Well done, Frank. I think you've summed up there just about all of our collective knowledge on the subject. It still leaves the interesting question: 'Is the mandolin a type of lute or cittern ?'. Which then leads to 'Is the modern cittern just a type of mandola ?' - to which I would answer 'Yes'. As regards the developement of the neapolitan mandolin, it is a shame that its relationship with the Greek Bouzouki isn't the other way around as then history would be so much simpler ! The Greek Bouzouki is obviously derrived from Turkish instruments which came from Arabic tradition. If what we know as the neapolitan mandolin had have come about due to the constructional influence of the Greek Bouzouki inter-mixing with the cittern then life would be so much simpler. Unfortunately it is the other way about. The modern Greek Bouzouki came about due to influences of the staved construction of the neapolitan mandolin on the instrument derrived from the Baglama Saz. Shame ! As regards the 'Portugese mandolin' I don't believe that it is a mandolin-like instrument which originates from portugal. From my visits there and also portugese people I have met in my work, the instrument known in Portugal as a Mandolin is the neapolitan mandolin. I have a feeling that it is an invention of Victorian England and I will try to prove it by research in the near future. Given that the Cittern and English Guitar would have been almost unknown in Victorian England, apart maybe by musical historians, I will hopefully one day show that it came about by making a mandolin with what was termed a 'portugese back'. It would have been called a 'portugese back' because I would expect that travellers to Portugal would have noticed the construction of the Guitarra. It is also quite usual to attribute unusual forms to foreign countries - ie: 'French toast', 'Chinese whispers', 'Double Dutch', 'Russian roulette', 'Dutch courage', etc. I guess it could have been 'guitarra-mandolin' or even 'cittern-mandolin' but no - we got 'portugese-mandolin' instead ! Like I say, I don't know this for sure but I suspect it to be true - it seems to make sense - and I'll try to find proof. Kevin. Frank Nordberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I'm afraid you're in for a *really* long rant now! (after I've politely replied to the other posts of course ;-)
Strangely enough I never thought of bringing up the mandolin question on this list. It's quite obvious really since no matter how we look at it, the histories of the mandolin and the cittern are well and truly entangled with each other. Doc Rossi wrote: > Are we talking about flat-topped mandolins, or flat-backed mandolins > (relatively speaking)? Despite the common name for that type of mandolin we're talking flat backs. Mandolins with flat tops have been around as long as there have been mandolins. KEVIN LAWTON wrote: > Fair enough. We all sometimes mislay our sources, me too ! Yes. I wish I hadn't this time though. > I know the Mandolin was quite popular in Victorian > England as a 'parlour' instrument. It definitely was. There was this school called "Conservatory of Venice" (or was it just "Venice Conservatory?"). No connection to the Italian city afaik but with branches all over England. They had their own instrument models which they loaned to their students. If/when somebody finished the course he/she got to keep the instrument. But their mandolin was a mandolinetto which is usually regarded as a separate type of mandolin - or often not as a mandolin at all. There also was a "Conservatory of Vienna" mandolin that may count as a flattop mandolin. That may have been a bit later though - never managed to find any info about it. > I recall reading > somewhere, and seeing pictures too, but I cannot for > the life of me remember where, that a version of the > Mandolin known as 'Portugese style' was seen in > Victorian times on account of it being both cheaper to > build and easier for a novice player to hold. If this is true (and I believe it is) the only place in Europe it could have happened would be in England where the cittern seems to have been completely forgotten at that time. I have to play the Devil's advocate here though. We need proof, substantial proof! Is there any chance you can remember where you got it from? > I'd reckon that what is now termed the > 'Celtic' mandolin is just a development of the > 'Portugese' variety which is itself derrived from the > Neapolitan one. That's an interesting theory and since I believe we have people who know a lot about Irish traditional music here: Can anybody tell us what kind of mandolins Irish musicians used to play before the 1970s? > I wouldn't be too surprised if citterns were > occasionally referred to as 'Mandolas' in seventeenth > century France The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced I must have been wrong. The regular baroque mandola was quite well known in France at that time and the cittern and the mandola were so different there's not much chance anybody would have confused them with another. ------- Here's the rant. Part of it is about western stringed instruments in general and there's some legitimate cittern content in it as well. 1. Instrument families. Although there are various models for classifying musical instruments, it seems most experts agree that using construction features as the basic factor is what gives the best (that is most