Cultural Action, the Art of Tone and Sonic Brokerage: An Inquiry

Cultural Action, the Art of Tone and Sonic Brokerage:
An Inquiry into Lloyd Loar’s F-5 Mandolin Design
A thesis presented by
Elijah Forrest O’Connor
To
The Committee on Degrees in Special Concentrations
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts
Harvard College
March 11, 2010
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Table of Contents
List of Figures……………………….…..………………………………......……iii
Acknowledgements………………………..………………………………………v
Introduction……………………………………..…………………………………1
Chapter 1: The Origins and Cultural Function of the F-5 Mandolin……….……14
Chapter 2: The Art of Tone…………………….…………………………...……40
Chapter 3: Lynn Dudenbostel, Sonic Broker……………...…………………..…61
Conclusion……………………………………...……………………………..…84
Works Cited.…………………………………………………………….…….…93
Appendix: Inside Lynn Dudenbostel’s Workshop.………………………..……104
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List of Figures
Figure 1: Neapolitan Mandolin…………………..………………………………..3
Figure 2: “Master Model” F-5 Mandolin…...……………………………………..9
Figure 3: Gibson Catalog Cover (1903)………….………………………………14
Figure 4: Gibson Catalog Cover (1921)...………..………………………………14
Figure 5: Lloyd Loar-Signed F-5 Mandolin……………………..………………17
Figure 6: F-5 Graduation Maps…………………..………………………………20
Figure 7: Loar’s F-5 Specification Sheet…………...……………………………22
Figure 8: Instrumental Model………..…………..………………………………58
Figure 9: Tonal Model……..…..…………..……….……………………………59
Figure 10: Dudenbostel F-5 Mandolin……………...…………………..………..76
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To Lynn Dudenbostel
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v
Acknowledgements
This undergraduate senior thesis is indebted to a number of people for
their input, guidance and hospitality. It would be impossible to name all the
performers, scholars, luthiers, friends and family members who motivated and
supported me during the writing process, but a few deserve mention here.
On Harvard’s campus: I can think of no scholar as brilliant, patient and
intellectually curious as Professor Kay Kaufman Shelemay, my thesis advisor.
The numerous works she suggested I read, in particular Pierre Bourdieu’s The
Field of Cultural Production, proved invaluable to me as I developed my
arguments. For her I offer nothing but the highest praise. I also extend thanks to
Deborah Foster, director of the Special Concentrations program at Harvard, as
well as Liza Vick and the rest of the Loeb Music Library staff. In addition, I am
grateful to the Harvard College Research Program for funding my research travels
to Maryville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas, in August 2009.
Off campus: One of the kindest people I have ever met is guitar- and
mandolin-builder Lynn Dudenbostel, to whom this paper is dedicated. His
capacious knowledge, talent and generosity are unparalleled on this earth. To him
and to his family (Amy, Lauren, Andy and Matthew) I owe my sincerest
gratitude. Moreover, I truly appreciate the time Bill Collings, Steve McCreary,
Joel Pollack, Bob Arnone, Alex Rueb and Angela Thomas spent with me during
my visit to the Collings Guitars headquarters in August 2009. Thanks also to
luthier and historian Roger H. Siminoff for sharing with me some of his vast
knowledge of Lloyd Loar and the Gibson Company.
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I am particularly grateful to my family and friends for their unwavering
support. My mother, Suzanne MacKillop, provided the best hospitality a travelweary son could hope for throughout fall 2009. My father, Mark, a mandolinist
himself, offered me some valuable insight into the history of the F-5. I especially
thank my fellow undergraduate, Krysten Keches, who assisted me in countless
ways as I labored over this paper between September – November 2009.
Of course, my thesis on the F-5 mandolin would not have materialized
without continual inspiration from F-5 mandolinists like Chris Thile, Sam Bush,
David Grisman, Mike Marshall, Andy Leftwich, Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz and the
many up-and-coming players in the Greater Boston area. I thank them for
composing and performing beautiful mandolin music.
