| An important objective of this and many of my other sites is to present a consise and comprehencive overview of musical instruments and how they're related to each other. The most obvious way to do this, is to present instrument "family trees." Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is really no clear way to do that. Traditional instruments classification systems usually organise most fretted, plucked stringed instruments in western music into four main families: lutes, citterns, guitars and mandolas (or mandolins). There are actually a lot of other instrument families as well (like the banjo family) but since there is rarely any confusion between them and the four largest families, we can ignore it (and some others too) for now. The classification works well for a broad overview, but once we start to look in detail at the multitude of instruments known through the ages, we run into serious problems. This is by no means a situation unique to the four main families of stringed instruments. We find exactly the same everywhere we look in the world of musical instruments. The four families mentioned serve as a good example to illustrate the situation though. At first glance it seems the only even marginally coherent way to organise different instruments, is by their construction. Playing style can change even for exactly the same instrument, historical relations are often too unclear (and the different families have a strong tendency to "interbreed") and common use is - although quite often a good indication - not nearly as common as one may think. There seem to be three construction features that define the four families, the body shape, the back and the bridge:
This overview is quite straight forward and looks quite convincing at first glance. There are however a number of serious problems with it. First of all there are instruments that won't fit. How about the archtop guitar and the chitarra battente with narrow waisted bodies and floating bridges? Or the bandora with a flat back and fixed bridge? Also of course, since it's impossible to define a standard back shape for the mandola family (which historically and technically isn't really a family of its own, but rather an amalgation of different branches of the lute and cittern families) a flatback, oval shaped, floating bridge instrument would fit both the cittern and the mandola families. Even if we somehow managed to modify the system to give all known instruments an unambigious place, there's still the matters of historical relationships and common use. Although these factors are far too volatile to be used as the basis of a classification system, they can't be completely ignored either. Of course there's also the question of what exactly an instrument type is. How much differences must there be between two individual instruments to regard them as two different kinds of instruments? In the end, any classification system must necessarily be highly subjective. That means it's always open to discussions, disagreements and refinement. This may seem like a problem, and indeed it often is. Then again, what really matters is the music we make with our instrument, not how we classify them or what we call them. Very often the confusion is a creative confusion, allowing instrument makers to come up with new innovations and musicians to use the instruments in new and wonderful way. In the end it's definitely worth all the trouble. Mando family (and some other instrument families) overview. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||