coherent) result. Other factors, such as tuning, size, historical relationships and naming conventions must be taken into account but none of these are clear enough to form the *basis* of a general classification scheme. For fretted stringed instruments it seems the construction factors that give the best result are: general body shape and back and bridge construction. That gives us three families relatively common in western music: Lutes Body shape: ovalish/round Back: bowl Bridge: fixed Citterns Body shape: ovalish/round Back: flat or arched Bridge: floating Guitars: Body shape: narrow waisted Back: any Bridge: any There are a few other families too of course but we don't need to concern ourselves with them for now. This scheme may seem straightforward at first but it does cause some serious problems and I'd be very much obliged if anybody here can come up with a better system (preferably one that doesn't require 500+ words definitions of each and every factor). The problems most relevant to this list and/or topic are: a) Throughout history there have been several instruments with significantly different body shapes that "common sense" still says should be fitted into one of these families. b) Some instruments get obviously misplaced if we follow the system slavishly. One example is the Swiss Halszither. Since it has a narrow waist it would be defined as a guitar yet I'm sure we all agree it's a cittern. b) If somebody glues a floating bridge onto an instrument, does that suddenly make it a completely different instrument? (Kids, don't try this at home! Attaching a floating bridge with glue will seriously reduce the instrument's tonal qualities (if it has any) and is very harmful to your karma.) c) The system doesn't allow for an instrument with a flat/arched back and a fixed bridge, such as the bandora and the 20th century flatback lute. I think this is a problem we ought to discuss on the list (although nor in this particular topic). Are these instruments lutes or citterns or a separate instrument family? d) The system doesn't allow for an instrument with a bowlback and a floating bridge? (points b, c and d can of course be easily solved simply by leaving out the bridge construction factor from the definitions. I understand however that not everybody are happy with this.) e) There is no mandola family (note: I'll often use the broader term "mandola" rather than "mandolin" through this rant). This is not a flaw in this system per se but rather a general flaw for all possible instruments classification system. There simply is no way to come up with a concise definition that includes all "mandolas" and excludes all "non-mandolas." The closest we can get is to base the definition on naming conventions: A mandola is an instrument commonly called a mandola. I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel uneasy about such a circular definition and even that one isn't concise enough. What is commonly called a mandola in one place/time may not be so elsewhere and elsewhen (stipulating for the sake of argument that the word "commonly" applies at all to this case). --- 2. A brief history of mandolas and mandolins (as far as I've managed to figure it out by now) To understand why it's so hard to define what a mandola actually is, one must know a little but of mandola history. Instruments called "mandola" (various local and individual spellings) are known from different parts of western Europe at least since... 16th C. I think. At that time it always means a very small, shallow-bodied lute. The term is almost certainly Italian of origin and derived from the Italian word for almond (referring to the body shape). Personally I've always suspected there's a bit of deliberate punning in it as well. The similarity in name to the viola da mano is so obvious, the luthiers and musicians at that time can't possibly have missed it. I suppose that's rather irrelevant though. ;-) Towards the end of the 17th century, the term "mandolin" begins to turn up in historical sources. This diminutive form of the name does not imply an instrument smaller than the earlier mandola but rather to the fact that the instrument in question is much smaller than other lutes. There were however larger instruments of similar construction fairly early. I'm not sure whether these preceded the introduction of the mandolin term. At about the same time as the mandolin term first appears, we have the first evidence of different local Italian variants of the mandola/mandolin. The dominant variant did however remain relatively unchanged. During the 17th C. the number of courses increased from four to five and then to six and around 1800 single strings began replacing the double courses and some construction details were changed to increase volume but still the instrument known today as the Lombardic mandolin or Milanese mandolin is very similar to the first mandolas and mandolins we know of. This is the instrument Beethoven wrote for and almost certainly Vivaldi as well. Towards the end of the 18th century a brand new instrument appeared in Italy. It had a floating bridge, four double courses tuned GDAE as a violin and a narrow, deep body more reminiscent of Turkish/Arabic lutes than any common European one. If I remember correctly, it was originally strung with a combination of silk, gut and metal strings but it didn't take long before steel took over. Even though some of the