Arts Directory

About

Artist Bio

A passion for unusual sounds and instrument construction has driven Brien Engel’s musical life for decades, from immersive sound design in theatrical productions, to experiments with cooking pot guitars, vacuum cleaner flutes, and modified retro recording paper machines. It was the Glass Harp, however – an instrument made of stemware and played via finger friction, dating back to mid-18th century Europe, which announced itself as his main act and purpose in life.

For some of us, living the dream means to hunt for glassware in retail stores and yard sales, and collect them into an otherworldly chorus. The next step is a true privilege – being able to share it with the world on a career path!

Brien built his first Glass Harp in Atlanta in 1993, and developed his own stylings with this rare and beguiling art form, first performing for festivals and in local libraries. Then, thanks to his connections with the local Young Audiences chapter (with a preceding stint as a puppeteer), he was invited to develop a Glass Harp K-12 assembly performance, while he also took the Glass Harp into other performance settings.

He received a great deal of training with YA’s educational and artistic directors, developing the presentation and curriculum connections, with an eye to keep it a quality Fine Arts experience, to delight and to stimulate wonder and creativity.

Later he began to work more independently, gaining approved artist status for South Carolina’s Arts Commission directory, and appearing in rosters in Raleigh, Charlotte, Fayetteville NC, Anne Arundel MD, and several New York BOCES Chapters. He’s been a guest artist with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Spivey Hall Education (in Atlanta), and has staged K-12 tours to Alabama, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. He continues to perform frequently in many school districts in Georgia, and all over the southeast.

He’s played at the Waxahachie (TX) Chautauqua on the same bill with oceanographer Fabien Cousteau, at Silver Dollar City (MO), the Ventura, Sonoma, Napa County (CA) fairs, Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta Aquarium, High Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, Louisville Glassworks, and the D.A.R. (Washington DC), to name a few notable locations. Brien’s international travels have taken him to Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Kuwait.

In the recording studio, he’s contributed to albums by artists Yuval Ron, Elise Witt, Apolina, Kevin Dunn, Terry Garthwaite, and Atlanta’s Swimming Pool Q’s.

His broadcasting work includes appearances on How To With John Wilson (HBO), To Tell The Truth (ABC), a This Is Atlanta (Ga Public Broadcasting) segment, and commercials for Virginia ABC, Aloft Hotels, and Justin Winery (CA). Memorable creative collaborations include making tuned glassware for “Wino–” an automated glass instrument, with producer Jeff Leiberman, sponsored by Absolute Vodka. He contributed sound effects on glassware for the 2014 Movie Noah. He’s produced two of his own Glass Harp albums, Optimistic Voices, and Christmas Glass. More recently he produced a half-hour documentary, The Glass Harp and other Musical Oddities.

Artist Statement

I begin with performance, and the role I play to make our world a bigger and brighter place while we are together. This intimacy, in sharing the ethereal and captivating music, speaks for itself. I know those moments will live in our memories. I know they are a setting for engineering daydreams, and of poetry.

My main performing partner of nearly 30 years is a collection of singing stemware. There’s something so lasting and shiny about the Glass Harp tones for me –with their complex, musical box qualities, and the unique, ever-beckoning challenges of the instrument.

In educational settings, the Glass Harp is the central player. But in showcasing more improvised instruments, demonstrating the possibilities — and with my physics animations, I want to reveal a magical world of air molecules riding pressure waves, eventually translated into sound information. I reveal friction– from a skipping stone’s point of view. My object lessons show a vibrant and springy microworld of sound, which we can manipulate.

I invite my audiences to be musical sculptors and instrument makers too, after introducing a color pallet and tools. I show problem-solving in instrument design. And in the world of physics and nature, I want my audience to comprehend and enjoy a malleable scale of life, to see themes of repetition– from the heartbeat, to migration patterns, to ancient motions of galaxies.

I love compositions made of polyrhythms and interwoven melodies, which I relate to another close musical friend, the mbira of Zimbabwe. Mbira is a collaborative and conversational instrument, and I love to recreate these conversations with the Glass Harp. (And play mbira with my friends and teachers).

I’m already plotting new things to rotate into performances and into possible residencies.

Live engagement takes special meaning now, as societally, we engage in an ever-noisier and distracting copy-paste digital world. I want to bring the real and authentic world alive, to keep us engaged– designing, tinkering, and falling in love with the organization of sound and music in the air.