typologica musica.

[EDIT 1/Feb/2018: The Scandinavians have a different story about this instrument.]

I've been watching Scandinavian folk musicians on repeat for months now, so this singer's instrument, with 5 "courses" of 2 strings each, has been driving me batty.



(He sounds like Richard Thompson singing "The Times, They Are A-Changin'," but we'll run that down some other day. It is notable that this is a Swedish[?] Christmas song, the "Twelfth Night Carol," but since I first heard it yesterday, I don't care and I'm happy to play it on Repeat.)

The video description says Esbjörn Hazelius is playing the cittern, but then Ale Möller is on the mandola, so it's by process of elimination, and Google Chrome automatically translating Swedish Wikipedia tells us that yes, Mr. Hazelius is the singer. You might also, as I did a few months ago, say "What the hell is a cittern?", and then you could go to English Wikipedia and learn about something that is definitely not the instrument in that video.

This may be hard to appreciate if you didn't grow up with the state of the art being LexisNexis's infuriatingly odd query language, but one of the most important things about the post-Google era is that you can just type "difference between cittern and bouzouki and mandola" into a text box and get something really helpful.

The confusion is this:

1. The mandola and octave mandolin have the same relationship to the mandolin that the viola and cello respectively have to the violin: the cello is a full octave below the violin (G-D-A-E), and the viola (C-G-D-A) drops the high E and adds a lower C.
• The viola is usually described as "tuned a fourth below the violin," which is both more precise, and also, to my ear, more confusing.
2. Back in the 60s, some Irish guys introduced the four-course Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music, where it was sometimes custom-built with a flat rather than rounded back, just like the...flat-backed, four-course mandolin family.
3. English master luthier Stefan Sobell started custom-building mandolas/octave mandolins/Irish bouzoukis with five courses, and then he called that a "cittern" for some reason. He's been so influential that, with the original meaning of "cittern" having gone dormant, the name stuck. Sort of.

There's a bunch of stuff on that comparison site about instrument scale length and how that affects the gauge of strings you put on it to produce the kind of sound you want, but unless you play a stringed instrument, it's boring.

Best part: the Greek Greek bouzouki dates all the way back to...1900.