Music of Philadelphia and actress. Benjamin Franklin was also a musician, a guitar teacher and inventor of musical instruments like the glass armonica. In 1784 Andrew Adgate organized the Institution for the Encouragement of Church Music, renamed the Uranian Academy (1787–1800). The school was the center of the city's choral music scene during the latter part of the 18th century. The earliest known performance of a musical drama in Philadelphia was Colley Cibber’s "Flora, or Hob in the Well", a ballad opera performed by a touring opera company from England in 1754. In 1757 Francis Hopkinson mounted an elaborate production of Thomas Arne’s
Crystallophone his glass harmonica in 1763 after attending a recital performed on musical glasses in London in 1761. Crystallophone A crystallophone is a musical instrument that produces sound from glass. One of the best known crystallophones is the glass harmonica, a set of rotating glass bowls which produce eerie, clear tones when rubbed with a wet finger. Musical glasses, the glass harp, where documented in Persia in the 14th century. The "ethereal" quality of instruments such as the glass harmonica exemplified the "Empfindsamkeit" and for a while, "the instrument was extraordinarily popular...[but] About 1830 the instrument fell into oblivion." The glasschord