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Introduction
Some years ago the mandolin was gradually introduced to the
general public. At first it was played by high society, and these
were the days of glory and money of the master mandolinists. But
it descended the social scale and now clerks, labourers,
dressmakers, and milliners play the mandolin…the trouble lies,
above all, in the first place that the mandolin is not considered as
an instrument of music. – Jules Deblaive1
Today, adherents of the mandolin comprise more than just laborers and
manufacturers of women’s hats. The instrument may seem somewhat foreign to
the common listener, but it prospers in a variety of musical styles throughout the
world, including Italian folk music, Brazilian choro, Irish music, South Indian
Carnatic music, Cretan music, Western classical music and, perhaps above all,
American folk, country and bluegrass music. However, its current popularity does
belie centuries of neglect and opprobrium. The focus of this essay shall be the F5, a model of mandolin designed in the first quarter of the 20th century, one of the
most revolutionary but desperate periods in the instrument’s history (as
Deblaive’s review attests).
I should note that my interest in mandolin history and luthiery was kindled
when I met luthier Lynn Dudenbostel at the Mandolin Symposium in Santa Cruz,
California, in June 2007. At the symposium, I had the opportunity to play several
of Dudenbostel’s F-5s, all of which possessed remarkable tone quality. The
following winter, Dudenbostel built me a beautiful A-5 mandolin, and soon
thereafter, I began conducting preliminary research on the history of the mandolin
for this project. In spring 2009, I requested, and was granted, permission to
1
Deblaive 2.
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document the process by which Dudenbostel built his mandolins. Thus, I spent
five days in August 2009 with Dudenbostel and his family in Maryville,
Tennessee. During that time, I took extensive fieldnotes, shot a number of
photographs and conducted and recorded several interviews with Dudenbostel in
his workshop. The wealth of information I learned there inspired the chief
arguments in this essay.
Any information herein that is not attributed to a specific source is derived
from fieldnotes I took either at Lynn Dudenbostel’s workshop in Maryville
(where I stayed from August 9 – August 13, 2009) or Bill Collings’s instrument
production plant in Austin, Texas (which I visited on August 17, 2009).
A Brief History of the Mandolin: Tenth Century CE – 1890s
The mandolin’s ultimate progenitor is the gittern, which (along with the
ud, which developed into the lute in western Europe) Muslims from North Africa
and the Middle East brought to Spain and southern Italy during the tenth century
(Wright). While the earliest published gittern music dates to 1552, Pierre Brunet’s
Tablature de Mandorre (Paris, 1578) – which was written for the same instrument
– includes the first allusion to a “mandorla” (It. for “almond”), which the
instrument resembled (Brown 138). By the mid-seventeenth century, it (or an
independently developed instrument very similar to it) had become known as the
mandolino, and by century’s close, it had attracted an admirable following in Italy
and France, prompting none other than Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) to design
and build several of them (Tyler 100).
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Historian James Tyler has labeled the eighteenth century the “Golden Age
of the mandolino” – it is a fair title, though a little exaggerated, for while the
instrument sprang into operas, cantatas, oratorios and chamber music throughout
Europe, it never truly escaped a state of obscurity. Early in the century, Antonio
Vivaldi (1678-1741) composed his Concerto per Mandolino (RV425) and
Concerto per due Mandolini (RV532) for young girls to perform at the Ospedale
della Pietá, a Venetian convent school at which the
composer served as music director. Those two
works, along with Johann Adolph Hasse’s Concerto
con Mandolino Obbligato and G.B. Sammartini’s
Sonata per Armandolino, remain among the most
popular Baroque mandolin music to date. However,
the mandolino, whose ten gut strings were typically
plucked with the fingers, soon succumbed to the
newer, louder mandoline, which featured metal
Figure 1. A Neapolitan
mandolin.
strings and only four double-courses tuned like a violin (g-d’-a’-e”) (Tyler 83).
Luthier Gaetano Vinaccia of Naples is credited with having built the first
mandoline (known today as the Neapolitan mandolin) in 1744 (see Figure 1).2
Over the next 50 years, the mandoline captured the fancy of the some of
the most noteworthy classical composers. Mozart equipped Don Giovanni, the
protagonist in his opera (1787) of the same name, with a mandoline to seduce
2
Montagu writes, “The mandolin is an instrument with a long history and a variety of forms, each
associated with a particular Italian city” (27). In fact, organologist Curt Sachs has gone as far as to
devise a typology of eight mandolin forms associated with eight different Italian cities, although
this is probably not entirely accurate; since the Renaissance, differences between small, wooden,
stringed, plectrum (plucked) instruments have been largely of degree rather than kind (Sachs 251).
