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"At the turn of the Twentieth Century, a sound lilted through the air of American music like nothing that had ever been heard before. It inspired one writer to call it 'the true soul of music'. It inspired thousands of Americans to pick up instruments and form groups to create this sound for themselves. It was the sound of the mandolin orchestra. The late Nineteenth Century was an exciting time for American music lovers. The invention of the phonograph had brought music into the home, and the increased exposure and competition brought out the best players. The sound of the mandolin orchestra carried an extra edge of excitement because most Americans had never heard a mandolin, much less the sound of mandolin-family instruments played in an orchestral setting. The mandolin alone had a distinct, unique sound. When a mandolinist plucked a single-note run, nothing could match its crispness of attack and delicacy of tone. And when a group of mandolin-family instruments launched into an ensemble tremolo, the listener was bathed in wave after wave of the most beautiful sound imaginable. The mandolin orchestra style could be applied to any kind of popular music: marches, dance pieces, overtures. Americans wanted to play this music as well as hear it. The first nationally-popular group of mandolinists was the Boston Ideals, made up of two teachers, A.D. Grover and George Lansing, and two of their students. They started in 1883 as a banjo 'club', or amateur group. By 1897, they had reached legendary status. The mandolin permeated American musical culture in the early Twentieth Century. On the serious side, Providence, Rhode Island, became a center of study. Giuseppe Pettine, a native of Italy, was the most famous teacher, and his students included William Place Jr., who would later be billed as 'America's Greatest Mandolin Virtuoso'. On the entertainment side, James H. Johnstone, a.k.a. 'The Musical Johnstone' or 'Jumping Jimmie Johnstone', entertained vaudeville crowds with his performance of Yankee Doodle Backwards, in which he played the tune forwards, but turned his back to the audience and put his mandolin behind his head. By 1908 the mandolin was popular enough to support two new magazines. Boston publisher Walter Jacobs founded The Cadenza, and Philadelphia teacher and publisher Herbert Forrest Odell started The Crescendo as the official organ of the Guild of Mandolinists, Banjoists and Guitarists. Both magazines included group arrangements, columns by leading musicians, news and advertisements for sheet music and instruments. The mandolin orchestra movement was so widespread that Odell wrote The Mandolin Orchestra, subtitled 'A book for directors, managers, teachers and players'. The 90-page manual, published in 1913, covered everything from instrumentation and conducting style to effective programming and proper stage behavior. Suddenly, or so it seems looking back, the mandolin orchestras died. The delineating point was World War One. The beauty and serenity of mandolin music could not hold the interest of soldiers who had been in war. They looked for something louder and more raucous, and they found it in jazz music (Dixieland). The mandolin orchestra died a slow death, as illustrated by the shrinking size of Odell's magazine, The Crescendo. In its heyday, it was a large folio magazine; by the end of the 1920s, it was no more than a pamphlet. By the 1980s, links to the mandolin's pre-World War I glory days had dwindled down to Walter K. Bauer, who continued to lead his Plectrophonic Orchestra, and the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra, which became the only mandolin group in America in continuous existence since the turn of the century. A few individual players maintained an interest in what had become known as 'classical mandolin' style, and in 1987, Norman Levine formed the Classical Mandolin Society of America to promote the mandolin as a classical instrument, with standards of performance and literature to keep the mandolin alive."
-- Walter Carter
(Excerpted from Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc. | |||
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