construction details were found in earlier instruments labelled as mandolins, this instrument was such a radical change it has to be regarded as a completely new instrument, probably more inspired by some oriental lute than by the existing mandolins. This instrument became known as the Neapolitan mandolin and to many people this is still *the* mandolin. Later variants of the Neapolitan mandolin includes the Roman mandolin - aka Embergher mandolin (narrower body, extended fretboard and note Martina's reference to "Embergher tuners" in a post about Waldzithers) and the lute-mandolin (wider body, fixed bridge, probably gut strings). It's hard to see how this new instrument could have been known under the same name as an already existing, quite popular and very different one. The fact that various local variants already made the mandolin term a bit diffuse at that time may have played a part there. As we all know, throughout the 19th century instrument makers all over Europe and Northern America went into mad zcientizt mode and came up with an endless stream of weird and wonderful hybrids and innovations. Once the Neapolitan mandolin became known it became a prime target for these innovations and we got the lyra-mandolin, the harp-mandolin, the (guitar or violin shaped) mandolinetto and eventually the archtop mandolin. Was there a mandolin-cittern too? Well, at first it seems very likely although so far I haven't been able to find any clear reference to it. Kevin's reference to a Victorian "Portuguese mandolin" is very intrihuing but I think we should await some confirmation before drawing any conclusions. But let me rephrase my question: was there a small, GDAE tuned instrument regarded as a hybrid between the mandolin and the cittern? The answer is no, there wasn't - at least not on the European continent until very late in the century. The reason is that such an instrument already existed and it had nothing to do with the mandolin at all! After all the flattop mandolin is just a Bergmannzither with a marginally shorter scale and a different tuning. Two conditions have to be met before such and instrument would have been regarded as a mandolin or a mandolin relative: the GDAE tuning has to be commonly associated with the mandolin and the cittern has to be forgotten. The former happened gradually during the first few decades of the century, the latter happened in most of the USA and some parts of Europe later that century but not at all in other places. If you showed a 19th C. German or Scandinavian musician a modern flattop mandolin he might have said something like: "Oh yes, it's a zither. These small ones aren't as common as they used to be. You tune it like a violin you say? How very unusual!" Show it to a Spaniard at that time and he'd ask: "Why does your bandurria only have eight strings?" Towards the end of the century some US luthiers/inventors brought about yet another significant turnabout in the mandola history: the archtop mandola/mandolin. This was very much an innovation of necessity. The mandolin was very fashionable in the USA at that time but lute style bowlbacks are complex and expensive to build so instruments of decent quality were way too expensive for most people. The solution was a completely different approach: carve the entire instrument out of two solid chunks of wood: one for the soundboard and one for all the rest. Arching the soundboard slightly outwards gives it extra strength and reduces the need for (and cost of) bracing. At least three people came up with the idea (or at least parts it) independently of each other. The last one, Orville Gibson, won the marketing battles and built a flourishing instrument manufacturing company on his innovation (of course, only few decades later he was ripped off by some sharp business people and eventually died in poverty). There's very little doubt about the time and place of this innovation. It simply couldn't have happened in Europe and it's highly unlikely that there was any earlier American attempts. (Actually, it *did* happen in Europe centuries earlier but that's another story and another instrument.) In the USA neither the mandolin nor the cittern had any firmly established tradition so the customers had no problems accepting the mandolin name for Gibson's citterns. Heavy marketing from Gibson soon meant that the new instrument all but replaced the old mandolin in the US public's mind. This change of perception only happened in the USA though. Apart from a brief fad in France (not sure when nor what they called the instrument) the archtop mandolin remained all but unknown in Europe at least until the 1960s folk boom. Early in the 20th century, the term "mandolin" had different meanings depending on which side of the Atlantic you lived. In Europe it meant a Neapolitan mandolin while in the USA - well, people still had a slightly confused view, but the Gibson cittern was taking over fast in people's minds. This is where the flattop mandolin makes a serious appearance. It is possible that it was invented (or re-invented or whatever) semi-independently on both sides of the Atlantic and although the goal was the same, the thought process behind was different. In the USA carving instruments was no longer cost effective so another new solution was required. Or rather another old one: build the instrument from shaped sheets of wood the way guitars and citterns have been built