesn't look like there is any water in them, which means somebody went to a lot of work to put this collection of glasses together. Looking around I found these guys:

Glass Harp

G2 Glass Instrument Makers explains how this harp is made:

This glass harp is excellent both for learning to play and for concert performance. It consists of 30 stemmed glasses arranged in three rows, and its scale is 2 and a half octaves. The glasses themselves were handblown in a glassworks according to our individual design. We also paid careful attention to achieving the best shape of goblet for musical purposes and an appropriate composition of the glass itself. All the glasses are the same shape, they only differ in size and thickness of the glass.

From thousands of ordered glasses, we first select those which are pleasant to the ear. From this selection, we then choose glasses of particular sound frequencies. The last stage is to match the glasses to the harmony of one particular instrument. All the glass goblets are precisely tuned thanks to careful selection, and in some cases as a result of precision grinding of the glass. The polishing which finishes the tuning is exceptionally time-consuming but, as a result, evidence of the glass production process becomes almost invisible.

We construct each individually designed instrument in our workshop in Poland. They are modelled on the instrument we have been using for many years for concert performances, perfect quality of the biggest glass harp in the world.

There is no need to fill the glasses with water, which dampens the sound, giving rise to a non-uniform vibration and changes in frequency as the water evaporates.

So, yeah, a lot of work goes into making a glass harp. The harp in the video has almost twice as many glasses as the one in the picture.

I came across this video on someone else's blog, but I simply added it to my 'Watch Later' list and neglected to note where I found it.