"Family trees"

[vkioulaphides]

Each instrument has developed a "family tree" (or sometimes several, distinct ones) across the centuries, based on all those teacher-student relationships. My own bass lineage, for example, goes like this: Vaclav Hause (b. 1764) – Josef Hrabe — Franz Simandl — Ludwig Manoly — Hermann Reinshagen — Frederick Zimmermann — David Walter — Me. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif I tell my students that they are thereby "9th-generation Czech"! http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

So.... where do all those (trained) mandolinists come from? Who taught whom? Ye historically informed, speak, enlighten, illuminate with lists, columns, graphs and all.

[Eugene]

I was a victim of spontaneous generation.

[etbarbaric]

I suppose, Victor, by analogy, that I am born of the Italian school of violin playing (what ever that is)... though I'm certain they wouldn't claim me. In the mandolin world I have climbed down from my tree and run across the open plain (yipee)... consorting with lutenists, guitarists, and the like!

I'd guess that most mandolinist "trees" have roots only as far back as the late nineteenth century. The great Mandolin Dark Ages at the early part of that century would seem to have pretty much burned the forest to the ground.... but we are re-planting eh?

Eric

[Arto]

"I was a victim of spontaneous generation."

...ehm... you mean MUTATION?

[Eugene]

Errr...

[JimD]

'spose I jus' growed...

Pardon the 19th century literary reference.

Maybe I should say that I sprang full-grown from the head of Zahr (through his books and the may others that live on my shelves.)

[vkioulaphides]

Uhm... please allow me to clarify the point of interest— if only of interest to me. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/rock.gif Said point is twofold:

A. I never had the fortune of instruction on the mandolin. You that did, who did you study with? You who taught others, who were your pupils?

B. Take luminaries like Pettine, or Munier, et al. Who did they study with? Whom did they, in turn, teach?

I am not prying into folks' family matters. I am just trying to mentally draw up a family tree for mandolin education in general.

[mad dawg]

Well as far as my family tree goes, I share a common ancestry with the great apes, and that fact is reflected in my playing. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/sad.gif

[RSW]

I wrote an article about Pettine that was published in Mandolin Quarterly some time ago, his mandolin history is given to the extent that we know. In resume, he started on this instrument when still living in Italy (Isernia/Naples).

"...An article from 1896 in "CLUB and Professional Life" gives us the Feb. 12, 1874 birth date and mentions that he had immigrated to the USA with his family when he was 15 (1888/89). The article also mentions that he had been teaching for the past 5 years (since age 17) in Providence. This seems to me to be the most likely scenario and pushes the imagination the least distance. Whatever the exact year of birth and his arrival in the USA, Pettine had already had an appreciable skill on the mandolin before he came. He began study of the mandolin at the age of 8 or 9 with a local professore named Camillo Mastropaolo. He apparently showed striking talent and was encouraged to further his musical studies with a certain Professor Nozzi, leader of the orchestra di San Carlo Theater in Napoli. Little more is known of his musical formation other than he had studied the basics of music theory and composition and was brought up in a culture wed to opera and bel canto. Pettine would later say that, from about the age of 12 he was mainly self-taught. Later he would credit D.W. Reeves with having helped him improve his compositional skills as well as the practical side of the music business...."

[MandoJon]

Me grow spontaneously from primordial music soup into guitar strummer. Then me evolve to pick mandolin. Instructor? What is 'instructor'?

Take me to your instructor! Me want to rule Mandolin world... http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif

[JimD]

Pettine would later say that, from about the age of 12 he was mainly self-taught. Later he would credit D.W. Reeves with having helped him improve his compositional skills as well as the practical side of the music business...."

Interesting...

I have read that D.W. Reeves was also an influence on John Philip Sousa and Charles Ives. Not their teacher, but an influence. Ives actually quotes from Reeves in his Decoration Day.

[PlayerOf8]

Victor

My great grand fathers on both sides played mandolin as did all of their sons. Then, for some strange reason the accordion takes a branch. I have two uncles who squezzed a living out of their boxes, and another who was a very talented accordion maker.During the '40s, everyone was playing guitars including my father. In the early '50s, both my grand father and uncle purchased mandolins from John D'Angelico. It was mandolins from then on.