for centuries. In the 1910s C. F. Martin came up with such an instrument with a single bend on the soundboard (similar to what was already common on Neapolitan mandolins) for structural strength. Only a year or two later Gibson introduced their short-lived D model where they'd left out all the fancy shaping and relied entirely on bracing for strength the good old fashioned way. The archtop mandolin still survived but was usually made from wood bent rather than carved into shape. This of course raises the question: what is the difference between an archtop and a flattop mandolin really? In Europe things were a bit different. People's view of what a mandolin ought to look like was much firmer established, the instrument wasn't nearly as much of a fad there and the huge German music industry was probably able to produce bowlbacks far cheaper than the US manufacturers were. Böhm's Walddoline seems to have been the first European attempt to make a cittern with a name associated with the mandolin. It is interesting to notice that unlike Gibson, he never actually called the instrument a mandolin. Böhm was at least as marketing savvy as Gibson but he worked in a different market with different expectations and chose his product names accordingly. In any case, the Walddoline remained an oddity and can't have been too successful. It was a good idea but Böhm was ahead of his time. All evidence revealed so far suggests that flattop mandolins first make a significant appearance in Northern Europe after ww i when German instrument distributors start including "Flach-Mandolinen" in their catalogues. However, it is clear that even then they did not regard this instrument as a mandolin but rather as an instrument that "is played and sounds just like a mandolin." The distinction between "flattop mandolins" and "mandolins" as to separate kinds of instruments is still quite strong in Germany although it has faded elsewhere in Europe. Interestingly, flatback (or rather arched back) lutes begin to appear at about the same time and they didn't seem to have too much problems accepting these as genuine lutes. Where the German flattop mandolin came from is still unclear. The Walddoline probably didn't have much of an impact here but Böhm's general idea of combining the cittern and the mandolin must have been rather obvious. There is no doubt whatsoever that it was based on the Waldzither and it's even often grouped among the Waldzithers and separate from the proper mandolins in the catalogues. On the other hand, the German luthiers at that time must have been aware of the Gibson D-model. Short-lived as that model may have been, it was still manufactured in huge quantities, bought by the US military and shipped to US forces everywhere. There's simply no way the Germans could possibly have missed seeing one. It's probably a question of both domestic and foreign influences. The Waldzither manufacturers in Markneukirchen and Klingenthal learned about this mandolin-tuned cittern the Americans were building and thought: "hey, we can do that too!" --- 3. But what about France and Portugal? The flattop mandolin is sometimes called the French mandolin, sometimes the Portuguese mandolin but never ever the German mandolin. So it may seem strange that I've focused so much on Germany. One reason is of course that I've spent a lot of time studying German pre-war instrument catalogues recently. ;-) Another, more significant, reason is that up until ww ii the Germans completely dominated the international musical instruments industry - and they probably still did until the 1970s when the Japanese took over. So what the German distributors offered, was not just what the German market asked for, it was what *everybody* asked for. Unfortunately. the third and most important reason is that I don't know much abut France and Portugal - or Spain. I know there is a strong Iberian tradition of small citterns, a tradition that may go back unbroken as far as to the 15th century. Hopefully this maillist will be able to shed some more light on this. I do however suspect that the situation is similar to Germany: these instruments were never regarded as mandolins because people already had other names for them. If I'm correct, the term Portuguese mandolin makes a lot of sense not in the meaning of "a Portuguese variant of the mandolin" but rather "a hybrid instrument inspired both by the mandolin and by one or more traditional Portuguese instrument(s)." In any case it's clear that Spanish and Portuguese traditions do touch the evolution of the flat/arched top mandolas at least twice. Martina has already told us of Böhm's Portuguese influence and the late 19th C. US mandolin wave was sparked by an immensely successful US tour by a Spanish bandurria ensemble. (So why did the Americans end up playing mandolins rather than bandurrias? Probably the music stores didn't have those Spanish instruments in store so the public had to settle for the closest equivalent they could get. I'm not sure if it's a pity or a blessing they didn't have any citterns lying about.) As for France, I have absolutely no idea! That is, I don't believe the provinces were much different from the rest of continental Europe but Paris... Paris is *always* different! Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com http://www.tablatvre.com http://www.mandolin-player.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --
