PROTECT YOURSELF FROM THE TERRIFYING WINE GLASS The protective Plexiglas hood is lowered.
  • Julia Raban
  • PROTECT YOURSELF FROM THE TERRIFYING WINE GLASS The protective Plexiglas hood is lowered.
When I heard that the Museum of Glass was holding an event in which local bands would “attempt to shatter glass using only their music,” I imagined a hailstorm—an electric guitar striking a chord, and a Chihuly splintering into a thousand pieces, covering patrons in a thick, colorful dust. In anticipation, I spent an afternoon screaming at a wine glass.

I wanted to see whether I could break things with my own “instrument,” before heading down to Tacoma for the museum’s 10th anniversary party, called Shatter Sessions.

While I never managed to shatter my own glass at home, I did get to see how, with the correct pitch, the glass changed shape slightly and blurred at the edges. I was reminded that music is not just an auditory experience, but a physical one made of vibration and movement. Teenagers love turning up the bass in their cars because they can feel the beat coursing through them. People don’t often compare painting to sex, but music and sex are paired because you can feel music in your body.

Unfortunately, at Shatter Sessions, the physicality of sound and the experience of music were totally separate. Safety and practicality apparently were more important than exciting displays of destruction. Here’s how it went: Plexiglas boxes contained a single wine glass, and a device embedded in the box's base emitted sound. In case you’re not familiar with sound-glass-vibration physics (you can tell I’m very well-versed), when you tap the edge of a wine glass with your finger, the note that resonates is the note required to blast that goblet into oblivion. Play that note loud and hard enough, and the glass will shatter. Guests were challenged to try to find that note in under a minute on the devices provided, and could adjust the frequency and volume of the sound until they found the “sweet spot” that sent shards flying—inside the box, of course. At least that was the idea. Instead, museum employees hovered nervously, and controlled the experience from start to finish. It was utterly contrived.

So, bands were not actually using their music to attempt to break glass, but providing a pleasant soundtrack to guests’ mediated attempts at using a complicated device to break glass inside an unbreakable aquarium. It was entertaining, but not for the reasons the museum intended.

As the night went on, I realized that this party wasn’t about the physicality of sound. It was about the physicality of glass: The Museum of Glass is trying to remind audiences that just because glass is fragile, that doesn’t mean it’s frail, and it doesn’t mean it’s never meant to be broken. If many of the blown-glass pieces in the museum’s new exhibition by Lino Tagliapietra, for instance, had been stretched just a few inches farther, they would have collapsed and never seen the light of day—and that is why glassblowing requires such technical skill, and why the museum wants to celebrate its anniversary by breaking glass rather than creating it. Yes, glass is delicate and easily broken, but that doesn’t make it weak or precious, it makes it edgy and dangerous.

Unless you embed it inside a monitored Plexiglas box.