[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In einer eMail vom 22.10.2006 18:01:48 Westeurop=E4ische Sommerzeit schreibt > [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ..
I don't think the list saw the email you're quoting from, John. What happened was that John accidentally sent me a repy privately that it later turned out he intended for the list. (The reply function of this list is horribly awkward sometimes). Since I couldn't be sure he wanted it public I sent him my answer privately too. Anyway, here it is. Probably not that interesting really: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I very much renjoyed your rant! Thank you! Did you actually read all of it? I tried myself and nearly chocked. So poor language! > In my opinion, you're right about construction factors being useful > for categorisation. But I would go farther back, and focus on the > caracteristics of specific components, e.g. back, bridge, outline, > peghead, string material, by themselves. Not as "family features". Yes but keep in mind what I presented was just a very rough overview. > And, with respect to mandolins, I would regard another criterion as > being even more important: playability! You're right of course. It's what I do as a musician. Whether I happen to take a flattop or a Neapolitan mandolin to a gig doesn't really matter. The important things are how I play it and how it sounds. 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 regard a church organ and a piano as being the same instrument. The sound is simply too different. So we have to take tonal qualities into account as well and that is always a subjective question. To me and many others the sound of those small guitar-shaped, fixed bridge instruments Ovation, Crafter and others sell as mandolins are so different in tone to regular mandolins we'd hesitate to regard them as the same type of instrument. Others may disagree to this. This leads to yet another point of view: the one of the composer/arranger. A while ago I saw a TV concert of one of the "great" tenors (might have been Pavarotti performing with a US orchestra. One of the numbers they did included a beautiful strummed guitar accompaniment part. That is: it would have been beautiful if they had used a classical guitar as the composer clearly had intended. On the archtop guitar they actually used, it just sounded ridiculous - the few times such a soft-sounding instrument managed to be even heard through the orchestra. Why did the orchestra make such a strange choice of instrument? Probably because the score specified "Spanish guitar" and as you may know, the archtop was originally marketed under that highly misleading name. Actually I very much prefered the archtop in that case. IMHO it brought some much needed comic relief to an otherwise bland performance. But of course, that's not what they intended. ;-) Or take Vivladi's mandolin concerto. I'm sure most people if they thought about it at all would agree it would be "right" to play it on a Neapolitan mandolin and "wrong" to play it on a charango. But why? The charango is much closer to the mandolin Vivaldi knew than the Neapolitan mandolin is. Sound, tuning, playing style, instrument construction - the charango is the closest. The only thing the Neapolitan mandolin has in common with Vivaldi's mandolin is the name. Not that Vivaldi would have been too concerned of course. He was always open to rearrangements, adapting old music to different instruments. The points of view of a musicologist, a musician and a composer can be very different and they're all equally valid. There are other views as well such as the sound engineer's (in an ideal world everybody would play synthesizers) and the instrument/equipment buyer's (I have some horror stories about Norwegian marching bands ordering "baritones" from England believing them to be euphoniums and of amateur big bands struggling in vain to recreate the original Glenn Miller sound with those harmon mutes they ought for their trombone section just for that purpose). Me, I'm a bit of a jack-of-all-trades in music so it's hard for me to even agree with myself. ;-) Frank To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
