In einer eMail vom 22.10.2006 18:01:48 Westeurop=E4ische Sommerzeit schreibt [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> From a musicologist's point of view it's a bit different though. I > think we both agree that a banjo-guitar wouldn't really count as a > guitar even though you play it just the same way. Nor would we rgard a > church organ and a piano as being the same instrument. The sound is > simply too different. > Frank, This is an interesting point, and perhaps has a bearing on other families of instruments. The fact that piano and organ are different instruments is evidenced by my criterion of playability. When the organ at our local church was being rebuilt, the organist accompanied the singing on a piano. Well, he tried to. It was AWFUL! The only similarity between piano and organ is the layout of the keyboard, and this similarity is deceptive. ;-) But I read somewhere that the first keyboard stringed instrument, the clavichord, was originally intended as a practice instrument for organists. Hence the organ keyboard, which allowed an organist to play through new music and to work out the fingerings for difficult bits in the comfort of his home, rather than in a cold, draughty church, and without the expense of hiring a couple of stalwart lads to work the bellows. And the clavichord is organ-like, in that a note sounds only as long as you keep the key pressed.---- But it became apparent that the clavichord was also an instrument in its own right, with a characteristic, quiet voice suitable for accompanying house music, and offering non-organ features like vibrato (the tangent, remaining in contact with the sounding string, transmits wavering pressure on the key to the s tring). Structurally, the clavichord is the mating of the organ keyboard with an instrument with a sounding-box and many strings, such as a psaltery. With the concept of "keyboard strings" established, the virginals, spinet and harpsichord emerged, still basically keyboard psalteries, but with a plucking mechanism like a real psaltery. Conceptually, only the mechanism between key and string was altered, but the dimensions also grew to provide more volume for what was now definitely a mainstream instrument. The early pianos were little more than harpsichords with a hammer rather than a plucking action - a mechanised dulcimer - and the sustain pedal finally overcame the organ's limitation of sounding a note only while the key remains pressed. This, and the fact that the piano action is pressure-sensitive, puts the piano out of bounds for the average organist. He can read the notation, he can find the notes, but he has to learn how to produce the tone. To transfer this to my beloved mandolin: At some time, the neapolitan mandolin with its lute body, double wire courses and violin scale length and tuning became established, and proved useful for melodic playing in many styles of folk and classical music. It had the advantage that anyone who had learnt the violin - and that meant tens of thousands of European musicians - could transfer their sight-reading and motoric skills to it. Analogous to the organ-clavichord relationship, with similar fingerings giving a different sound and different capabilities and limitations. I am convinced that this is what led to the wide distribution of the Neapolitan mandolin. Certainly it was the reason why my father had one - he had learnt the country fiddle as a boy, and realised he could transfer his fingerings to the mandolin. (This answers another question from this thread: What kind of mandolin did Irish musicians play before the 1970s?- In general, Irish musicians play what they can get, and in 1940, when my father got his mandolin second-hand, it was the classic Italian variety, probably imported for some bourgeois amateur musician. And later, in the '60s - I remember them well - Luke Kelly and John Sheehan of The Dubliners also played Neapolitans. The Folk Scare created a demand for mandolins, and the cheaper, more robust German "Waldoline" models began to appear.) So I see the mandolin as the mating of violin tuning with the plucked, fretted lute configuration - and the doubling of the courses and the wire strings perhaps as something of a cittern legacy (was not the Renaissance cittern the earliest instrument to use wire strings in double courses, played with a plectrum?) The different varieties of mandolin - lute back, cittern back, flat back - can, I think, be seen as analogous to the virginals, spinet and harpsichord: the same "human interface" with the same way of exciting the strings, and capable of playing the same music in the same arrangements, but varying subtly in timbre because of the different construction, which in turn may stem from the practical requirements of robustness, cheapness or manufacturing capabilities (why go to the bother of learning to build a lute body when you have already learnt to build a Waldzither body, which will serve just as well if slightly scaled down?) Looked at in isolation, a "Waldoline" might appear as a cittern with an alternative tuning, borrowed from the violin. Historically, however, it is a Neapolitan mandolin with an alternative body construction, borrowed from the Waldzither! What we have here is various combinations of body construction, stringing, size, tuning, bridge type and (what I forgot to mention) details of decoration, like the Neapolitan mandolin's elaborate inlays under the picking position, which the Waldolines adopted, all familiar from much earlier instruments. The focus of all these elements is to produce instruments that are interchangeable from the point of view of the player!- One could also view the various versions as a basic model with modifications to it "suggested" by the features of other instruments. An endless topic! Cheers, John D. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
