Frank: I agree with your comments that classification can be vey difficult and indeed subjective. many variables must be taken into account, especially with regard to regional adaptation of musical instruments. However, I really don't feel that I am exagerating the differences between the baroque and renaissance citterns. both have different approaches to body depth and general shape, string length and groupings, tuning and playing technique. They could hardly be more different. In fact, they are totally different instruments! The so-called "Irish" cittern was invented (or developed) by Stefan Sobell, who built a variation of a Portugues guittarra he had and called it a cittern because it basically looked like and old cittern. The name stuck. Simple as that. No direct descent from any Irish instruments or from lutesThat's pure wishful thinking. Guittars or citterns were used in the houses of the Anglo-Irish in Dublin and the Pale, not in the native Irish. Calling it an Irish insrument is a miapplication, as the builder was not only English, but the citterns was (and I believe still is) more common in the Scottish folk scene (and to some degree the English) than it is in the Irish, where the bouzouki is more prevalent. Brad
Frank Nordberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Brad McEwen wrote: > Is any particular version then any more "true" to a name with such a flexible and elastic application throughout time? I'm sure there are instruments we all agree do not belong to the cittern family even though they have names derived from the same root. The regular guitar for example. And also the German/Scandinavian Zither (the dulcimer kind that is) and the Indian sitar (assuming the name similarity is more than a coincidence). The modern "Irish" cittern is a rather interesting topic though. I've heard at least three widely different stories how it was invented, all of them absolutely true and all of them confliciting with each other. One of the stories firmly establishes it as a descendant of a member of the "true" cittern family. The two other as a decendant of the lute family. None of them actually suggest that it should belong to the mandola family from a historical point of view. Classifying musical instruments by their ancestory is however extremely difficult and sometimes completely impossible so personally I wouldn't put to much significance into it. The important thing is what the instrument is, not where it comes from. The mandola family is a good example here. I think we all agree it exists (although some will call it the mandolin family of course), but historically it really makes no sense at all. Various mandos have widely different origins, some evolved from various branches of the lute family, some from the cittern family and some you just can't tell. Even so we bundle them all up as a single instrument family. > Because the modern cittern has a mandolin/violin based tuning hardly makes it any less true than a Renaissance or Baroque cittern, both of which were instruments that were extremely different from each other. I think you exaggerate the differences between citterns of the renaissance and baroque periods a bit, but apart from that I have to agree. The tuning is definitely not a good basis for classifying instruments and besides the Irish cittern is rarely tuned in fifths anyway. ------- By coincidence, yesterday just before this discussion started, I wrote this article for one of my web sites (not sure which one yet). ***Lutes, citterns, guitars, mandolas - what's the difference?*** Traditional instruments classification systems usually organise most fretted, plucked stringed instruments in western music into four main families: lutes, citterns, guitars and mandolas (or mandolins). There are some exceptions, like the banjo, but since there is rarely any confusion between it and the four largest families, we can ignore it (and some others too) for now. This classification works well for a broad overview, but once we start to look in detail at the multitude of instruments known through the ages, we run into serious problems. This is by no means a situation unique to the four main families of stringed instruments. We find exactly the same everywhere we look in the world of musical instruments. The four families mentioned serves as a good example to illustrate the situation though. At first glance it seems the only even marginally coherent way to organise different instruments, is by their construction. Playing style can change even for exactly the same instrument, historical relations are often too unclear (and the different families have a strong tendency to "interbreed") and common use is - although quite often a good indication - not nearly as common as one may think. There seem to be three construction features that define the four families, the body shape, the back and the bridge: Body Back Bridge Lutes Oval Bowl Fixed Citterns Oval (more or less) Flat/arched Floating Guitars Narrow-waisted Flat/arched Fixed Mandolas Oval - Floating This overview is quite straight forward and looks quite convincing at first glance. There are however a number of serious problems with it. First of all there are instruments that won't fit. How about the archtop guitar and the chitarra battente with narrow waisted bodies and floating bridges? Or the bandora with a flat back and fixed bridge? Also of course, since it's impossible to define a standard back shape for the mandola family (which historically and technically isn't really a family of its own, but rather an amalgation of different branches of the lute and cittern families) a flatback, oval shaped, floating bridge instrument would fit both the cittern and the mandola families. Even if we somehow managed to modify the system to give all known instruments an unambigious place, there's still the matters of historical relationships and common use. Although these factors are far too volatile to be used as the basis of a classification system, they can't be completely ignored either. Of course there's also the question of what exactly an instrument type is. Exactly how much differences must there be between two individual instruments to regard them as two different kinds of instruments? In the end, any classification system must necessarily be highly subjective. That means it's always open to discussions, disagreements and refinement. his may seem like a problem, and indeed it is. Then again, what really matters is the music we make with our instrument, not how we classify them or what we call them. Very often the confusion is a creative confusion, allowing instrument makers to come up with new innovations and musicians to use the instruments in new and wonderful way. In the end it's definitely worth all the trouble. Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com http://www.online-guitarist.com http://www.gitar-siden.com http://www.tablatvre.com http://www.mandolin-player.com http://www.roarogfrank.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! --
