Finally get the love toy out of the left corner!
Willy Brandt in 1976 with a mandolin in the Teutoburg Forest
Source: Henning von Borstell /FES
The mandolin is the instrument of the year. That’s a pretty wise decision. The spherical thing with the chirping sound was the favorite instrument of noble ladies and small workers, the brown and the red. However, it works best elsewhere.
Um the whinchat you have to worry. And around the downy birch. And especially the blue-winged wasteland snail. They are really threatened. Which is why they are the bird, the tree, the animal of the year.
You really don’t have to worry about the mandolin. What the German state music councils proclaim every year as instrument of the year is no indication of the respective degree of extinction.
The mandolin, for example, has fared much worse in its long and rather tortuous history since the early 1800s. A lot better too. It has something to do with social democracy. But we are anticipating.
The mandolin is a four-course lute instrument, tuned like a violin, with an almond-shaped body that makes it look like a heavily pregnant small guitar. Invented around 1700 in Naples, a compulsory instrument for noble ladies. Used by Beethoven and Mozart as musical messengers of love because of their cricket chirping character, to be used under the balconies of loved ones.
Forget. Became bourgeois with mandolin orchestras, which were called ice cream parlors like in the 1960s and later operated as the “symphony orchestra of the little people”. In addition to the accordion orchestras.
The orchestra of longing for Italy. For practical reasons – for migratory birds it fit better in the backpack than the guitar – it became a folk instrument of early left-green circles. Observed with eagle eyes by anti-socialist moral guardians. Shot on brown by Italian Fascists.
Forget. Until everything that used to make a sound and sounded different than a violin trumpet flute was reanimated. “Zupfgeigenhansel” picked up the plectrum. Willy Brandt played the mandolin, you can see him plucking with a fluppe in the corner of his mouth on a hike in the Teutoburg Forest. 1976 was that.
Folk rock also brought back the ringing almond. And the jazz and Mike Oldfield (“Tubular Bells”) and REM (“Losing my Religion”).
Even in the classics. Avi Avital, who grew up in the great mandolin tradition of the kibbutzim, brought the love guitar from the left corner into the heart of the philharmonics. It can go on like this.