Here a quick sidebar to the accordion. When it came my older brother's turn to start taking accordion lessons, he slammed his hand in a car door on purpose just to get out of playing the accordion. He screwed up the index finger on his left hand so bad that he became the family's only drummer.

george

[Eugene]

I am not prying into folks' family matters. I am just trying to mentally draw up a family tree for mandolin education in general.
I understand. Knowing whom my daddy is, I remain a victim of spontaneous generation regarding mandolin.

[Bob A]

It's fair to say that, thanks to the wonders (and, of course, accursed horrors) of mechanically reproduced sound, not to mention the current lowly status of the mandolin, most players born since, say, 1950, are more or less self-taught.

While not yet so far down the scale as for instance lawyers (A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client) it must be said that we as a group probably suffer more than we deserve, due to the lack of a chain of transmission. The secrets of the Golden Age are buried with the practitioners, for the most part.

That said, we at least have the aural tradition made possible by the aforesaid mechanicals. While this may not aid in the transmission of practical technique, perhaps it may have contributed to a flexibility of techniques, as the listener and would-be player attempts valiently to reproduce what he hears.

My family tree therefore is rooted in the playing of Ry Cooder, whose own roots draw deep from the American folk and blues tradition, with a generous leavening of early jazz and tin pan alley added for spice. Or perhaps fertiliser would be more apropos of the metaphor. I honor the man for his playing, and for the inspiration he provided me, and for the F4 I had to buy, at great personal sacrifice, because HE had one.

So. Second generation American, and perhaps third generation phonograph, certainly mixed-race and definitely mongrel origins. Still, hybrid vigor is not to be discounted in human breeding, however it might be disdained by breeders of other vertebrates.

[Martin Jonas]

Well, to link Victor's idea of a teacher-pupil "family tree" with my actual family tree, I can claim to be a third-generation mandolin player without having learned anything much from the first two generations. My maternal grandparents were both in the Wandervogel movement in the 1920s in Germany. That pretty much meant having to play an instrument: my grandmother played guitar and German concert zither and my grandfather eventually bought a Majestic mandolin, second hand, and at the same time also bought the revised 1929 edition of the "Kleine Mandolinenschule" by A. Alberto. I believe that was in the late 1930s. I doubt he ever became very proficient on the mandolin -- the war would have intervened and he died shortly afterwards.

The Majestic mandolin and the Alberto tutor then passed to my mother, largely because it was the one instrument in the house that none of her three sisters were at all interested. She then learned the instrument from scratch, partly (and largely unsuccessfully) from the Alberto tutor and mainly from lessons she took on joining a mandolin orchestra, having been too small when my grandfather died to learn anything from him or even to remember him playing.

Although there was lots of singing and guitar/mandolin-playing around when I grew up (my father is a decent, though untrained, accompanist on nylon-strung guitar), I was never taught any of it by either of my parents, having been written off as unmusical. I had a brief abortive attempt in my teens to teach myself the way around the by-then abandoned Majestic, using the Alberto tutor. That came to nothing, partly because there weren't any electronic tuners around and I could never get the thing in tune, and partly because I strongly suspect that the Majestic was basically unplayable by then, having spent much of the 1960s being strung as a balalaika by one of my aunts.

I only started to learn seriously another 20-odd years later, when my parents moved house and in the process of getting rid of "clutter" decided that the Majestic (and the Alberto tutor) were rightfully mine on the basis of my having been the last family member to show any interest at all in it. So, my seventy years or so of mandolin family history count for little for my own playing background -- for my first "real" learning steps a mere two years ago I went for Simon Mayor's tutor, initially on the Majestic (which turned out to be a nice enough instrument once I had taught myself how to set it up) and then on my alarmingly-expanding motley collection of other mandolins. All of which makes me yet another rootless self-taught mando-orphan. To make it worse, the author of the (altogether excellent) book that got me started, Simon Mayor, is himself self-taught as well. No chain of transmission even with a 70-year mandolin family history reaching back to the very end of the golden period. I do still have that 1929 Alberto tutor, though, which as far as I can tell has defeated the efforts of three generations of my family to learn anything useful from it!