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Elvira’s maid, while Beethoven composed four short mandoline pieces (1796) in
an attempt to woo soon-to-be Countess Josephine Clary. Soon thereafter, Johann
Nepomuk Hummel composed his Mandolin Concerto No. 1 in G Major (1799),
which remains the most popular piece in the classical mandoline repertoire. Tyler
contends that these compositions (Don Giovanni in particular) “crystallized the
role of the instrument in ‘serious’ music” for future composers (100).
However, the instrument’s glory days would not last beyond the turn of
the nineteenth century. It is perhaps not out of line to suggest that Don Giovanni
crystallized popular perception of the mandoline as a tool for seduction – a
stereotype the instrument never quite managed to shake off. Moreover, composers
began to prefer instruments with sustain, rich tone and an extensive dynamic
range; the mandoline, which the Journal de Musique had dubbed “too dry, and
too lacking in resonance, to be heard in a large hall,” possessed none of these
qualities (qtd. in Tyler 93). Thus, the instrument quickly fell out favor among
composers and audiences alike.3 In a review of a performance by Pietro
Vimercati, one of the few touring mandoline virtuosi of the Romantic era, a critic
from The Harmonicon expressed the prevailing sentiment of the early nineteenth
century:
Why has he not dedicated to the harp, or even to the guitar, the
immense time which he must have employed upon the mandoline,
3
Hector Berlioz lamented the dearth of skilled mandolinists during this period, noting that the aria
“Deh, vieni alla finestra” in Don Giovanni, which featured the don on mandolin, often had to be
performed on harpsichord, harp or violin. None of these was very convincing (Mann 492).
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5
an ungrateful instrument, whose sharpness he will never soften,
and whose dryness he will never overcome (qtd. in Sparks 3)[?]
By the time Vimercati reached his prime, the mandoline belonged chiefly to
Neapolitan lazzaroni, or beggars, who wandered the streets singing folk songs and
operatic excerpts (Burney 170). To the general public, the mandoline symbolized
a bygone, pastoral era.
Ironically, when the mandoline could descend the “social scale” no
further, a member of the Italian royalty resurrected it. Princess Margherita of
Savoy (1851-1926) – future wife of King Umberto I and consummate benefactor
of the arts in Italy – was proficient on a variety of plucked instruments and had a
mandoline built for her as early as 1865. As soon as she and the rest of the royal
family moved into the Roman Quirinal Palace in 1870, “the ladies of the court
took up [the mandoline] as a fad…soon the fondness spread to all classes, [and]
high and low took pleasure in playing” (Pleijsier 115). Contemporaneously,
millions of southern Italians, who had come to disdain northerners during Italian
reunification (or il Risorgimento, which began in the early 1800s), departed for
the United States; with them they brought their most beloved portable
possessions, including mandolines.
Yet the popularity of the mandoline in the United States is not directly
attributable to the influx of Italian immigrants. During the 1880s, a Spanish
ensemble named the Spanish Students toured the country singing Spanish folk
songs with guitar and bandurria (a cousin of the mandoline) accompaniment. The
Spanish Students were a sensation in America, and they prompted a number of
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6
new Italian immigrants – who correctly guessed that most Americans would not
know the difference between Italians and Spaniards – to form their own,
profitable troupes that substituted mandolines for bandurrias.4 As a result, the
mandoline, which many Americans now believed to be Spanish, became
increasingly popular.5
In 1892, Italy and the United States collaborated to organize the Genoa
Exhibition, a massive, international cultural event commemorating the New
World’s four hundredth birthday. The exhibition featured the “Primo concorso
Nazionale Mandolinistico” (the “First National Mandolin Competition”), which
attracted a number of Italian mandolin virtuosi and large mandolin orchestras
known as circoli. Sparks observes that the Primo concorso “transformed the status
of the mandolin [sic]” throughout the Continent and led to the founding of several
European journals, such as Il Mandolino, Il Plettro, and Mandolinista Italiano,
devoted exclusively to the instrument (49). Moreover, mandoline orchestras
modeled on Italian circoli sprang up throughout the United States. Although the
banjo also became popular in the late nineteenth century, the mandoline remained,
according to The Musical Herald, “the rage…among fashionable young men and
women in New York and elsewhere” through the early 1900s (336).
