Mandolin

• 1. Introduction

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  The mandolin most commonly carries four courses of doubled strings tuned in unison, eight strings in total, plucked with a pick. Its name comes from the Italian mandolino, literally "small mandola." Tuned in perfect fifths to G3, D4, A4, and E5, it shares its exact tuning with the violin, and it sits as the soprano voice of a family that runs down through the mandola, the octave mandolin, the mandocello, and the mandobass. This is an instrument whose notes die quickly. Pluck a string and the sound decays to silence faster than a guitar's, faster still than a violin's bowed note that can sing on and on. So how does a small plucked instrument hold a long line of music? Why does it appear in a Mozart opera, in Carnatic temple music in India, and in a bluegrass band in the American hills? And how did a single shape splinter into bowls, arches, and flat boards, each tied to a different corner of the world?

• 2. The Singing Decay

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  Pluck a mandolin and the note begins dying at once, faster than larger chordophones like the guitar. This single fact shapes how the instrument is played. To make a note last, players reach for tremolo, the rapid picking of one or more pairs of strings to fake a sustained tone. The paired strings exist partly to make this possible. The plectrum strikes each string of a pair in alternation, so the ear hears a fuller, more continuous sound than one string alone could give. The physics of how the note is made is simple. Strings run from tuning machines at the head of the neck down to a tailpiece that anchors them, passing over a floating bridge held to the soundboard only by the strings' downward pressure. When the strings move, the bridge drives the soundboard into vibration, and the soundboard makes the air sing. One modern fix went the other way entirely. Fender released a model in 1992 with an extra high A string above the E, a tremolo bridge, and two humbucker pickups, an electric instrument meant to sustain notes the way an electric guitar can.

• 3. Bowl, Arch, And Board

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  Three shapes dominate the mandolin world, and each one sounds like a different place. The Neapolitan or round-backed mandolin has a deep bottom built from strips of wood glued into a bowl, an almond-shaped body that carries European classical music and the Andean music of Peru. In the United States the bowlback earned affectionate nicknames for its striped, segmented shell: the "potato bug," the "potato beetle," the tater-bug mandolin. The archtop, or carved-top mandolin, took over in America at the very end of the 19th century, its arched top and shallow arched back both carved from wood like a violin. This style is credited to Orville Gibson, a Kalamazoo, Michigan maker who founded the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Co., Limited in 1902. His designs split into two basic forms. The Florentine or F-style carries a decorative scroll near the neck, two points on the lower body, and often a scroll in the headstock. The pear-shaped A-style has no points and a simpler head. Their soundholes vary too, either two f-shaped holes like a violin on the F-5 and A-5, or a single oval hole under the strings on the F-4, A-4, and lower models. In America the F-hole F-5 is bound up with bluegrass, while the A-style spread across other music. The flat-backed mandolin is the third path, a thin sheet of braced wood for the body like a guitar, with a warm, mellow tone suited to folk music and small rooms. Its sound does not punch through a band the way a carved top does. Numerous modern makers still chase the Gibson F-5 Artist models built in the early 1920s under acoustician Lloyd Loar, whose original signed instruments are sought after and extremely valuable.

• 4. The Family Below

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  Below the soprano mandolin stretches a whole family, each member tuned to mirror a voice in the violin family. The mandola, called the tenor mandola in Britain and Ireland and the alto mandolin in continental Europe, drops a fifth to C3, G3, D4, A4, the same step the viola takes below the violin. The octave mandolin falls a full octave to G2, D3, A3, E4, with a scale length typically near 20 inches, though some run as short as 17 or as long as 21. Off the coast of South America, in Trinidad, this instrument has a variant called the bandol, flat-backed with four courses, its lower two strung with metal and nylon. The mandocello goes lower still, tuned an octave plus a fifth below the mandolin to C2, G2, D3, A3, standing to the mandolin as the cello stands to the violin. At the very bottom sits the mandobass, usually built with four single strings rather than double courses, most often tuned in fourths to E1, A1, D2, G2. Gibson made these in the early 20th century, and they were never very common. The Greek bouzouki's relatives crowd the edges of this family. The Irish bouzouki, built like a flat-backed mandolin and tuned in fifths, often G2, D3, A3, D4, overlaps the octave mandolin's range so closely that in modern use the two names are often swapped for the same instrument. Stranger members appear too, like the rare eight-string "tremolo-bass," tuned two octaves below the mandolin or two below the mandola.

