a world of musical ambiguity

I have already brought home a hand-crafted...thing. It belongs to an odd family of instruments, which the "mandolin" family. They have paired strings, called "courses," and each course can be unison or an octave apart, and the paired strings give them a full, more multi-dimensional sound with more higher-pitched overtones. Which may not be what you want: 6-string and 12-string guitars are both wonderful, but not, for most of us, interchangeable.

As mentioned previously, some Swedes developed a 5-course instrument that they call a cittern, for no discernible reason. I have discovered that you can actually buy one off the rack, though the Internet's opinion of the Ashbury brand is that it's kind of okay, but if you're halfway serious, it's worth having a luthier build you one. I don't really want to pay $900 for a mediocre instrument, nor do I want to pay $4,000 for a nice one. So much for that.

(Note that Ashbury calls it an "Irish" cittern, again sort of nonsensically because while Swedish musicians do love them some Irish traditional music, I've only seen one or two people play a 5-course instrument who wasn't Swedish.)

So I kept poking around on Craigslist, and this thing shows up, labeled an "Irish cittern."

 

The maker is a real person, using a different shop name now. It's "chunky," in a sense: the neck is square-ish and heavy, the string height farther down the fingerboard is really high, and it feels like the ends of the frets should be rounded off with a file. And it sings, with sustain and harmonics for days. It's clearly a solid early piece by an artist who could go on to make truly great things. Totally worth $140.

Here's what I've learned about these instruments:

• A "mandolin" is very well defined.
• The following instruments have no solid distinctions between them:
• "octave mandolin"
• "mandola"
• "mandocello"
• "cittern"
• "Irish Bouzouki"

People tune them differently, using different weight strings based on the tension the instrument was built to withstand: it's common, especially on longer-scale instruments like the Irish bouzouki or the Swedish cittern, to see people lower their preferred tuning to fits the instrument's strength, then only ever play with a capo that moves the instrument's range above what they could safely crank the strings to. For example, they could tune an instrument to GDAD, but always play with a capo that pitched the strings to DAEA, when trying to tune that high directly would be likely to break strings or damage the instrument.

I will call it an "octave mandolin," because that's what people thought it was when I wandered into the shop with it.

Wikipedia has caught up:

Amongst many luthiers and musicians the Irish bouzouki is considered to be part of the mandolin family, but for others this new family of instruments is a separate development. In actuality, the mandolin and lute families are related and the bouzouki is a part of that. At any rate, since the genesis of the Irish bouzouki in the late 1960s, luthiers have incorporated so many aspects of mandolin construction, particularly when building archtop Irish bouzoukis, that for most it is a moot point.

For many builders and players, the terms "bouzouki", "cittern", and "octave mandolin" are more or less synonymous. The name cittern is often applied to instruments of five courses (ten strings), especially those having a scale length between 20 and 22 inches (500mm and 550mm). They are also occasionally called "10 string bouzoukis" when having a longer scale length. The fifth course is usually either a lowest bass course tuned to C2 or D2 on an instrument with a long scale, or a highest treble course tuned to G4 or A4 on a shorter scale. Luthier Stefan Sobell, who coined the term "cittern" for his modern, mandolin-based instruments, originally used the term for short scale instruments irrespective of the number of their strings, but he now applies "cittern" to all 5 course instruments irrespective of scale length, and "octave mandolin" to all 4 course instruments, leaving out bouzouki entirely.

I'm sitting on our couch and I can see eight (8) stringed instruments, which is a fine number.