View Full Version : Satan's own mandolin? I thought this was a little unusual. Actually, not that uncommon as a general style. More often, the horns are hollow and often they attach to the neck. I think the idea was to increase the air chamber size. Sometimes, these blossom into true harp-mandolins with additional strings attached to one or both horns. On this one, the horns look solid, however, and have no strings attached -- and would seem to serve no purpose other than questionable aesthetic value.
Side ports! I'm not seeing any ports myself. I believe I read somewhere that one of the supposed advantages of this style mandolin was to give easy access to the extended fingerboard. Of course, actually getting notes to sound decent up there is no easy task, even if you can reach them. I've never seen one of those before. It's like a car wreck; you just can't quit staring at it. I see the soundholes on the sides as well. That's a pretty funky looking instrument. Imagine the case! These date from the days when mandolin players moonlighted as dowsers That's really funny Maybe if we had a couple of these mandolins, we might have had more of a crossover experience.
I really hope they're there again this year. I'm going to print off these pictures. Aping lyres with more modern plucked strings was really common at one time. The Calace shop in Naples and Turturo in NY produced a mess of lyre mandolin or mandolyra in the late s and early s. I find the Embergher paticualrly odd in that I believe their more typical mandolins were some of the most graceful of all mandolins.
Calace's were possibly the nicest or least hideous looking. They were so widespread at the time that many of the early publications for 6-string guitar actually specified "for guitar or lyre", lyre implying lyre guitar, of course. Such ports were status quo on mandolins of a few Neapolitan makers of the late s, most notably de Meglio.