• 5. Lost Tunings Of Italy

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  Long before the modern instrument settled, regional Italian mandolins disagreed on almost everything, starting with how they were tuned. The Lombard mandolin, from Milan and Lombardy, was shorter and wider than the Neapolitan, with a shallow back and six strings rather than four courses. Samuel Adelstein described it in 1893 as wider and shorter, with a shorter, wider neck and six single strings, tuned C, D, A, E, B, G across 20 frets covering three octaves and five extra notes. He judged its gut and single strings as not vibrating "so clearly and sweetly as the double steel string of the Neapolitan." The Brescian or Cremonese mandolin took a different road, surviving in museums with four gut strings and a fixed bridge, tuned in fifths like the Neapolitan. In his 1805 method, Bartolomeo Bortolazzi popularised this Cremonese instrument and argued that the new wire-strung mandolins were uncomfortable to play. He felt they had a "less pleasing...hard, zither-like tone" against the gut string's "softer, full-singing tone." The Genoese mandolin blended the styles, its six gut strings tuned like a guitar but an octave higher, e, a, d', g', b natural, e". A developer of the Milanese style was Antonio Monzino of Milan, whose family built these instruments for six generations.

• 6. Builders And Experiments

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  Prominent Italian makers gave the Neapolitan style its name brands: Vinaccia in Naples, Embergher in Rome, and Calace in Naples. In the United States, when the bowlback was made in numbers, Lyon and Healy was a major manufacturer, especially under the "Washburn" brand, alongside Martin, Vega, and the Larson Brothers. The push to make the mandolin louder bred odd hybrids. Makers paired a mandolin neck with the drum-like body of a banjo; Benjamin Bradbury of Brooklyn patented such an instrument in 1882, and John Farris named it the banjolin in 1885. Others added metal cones inside the body, most notably Dobro and the National String Instrument Corporation, to build resonator mandolins whose sound comes from metal rather than a wooden soundboard. Some experiments reached for a second hidden chamber. In the early 1900s the mandolinist Ginislao Paris asked Luigi Embergher to build custom round-back mandolins with a false back below the soundboard, creating a second hollow space; the build was named the Sistema Ginislao Paris, and four survive. The modern player Avi Avital uses a flatback variation with a double top, side soundholes, and a convex back, made by the Israeli luthier Arik Kerman, whose instruments are also played by Alon Sariel, Jacob Reuven, and Tom Cohen.

• 7. From Craze To Carnatic

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  After its early life in Italy, the mandolin spread across Europe and then far beyond it. Travelling virtuosi like Carlo Curti, Giuseppe Pettine, Raffaele Calace, and Silvio Ranieri helped turn it into a "fad" instrument in the early 20th century, a "mandolin craze" that faded by the 1930s. Mandolin orchestras carried the classical tradition, called Estudiantinas in much of Europe and Zupforchestern in Germany, and they remain especially popular in Japan and Germany today. Just as the craze waned, the instrument found a new home in American country, old-time, bluegrass, and folk music. The mandolin reached classical concert halls in scattered but striking ways. Vivaldi wrote concertos for mandolinos, including one in C major, RV 425, and one for two mandolinos in G major, RV 532. Beethoven enjoyed playing the mandolin and wrote four small pieces in 1796. Mozart's Don Giovanni of 1787 includes mandolin parts, among them the accompaniment to the aria Deh vieni alla finestra, and Mahler used the instrument in his Symphony No. 7, Symphony No. 8, and Das Lied von der Erde. In India, the mandolin entered classical Carnatic music, where U. Srinivas was perhaps its greatest player, lauded worldwide for his virtuosity, and he died young. Within the same Early music revival that lifted players like the Israeli Avi Avital and the Italian Carlo Aonzo, the instrument also drew renewed life in Celtic and British folk during the 2000s and 2010s, turning up often in contemporary Scottish acoustic ensembles.