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Thread: Good Renaissance or Medieval artists?

  1. #1
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    I love how the old old old mandolin songs sounded and stuff but i cant find any mandolin players whos music i can downlod or buy or anything who play it. Any suggestions?

  2. #2
    Mando-Accumulator Jim Garber's Avatar
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    You could try Allan Alexander's books. I have not seen them personally but I have heard from others that they are well done.

    Free baroque sheet music here.

    Jim
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    Registered User Martin Jonas's Avatar
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    Allan Alexander's books are indeed well done. Apart from a good choice of tunes and good settings, they are also beautifully produced visually, which somehow makes it more pleasant to play. One caveat, however, is that the CDs that come with the books are mainly for demonstration purposes and work less well as CDs of mandolin music for listening pleasure. Alexander is a good functional player, but no virtuoso, and all of the music is played on a Kentucky KM-380s, which would not have been my choice for this repertoire.

    Martin

  4. #4

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    A lot of the folks who are really into that type of music are also into historically informed performance. #Since the modern mandolin didn't come to be until the baroque era was ending, there are relatively few recordings of music from the renaissance and medieval eras on mandolin. #Some similar instruments of the renaissance were the mandore and cittern. #If curious regarding mandore, check out:

    The Broadside Band. 1980/1983/1992. Airs Populaires Anglais du XVIIe Siecle. Harmonia Mundi, HMA 1901039.

    MacKillop, Rob. 1998. Flowers of the Forest. Greentrax, CDTRAX 155.

    McFarlane, Ronn. 1990. The Scottish Lute. Dorian, DOR-90129.

    For renaissance cittern, look into broken consort music like the recordings of the Julian Bream Consort, the Baltimore Consort, and the Musicians of Swanne Alley.

    Of course, you can find mandolin in early music on some whimsical "crossover" efforts. #Look into the work of Owain Phyfe and his New World Renaissance band.




  5. #5

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    The medieval mandolin was called gittern. Very good gittern players today are Crawford Young (to be heard in Project Ars Nova or Ferrara Ensemble, on New Albion Records, Harmonia Mundi and Arcana labels) or Edin Karamazov (in Mala Punica, on Harmonia Mundi label), as well as the late and very appreciated Adolfo Broegg (of Micrologus, on Opus 111 label).

    If you want to hear medieval gittern, french renaissance mandore, as well as mandolino (lombardo), mandolino genovese, mandolino bresciano and original neapolitan mandolins of the 18th century, we have recorded a CD called "Mandolins over five centuries" on period instruments, please have a look at our site :
    http://www.ensemble-gabriele-leone.org/egl....lang=en
    Pietro Bono

  6. #6

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    Greetings Pietro. It's good to see your input here. Of course, gittern was one of those myriad mandolin-like things to predate mandolin, like mandora and cittern, but I really wouldn't conceptualize it as a mandolino/mandoline/mandolin any more than the renaissance mandore. Later uses of the words like gittern were applied to things that quite definitely were guitars.

  7. #7

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    PS: If we start to move into instruments that actually carried names related to "mandolin", there are huge numbers of recordings. I made a smallish list of such things here. I do not have your CD on hand, Pietro, but I will definitely look into it. Thank you for the reference.

  8. #8

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    Dear Eugene

    There is a clear link between french mandore and italian mandolino which was used by Vivaldi and Scarlatti, which lays in the wedding of Ferdinando di Medici with Christine de Lorraine 1589 (see Pellegrina Intermezzi...)

    There is also a quite clear link between the gittern (as it was called before 1530, which has nothing to do with the later renaissance guitar, which is a pear like small lute carved in a single piece of wood, from the pegbox to the neck and body, only the soundboard been from a different piece) and the mandore, which was also carved (from the inventories of french lute-makers of the 16th century, we know that some mandores were carved, and others were made of ribs like lutes)

    So for me the link is clear for medieval gittern (which has been called erroneously mandore by superficial musicologists) and french mandore to mandolino, and all other instruments like cittern, lutes, guitars, medieval citole, german mandora or others are only cousins, just as you say...
    Pietro Bono

  9. #9

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    I wholeheartedly agree, but the gittern of the medieval era and the mandore of the renaissance era are distiguishable from the instruments to be later named amandorla/mandola/mandolin/etc. by builders like Stradivari, Smorsone, Presbler, Lambert, etc., and the earlier pieces predate "mandolin"-like names in many cases. Later mandolins/mandolini certainly appear to have drawn inspiration from these earlier instruments, as you've rightly demonstrated, but the earlier instruments were not "mandolins" as I conceptualize the organology and weren't called that. I tend to prefer to default to contemporary names wherever there is evidence to do so. I also tend to avoid concepts of instrument "ancestry" in earlier instruments or "families" in anything other than very gross descriptions of sounding mechanism or very obviously intentional cases (like violin, viola, violoncello or similar). It's my own semantic quirk.

  10. #10

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    Like you, I prefer to call the period instruments with their contemporary name (therefore gittern, and not "mandore" in the middle ages !), in fact the theme of the discussion was "very very very old time mandolin" !
    Pietro Bono

  11. #11

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    Indeed. Jake came wondering why he couldn't find much medieval and renaissance music on "mandolin" and I think you've helped to explain the why of that rather well.

  12. #12
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    Check these soundclick recording:
    Ancient mando music
    If you search for the titles listed, you will find the books for sale various places, including eBay.
    I have the "Medieval Music for Mandolin vol. 1" book and CD. While I cannot speak to its accuracy (I am absolutely not a music scholar) they sound pretty good and are fairly easy to play. If you want to stroll around and sound like a minstrel, it works...

    {EDIT} I just went to the link on "Allan Alexander's books" above and those are the ones I was referring to.



    "First you master your instrument, then you master the music, then you forget about all that ... and just play"
    Charlie "Bird" Parker

  13. #13

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    what a nice juicy thread ... great sound samples.

    i've been changing facial color and flirting with stroke over in bagpipe-land - sorry i missed it.

    allan alexander's books are wonderful - a good introduction to the music and an awfully easy way to increase your repertoire, lickety-split. as martin says, the cd by itself is a bit stiff but it's great for jamming along with my charango'dore'lino'huela.

    gigantesco ciao - bill

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