The quality of mandoline luthiery, performance and composition also
reached its apex during this period. Roman luthier Luigi Embergher’s mandolines
were said to possess Stradivarian tone and playability (Sparks 67). Embergher
4
Carlo Curti’s Figaro Spanish Students were among the most notable.
Ironically, the nationalistic Spanish Students, a chief goal of whom was to promote Spanish
culture in response to the Neapolitanism that had infiltrated Spain since the beginning of the
Bourbon Empire, utterly failed at their task.
5
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also founded the first plectrum string quartet, which featured two mandolines,
mandola and mandocello (Sparks 64). European virtuosi like Raffaele Calace,
Silvio Ranieri, Ernesto Rocco and Laurent Fantauzzi floored European audiences
by performing a mixture of their own material and standard showpieces, such as
Paganini concerti and Bach fugues. Gustav Mahler, Anton Webern and Arnold
Schöenberg wrote symphonies, bagatelles and serenades featuring the mandoline,
and prominent conservatories, including London’s Guildhall School of Music and
Trinity College of Music, even began to accept mandoline students. Most
conspicuously, the proliferation of mandoline periodicals, such as Mandoline:
Internationales Musik-Journal (Leipzig), Banjo World (London), Calace’s
Musica Moderna and Fantauzzi’s Le Plectre, attests that, by the turn of the
twentieth century, the instrument had attained a level of eminence it had never
known before.
The Gibson Company, Lloyd Loar and the F-5
To accommodate escalating demand for the mandolin (a variant spelling
of “mandoline” that became standard in the U.S.), a number of American
instrument manufacturers began to produce (chiefly Neapolitan) mandolins. It is
speculated that Joseph Bohmann was the first American to build a mandolin (in
1883), although mandolin production did not gain any momentum in the United
States until the 1890s and early 1900s, when Lyon and Healy, C.F. Martin & Co.,
the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company and other profit-driven
manufacturers began to exploit the mandolin fad (Hambly 457). Of these, the
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8
Gibson Company, established by a consortium of businessmen in 1902, was the
most notable. The company’s chief instrument designer, Orville Gibson (18561918), was dissatisfied with the sound of the Neapolitan mandolin and thus
developed two revolutionary, flat-back (as opposed to bowl-back, like the
Neapolitan) mandolin designs – called “A” (“Artist”) and “F” (“Florentine”)
models – that borrowed f-holes, elevated fingerboards and carved top- and backplates from the violin. As part of its notoriously aggressive marketing campaign,
the Gibson Company disparaged Neapolitan bowl-back mandolins (i.e. called
them “tater bugs” in reference to a species of Colorado beetle that had recently
devastated crops throughout the country) in an effort to convert the public to its
own flat-back instruments (Hambly 450).
Although Gibson’s comparatively loud mandolins earned widespread
approval, an increased pace of life and changing tastes in music led to a steady
decline in the instrument’s popularity and use in domestic music-making (Sparks
154). By the end of World War I, the tenor banjo had displaced the mandolin as
the country’s chief fad instrument, and “for most…the mandolin remained the
instrument of simple songs and serenades” (Sparks 86). As a result, Gibson’s
sales began to slump. General Manager Lewis A. Williams, who had served as
sales manager during the company’s early, lucrative years, proved incapable of
maneuvering the company back into a position of commercial eminence before he
stepped down in 1923. However, he did make one decision in 1919 that, in due
time, would enhance the company’s reputation and change the fate of the
mandolin forever: he hired Lloyd Loar.
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9
A native of Illinois, Lloyd Allayre Loar (1886-1943) was an alumnus of
the Oberlin Conservatory, where he had presided over the school’s Mandolin
Club for two years. A consummate performer, Loar
had acquired a Gibson oval-hole F-2 mandolin in the
early 1900s and, beginning in 1906, had toured with a
number of plectrum ensembles nicknamed
“Gibsonians,” the members of which performed
exclusively on Gibson instruments. In return for
Loar’s promotional efforts, the Gibson Company had
published his mandolin-family arrangements of
around 35 pieces of classical music. Throughout the
1910s, Loar – who had demonstrated proficiency in
physics and mathematics at a young age – had
Figure 2. A “Master Model”
F-5 mandolin.
suggested that Gibson adopt certain design modifications to enhance the tone,
volume and playability of its instruments. Williams invited Loar to join Gibson
because he believed Loar’s ideas would precipitate a mandolin revival in the
United States (Carter, “Brief Reign” 98).
