Glas (Glass) starts with a whining, soaring squeaking sound that pries deep into your auditory hall of mirrors, reflecting back and forth like light in the transparent extremities of a snow crystal.
It could well be a somewhat electronically treated mosquito or some other hovering, winged insect, or even a high-strung viola in the hands of Walter Fändrich – but evidently it is the real sound of glass, the way it sounds when you circle your wetted finger around the rim of a wine glass; that winding, bulging, loosely rhythmical sound, so well-known through that groundbreaking CD from Meredith Monk: Our Lady of Late.

Here another layer of glass is introduced, sort of counter-pointing or reflecting or accompanying the first glass layer, and now I do get confused as to whether this now is a wine glass rim or actually a stringed instrument. The soaring beat between the two wobbly lines of delicacy produces an elastic, charged force field of high-tension.

This enchanted vision suddenly opens up inside a real-life glassworks, the rumble of the furnace intense, the industrial sounds smoking with power. The viola of glass returns for some fierce staccatos, until compressed air wheezes through the soundscape, when the familiar sounds of humans appear for the first time in this piece. Evidently a woman visitor to the glassworks is interviewing a maestro of the craft, as he is showing her some aspects of shaping the molten matter into brittle shapes of beauty and cause.

The glass viola appears absentmindedly in the heat and smoke, as the element of water is introduced, refreshing, cooling. The glass viola soars, circles, spirals around the listener, like in a painting by Joan Miro, carrying with it related sounds of rusty door hinges… and the water flows, blue, gray, cleansing…
From inside the rush of running water a beautiful, repetitious melody of real violins or violas rise, in a dance that is a communion of glowing glass, water and the serene beauty of musical motion, tiptoeing through the garden of someone’s childhood memories…

Maybe this repetitious musical gesture of beauty inside the workshop noise can be received also as a symbol of the beauty of glass that emerges out of the fiery furnace at the touch of a masterly glass blower.
As the music dwindles and oozes out into the noise, human voices again exchange information for a short instance, until shrill, thin glass sounds scrape at your perception in almost painful progressions…
“It looks like a bird”. “Yes, it was my intention”.

…And bird sounds embrace you as the piece nears its conclusion; songsters and the deep, resounding bass of a bittern out in the reeds… perhaps inspired by the landscape surrounding the glassworks.

This was my introduction to the sound world of Hanna Hartman, and I was forever charmed, bewitched…