I've written quite a bit on my thoughts of this in correspondence with various characters on and off list, so I'll try to "focus" here as much as I'm able.
At 07:47 PM 3/16/2005, Dr. Marion Ceruti wrote: >In biology (and Eugene will correct me if I am wrong) if something is >sufficiently difficult to classify, >we just create a new category for it. Oh my. I laid out an essay in private correspondence on a similar topic. We were all taught in biology class that all things were divided into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. However, in the case of North America's bullhead catfishes, for example, organologists weren't happy with such a simple classification scheme and introduced at least five subcategories between order and family as well as a few more above. You can find similar or even more complicated cases for almost any living thing. The truth is that no taxonomic categorization beyond the species level has much real meaning. It is all superimposed to facilitate conceptualization for the people who think about such things. >One of the challenges that we have that biologists don't have is that instruments >can be redesigned and built much faster than genes can mutate and new species >can emerge... >Certainly, more specific definitions would be most helpful in a constructing >a taxonomy of instruments much in the same way that biologists construct >taxonomies of living things... This becomes problematic. there often is a temptation to draw direct, biological-like lineages for musical instruments. The fact is that this rarely is possible. As complicated as they are, the cladistics of biology are far easier to grasp; all living things are by necessity directly derived from the living things that came before them. It takes a couple horses to make a horse. Put a horse and a donkey together, and you get an obviously intermediary hybrid, the mule. Nobody is giving birth to dragons and chimeras. However, no luthier is confined to the rules of heredity and can generate chimeras at whim. Luthiers are free to draw inspiration from anywhere and are not required (and sometimes not able) to disclose the source of/seed for their instrumental inspiration. There often are no direct relationships evident between intermediary steps, and if you try to concoct a cladogram of necked chordophones, you'll end up with crossing and undefinable or isolated branches. Thanks to the "definite parentage" aspect of organisms, Linnaeus could establish a system for giving all living things a name that would be universally recognizable without the fear that an abrupt new creation would generate chaos. With musical instruments, the "rightness" of a term is defined by common usage. One conceptual thing can correctly carry many regional names (e.g., the rococo-era mandora/gallichon/mandola), and many different things can carry the same or similar names (e.g., if you asked for a guitar in mid-18th-c. England, you would almost certainly be given an odd cittern tuned to a c-major chord). As you know, Marion, our own beloved mandolin is subject to some of the most horrific and variable chordophonic nomenclature that there is. What was initially called things like mandolino/mandola/amandorlino/amandorla/armandolino/etc. ad nauseam was a soprano lute-like thing that bears only trivial resemblance to the modern Neapolitan and Roman instruments and even less to American archtops. Another example that constitutes a bit of a personal pet peeve: Sobell in the UK built a big, flat-bodied mandolin. Ambivalent or ignorant of the fact that similar things were already called "mandola" by ca. 1900 mandolin orchestras, he leafed through a book, saw a renaissance cittern pictured, and decided to name his concoction "cittern." The terminology has become widespread amongst the Irish and Scottish music crowds, so it is now correct to call certain big mandolins "cittern" whether I like it or not. Best, Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