Loar occupied a variety of positions at Gibson, ranging from design
consultant to chief acoustical engineer to repair manager to purchasing agent.
Given that he earned a Master’s Degree in 1921 from the American Conservatory
of Music in Chicago and toured each July and August to promote the company’s
products, he can only have worked at Gibson part-time, at least during the first
three years. However, once the company began to produce his “Master Model” F-
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5 mandolins (see Figure 2), H-5 mandolas, K-5 mandocellos, L-5 guitars and
Style 5 banjos in the early 1920s, his role as acoustical engineer likely trumped
his other obligations. Nevertheless, his tenure was brief. His instruments did not
eliminate the company’s financial woes, and so he departed from Gibson in early
1925, a mere five years after he was hired.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, F-5 mandolin production remained
sluggish, and Loar would earn little appreciation until long after his death in 1943.
Scattered mandolin virtuosi, such as vaudeville entertainer Dave Apollon and
classical mandolinist William Place, Jr., championed the F-5 but did not generate
much demand for it. Once “hillbilly music” singer Bill Monroe (1911-1996)
acquired a Loar-signed F-5 in the early 1940s, however, the course of mandolin
history – let alone the status of the F-5 – changed dramatically. Generally
regarded the founding father of bluegrass music, Monroe, along with his
ensemble, the Blue Grass Boys, achieved international fame in the 1960s and
1970s; as the popularity of bluegrass grew, Monroe’s mandolin developed
something of a cult following (Rudder 126). Demand for F-5s increased
markedly, and luthiers across the country began constructing their own F-5s.
Speculators, primarily from the U.S., began to invest in vintage “Loars,” whose
market value resultantly skyrocketed (McCullough). Today, Loar maintains a
mystical, quasi-legendary status among flat-back mandolinists and luthiers, and
his F-5s serve as the benchmark against which modern F-5s are compared.
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Lloyd Loar’s Heritage
Proponents of Lloyd Loar’s Master Model F-5 mandolins have ventured as
far as to denominate Loar the Stradivari of the mandolin world (Siminoff, “Lloyd
Allayre Loar”). They argue that his F-5s represent the pinnacle of mandolin
design and possess unprecedented tone quality. Moreover, Loar’s F-5s, like
Stradivari’s violins, are highly singularized collectibles that fetch astronomical
prices relative to instruments of similar design built by other luthiers.6 At least in
name, both Loar and Stradivari are perceived as luthieric monarchs under whose
shadow all subsequent mandolin and violin luthiers have fallen.7
Yet the two men are hardly analogous. Unlike Stradivari, Loar did not
hand-build any of the F-5s attributed to him; rather, he conceived of them,
blueprinted them and supposedly oversaw their construction at the Gibson
Company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While Stradivari occasionally enjoyed the
assistance of his two sons, Francesco and Omobono, Loar depended entirely on an
ever-changing committee of around eight craftsmen (Dudenbostel I). Stradivari
produced 600-700 violins over a period of 80 years (at an average rate of one
every 40 days); Loar’s committee – which relied on mechanical technology
unknown to Stradivari – produced at least 250 mandolins over a period of only
two and a half years (at an average rate of one every four days).8 In short, while
6
An anonymous bidder purchased “The Hammer” Stradivarius violin (built in 1707) for a record
$3.54 million at a Christie’s auction on May 16, 2006, while mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile
purchased a Loar F-5 (#75316, signed Feb. 18, 1924) in the winter of 2007-08 for roughly
$250,000. The most expensive F-5s produced by modern builders fetch between $30,000 –
$40,000.
7
Of course, Stradivari has his critics. For further discussion, see Beament.
8
It is worth noting that both Stradivari and Loar also produced (or oversaw the production of) a
number of other instruments: Stradivari built cellos, lutes, guitars and even a few mandolins, while
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Stradivari was a “woodworking hero-saint,” Loar was not. In fact, luthier and
historian Roger H. Siminoff, one of the first to actually compare Loar and
Stradivari, has stated unequivocally that Loar “was not a luthier” (Siminoff,
“Harvard”).
