A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family (plucked, or strummed). It descends from the mandore, a soprano member of the lute family. The mandolin soundboard (the top) comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections. A mandolin may have f-holes, or a single round or oval sound hole. A round or oval sound hole may be bordered with decorative rosettes or purfling, but usually doesn't feature an intricately carved grille like a Baroque era mandolin.[1][2]
Early mandolins had six double courses of gut strings, tuned similarly to lutes, and plucked with the fingertips. Modern mandolins—which originated in Naples, Italy in the 3rd quarter of the 18th century—commonly have four double courses (four pairs) of metal strings, which are plucked with a plectrum.
Many variants of the mandolin have existed. These include Milanese, Lombard, Brescian and other 6-course types, as well as four-string (one string per course), twelve-string (three strings per course), and sixteen-string (four strings per course).
A mandolin's typically hollow wooden body has a neck with a flat (or slight radius) fretted fingerboard, a nut and floating bridge, a tailpiece or pinblock at the edge of the face to which the strings are attached, and mechanical tuning machines, rather than friction pegs, to accommodate metal strings. Like any plucked instrument, mandolin notes decay to silence rather than sound out continuously as with a bowed note on a violin. Its small size and higher pitch make mandolin notes decay faster than larger stringed instruments like guitar, which encourages the use of tremolo (rapid picking of one or more pairs of strings) to create sustained notes or chords. The mandolin's paired strings facilitate this technique: the plectrum (pick) strikes each of a pair of strings alternately, providing a more full and continuous sound than a single string would.
Various design variations and amplification techniques have been used to make mandolins compatible in volume with louder instruments and orchestras. Hybridization with the louder banjocreates the mandolin-banjo, and resonators have been used, most notably by Dobro and the National String Instrument Corporation. Some musicians play electric mandolins through amplifiers.
[edit]Forms
Mandolins come in several forms. The Neapolitan style, known as a round-back or bowl-back (or "tater-bug", colloquial American) has a vaulted back made of a number of strips of wood in a bowl formation, similar to a lute, and usually a canted, two-plane, uncarved top. Another form has a banjo-style body.
At the very end of the nineteenth century, a new style, with a carved top and back construction inspired by violin family instruments began to supplant the European-style bowl-back instruments, especially in the United States. This new style is credited to mandolins designed and built by Orville Gibson, a Kalamazoo, Michigan luthier who founded the "Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Co., Limited" in 1902. Gibson mandolins evolved into two basic styles: the Florentine or F-style, which has a decorative scroll near the neck, two points on the lower body, and usually a scroll carved into the headstock; and the A-style, which is pear shaped, has no points, and usually has a simpler headstock.
These styles generally have either two f-shaped soundholes like a violin (F-5 and A-5), or an oval sound hole (F-4 and A-4 and lower models) directly under the strings. Much variation exists between makers working from these archetypes, and other variants have become increasingly common. The Gibson F-hole F-5-style mandolins have come to be considered the most typical and traditional for playing American bluegrass music, while the A-style is generally more associated with Irish, folk, orclassical music. The more complicated woodwork also translates into a more expensive instrument.
Internal bracing to support the top in the F-style mandolins was usually achieved with parallel tone bars, similar to the bass bar on a violin. Some makers instead employ "x-bracing", which is two tone bars mortised together to form an X. Some luthiers now using a "modified x-bracing", which incorporates both a tone bar and x-bracing.
Numerous modern mandolin makers build instruments that largely replicate the Gibson F-5 Artist models built in the early 1920s under the supervision of Gibson acoustician Lloyd Loar. Original Loar-signed instruments are sought after and extremely valuable.
Other American-made variants include the mandolinetto or Howe-Orme guitar-shaped mandolin (manufactured by the Elias Howe Company between 1897 and roughly 1920), which featured a cylindrical bulge along the top from fingerboard end to tailpiece; the Army-Navy style with a flat back and top; and the Vega mando-lute (more commonly called a cylinder-back mandolin manufactured by the Vega Company between 1913 and roughly 1927), which had a similar longitudinal bulge but on the back rather than the front of the instrument.
As with almost every other contemporary string instrument, another modern variant is the electric mandolin. These mandolins can have four (single), five (single) or eight (double) strings.
