Introduction

Abstract

Shortly after we were married, my husband made me a mandolin. The body is built from rosewood and the bridge hand carved from ebony. Wood can be bent if you heat it, but he had no bending iron – so he curved the sides by rocking them over some hair curling tongs, clamped to the kitchen table. I had wanted a mandolin since I was a child – for almost as long as I had been playing the violin. The two instruments have the same intervals between their strings, and it seemed to me that it must be easier to rest something across your lap, plucking at notes whose positions were marked out for you by frets, than to contort the whole of your upper body into the violinist's masochistic stance, attempting simultaneously to create notes on a standard scale with your left hand and to tame two feet of bow with your right. I already understood what instructions the notes on a stave were trying to give my fingers, and had lately been charmed by the mandolin music of Vivaldi and Oysterband. (I was naïve, as it happens. The mandolin does have all these advantages, but it also – as the fingers of my left hand will testify – has strings like cheese wire.) My husband found the design in a woodworking magazine, tucked in amongst the usual advertisements and feature articles. An engineer by training, he had inherited both skills and tools from his father and grandfather.

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