Martin (who is alarmed that his father has just started, at the age of 65, to teach himself how to read music and play accordion and concertina).

[margora]

I'm self-taught on mandolin. On classical guitar, I studied with William Newman (Philadelphia) and John Johns (Nashville). I've also performed in masterclasses on guitar with Sergio Assad, Manuel Barrueco, and David Starobin. On mandolin I've performed in masterclasses for Tamara Volskaya. On both instruments I've learned a great deal by watching performance videos very closely (the Assads, John Williams, Getrud Troester).

[Neil Gladd]

I like to say that I studied with Bach, Leoni, Stauffer and Calace, but I really just taught myself using their music. Probably the most distinguished pedigrees on this board are:

Rafaele Calace - Mario de Pietro - Hugo D'Alton - Alison Stephens.

Giuseppe Pettine - Albert Bellson - Richard Walz.

[Plamen Ivanov]

Well, after Mr. Gladd`s post, in which were mentioned such great mandolin names, it`s hard to speak about my family/teacher mandolin three, but for me it`s OK, because I personally am much more obliged to them, than to any of the above mentioned.

# #My grandfather is a multitalented amateur musician. He has been playing mandolin, violin, guitar (in Spanish and Russian tuning), accordion, mouthorgan. He has even conducted an amateur orchestra! Unfortunately his efforts to educate his sons in playing violin and accordion have ended with a broken accordion (sabotaged by my father) and violin bows turned into Red/American Indian bows in a children`s play, influenced by the Western movies and Karl May`s novels. My brother was a victim of a guitar playing and I turned out to be my grandfather`s luck with the mandolin playing. Of course, I took lessons by the conductor of the biggest mandolin orchestra in Bulgaria Assen Dimitrov. My grandfather paid the lessons and was helping me in practicing the excersises at home. After years I was playing in a wonderful mandolin orchestra conducted by another great mandolinist - Ivan Maslev - professional musician from the National Opera (oboe and horn) and his son Plamen Maslev, which I consider the best mandolin player in Bulgaria. Unfortunately he doesn`t play active anymore. I learned specifc things from them and had the chance to play together with them. Nowadays I`m trying to learn things from another contemporary mandolin players - from some of them - how to play better, from others - how not to play.

My cousine also plays mandolin (my grandfather`s merit again). She is not very good, but she plays and is going to join the mandolin orchestra in Darmstadt-Eberstadt.

I hope the three will grow up and branch out. There`s a hope with my 3 months old son. I`m not going to insist, but for now he looks intrigued by the sound of the mandolin. In fact he is intrigued by everything around, so that`s not significant for his pending interest.

Good luck!

[Eugene]

Alright, I started on guitar by learning to strum cowboy songs and "old time" music from my grandfather, Ernest Ress. I quickly moved on, self taught, to hard-rock/heavy-metal wankery as well as a bit of badly played jazz. I eventually came to study classical guitar with Karl Wohlwend, a protege of John Holmquist at the Cleveland Institute of Music. I don't recall with whom Holmquist studied. When I came to mandolin, I was on my own.

[Bob A]

Shades of Eugene Autry, singing cowboy.

I kinda miss rooting for the good guys in a black-and-white world.

There's reason to believe that mandolins were more useful for the nomadic cowfolk than bulky guitars. How might the recent history of our instrument been changed, had the mandolin been depicted as the tool of choice on TV?

Out on a speculative limb here, falling off the family tree.

[vkioulaphides]

[QUOTE]"There's reason to believe that mandolins were more useful for the nomadic cowfolk than bulky guitars."

Or in the world of Mediterranean merchant mariners; can't see dragging a grand piano onto a schooner. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[Arto]

Oh Lord, he is so sweet! #http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[vkioulaphides]

Congratulations again, Plamen.

But don't rush to put a mandolin into his hands— at least not yet! http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[Plamen Ivanov]

Hello!

Here is my cousine as a part of the Darmstadt-Eberstadt orchestra. She is the first from the left, under the painting.

Good luck!