History
Mandolins evolved from the lute family in Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the deep bowled mandolin, produced particularly in Naples, became common in the nineteenth century. The original instrument was the mandore, which evolved in the fourteenth century from the lute. As time passed and the instrument spread around Europe, it took on many names and various structural characteristics.
Further back, dating to around 15,000 BC to 8,000 BC, single-stringed instruments have been seen in cave paintings and murals. They were struck, plucked, and eventually bowed. From these, the families of stringed instruments developed. Single strings were long and gave a single melody line. To shorten the scale length, other strings were added with a different tension and pitch so one string took over where another left off. In turn, this led to being able to play dyads and chords. The bowed family became the rabob, and then the rebec fiddle, evolving into the modern violin family by 1520 (incidentally also in Italy). The plucked family led to lute-like instruments in 2000 BC Mesopotamia, and developed into the oud or ud before appearing in Spain, first documented around 711 AD, courtesy of the Moors.
Over the next centuries, the strings were doubled to courses, and eventually (in Europe) frets were added, leading to the first lute appearing in the thirteenth century. The history of the lute and the mandolin are intertwined from this point. The lute gained a fifth course by the fifteenth century, a sixth a century later, and up to thirteen courses in its heyday. As early as the fourteenth century a miniature lute or mandora appeared. Similar to the mandola, it had counterparts in Assyria (pandura), the Arab countries (dambura), and Ukraine (kobza-bandura). From this, the mandolino (a small cat gut-strung mandola with six strings tuned g b e' a' dg sometimes called the Baroque mandolin or cat-banjo and played with a quill, wooden plectrum or finger-style) was developed in several places in Italy. The mandolino was sometimes called a mandolin in the early eighteenth century (around 1735) Naples. At this point, all such instruments were strung with gut strings.
The first evidence of modern steel-strung mandolins is from literature regarding popular Italian players who traveled through Europe teaching and giving concerts. Notable is Signor Leone and G. B. Gervasio who traveled widely between 1750 and 1810.[2] This, with the records gleaned from the Italian Vinaccia family of luthiers in Naples, Italy, lead some musicologists to believe that the modern steel-strung mandolin was developed in Naples by the Vinaccia family. Gennaro Vinaccia was active circa 1710 to circa 1788, and Antonio Vinaccia was active circa 1734 to circa 1796.[3] An early extant example of a mandolin is one built by Antonio Vinaccia in 1772, which resides at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. Another is by Giuseppe Vinaccia, built in 1763, residing at the Kenneth G. Fiske Museum of Musical Instruments in Claremont, California.[4] The earliest extant mandolin was built in 1744 by Gaetano Vinaccia. It resides in the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Brussels, Belgium.[5]
These early mandolins are termed Neapolitan mandolins, because of their origin from Naples. They are distinguished by an almond-shaped body with a bowled back constructed from curved strips of wood along its length. The sound table is bent just behind the bridge, the bending achieved with a heated bending iron. This "canted" table aids the body to support a greater string tension. A hardwood fingerboard is flush with the soundtable. Ten metal or ivory frets are spaced along the neck in semitones, with additional frets glued upon the soundtable. The strings are brass except for the lowest string course, which are gut or metal wound onto gut. The bridge is a movable length of hardwood or ivory placed in front of ivory pins that hold the strings. Wooden tuning pegs are inserted through the back of a flat pegboard. The mandolins have a tortoise shell pickguard below the soundhole under the strings. A quill or shaped piece of tortoise shell is used as a plectrum.[5][6]
Other luthiers who built mandolins included Calace (1863 onwards) in Naples, Luigi Embergher (1856–1943), the Ferrari family (1716 onwards, also originally mandolino makers), and De Santi (1834–1916) in Rome. The Neapolitan style of mandolin construction was adopted and developed by others, notably in Rome, giving two distinct but similar types of mandolin — Neapolitan and Roman.
The twentieth century saw the rise in popularity of the mandolin for Celtic, bluegrass, jazz, and classical styles. Much of the development of the mandolin from Neapolitan bowl-back to the flat-back style (actually, gently rounded and carved like a violin) is attributable to Orville Gibson (1856–1918). See above.
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