These contrasts would seem to negate the parallel altogether. Even so, the
fact that Loar was not an expert craftsman does not seem to detract from his
Stradivarian status among modern F-5 luthiers, most of whom are very skilled
craftsmen themselves. If most luthiers, at least, are aware that Loar did not build
the original F-5s, why does he continue to command such respect?
I address this question in three steps. In Chapter 1, I describe the design
and production of F-5s at Gibson from 1922-1924. I discuss the most noteworthy
antecedents of the F-5 and emphasize the degree to which its design appeals, both
structurally and symbolically, to the violin. Prompted by the commensal
relationship between the F-5 and the violin, I invoke Bourdieusian theory9 to
argue that the F-5 is a culturally active product. Finally, I recommend that its
sonic and material dimensions be perceived as separate entities.
In Chapter 2, I briefly recount the history of approaches to the
unanswerable question, “What is art?”, and explain that musical instruments,
though labeled “crafts” by some art theorists, have at times been deemed works of
“mathematical” art (akin to architecture) by virtue of their use of proportion.
Using the F-5 as a springboard for theoretical discussion, and stressing the
Loar oversaw the production of mandolas, mandocellos and guitars. The rates I present here are
approximate and do not reflect the actual time required to construct each instrument (i.e. many
were built in batches).
9
I.e. the theory of the field of cultural production. See Bourdieu.
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conceptual dissociation of sound from material, I contend that an instrument’s
tone – not just its use of proportion per se – can be perceived as a work of art. I
offer two basic models for understanding instrument production (i.e.
reproduction) and suggest that the term “luthier” really encompasses three
different types of instrument maker: (1) the tonal artist (or instrument designer),
(2) the sonic broker, and (3) the material broker.
I begin the final chapter by examining the course of F-5 luthiery and
consumption from 1924 to the present day. I proceed to investigate the meaning
of “sonic broker” by documenting the process by which Lynn Dudenbostel –
widely regarded an expert broker of the “Loar tone” – constructs his F-5s. I show
that sonic brokerage implicates certain tasks whose execution requires the ability
to mentally “hear” this tone.
After calling into question the widespread assumption that Loars are the
most superior of all F-5s, I conclude by suggesting that the relationship between
Loar and modern sonic brokers of the F-5 is one of symbolic symbiosis.
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Chapter 1: The Origins and Cultural Function of the F-5 Mandolin
Introduction
Below are two illustrations that were featured on the covers of Gibson
instrument catalogs during the early twentieth century:
Figure 3. This young lady, who strums a
Gibson three-point Florentine mandolin,
graces the cover of the Gibson MandolinGuitar Manufacturing Company’s first
catalog (1903) (Hambly 436).
Figure 4. This illustration appears on the
cover of the Gibson Company’s catalog
“M” (1921). Hambly writes, “In the first
years of this century it was fashionable
for the young woman to play mandolin
for her beau” (437).
The Florentine mandolin, depicted in both images, creates a sense of harmony
between the mandolinist and the natural world. In the Figure 3, the instrument’s
flowing contour mimics the gently sloping hills in the background; in Figure 4,
leaves spring from the suspended mandolin as though it were a tree branch itself.
Such pleasant, organic scenes portray Gibson’s Florentine mandolins as desirable
alternatives to the smaller, simpler Neapolitan mandolins that had dominated the
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American mandolin market ever since the Spanish Students popularized the
instrument in the 1880s.
It is unclear why Orville Gibson, who conceived of this radically new
mandolin design in the 1890s, chose the label “Florentine.” The mandolino
fiorentino (“Florentine mandolin”) already existed in Italy, and it resembled the
Neapolitan mandolin in all but a few dimensions, such as neck width (qtd. in
Hambly 461). Hambly argues that Gibson’s “Florentine” design was “partially
based on perceptions of organic principles synthesized through what may have
been a predilection for Art Nouveau,” which renders the label even more puzzling
(438). Gibson kept no personal diary, so it is impossible to determine the primary
inspiration for the label. I speculate that “Florentine” was selected largely for its
marketability: the name establishes an implicit rivalry with Naples, the birthplace
of the Neapolitan mandolin, but it still references the home country of the world’s
most illustrious violin luthiers, whose designs Gibson invoked in his own.
Like Gibson’s F-2 and F-4, Lloyd Loar’s F-5 borrowed structural
characteristics from the violin, yet it possessed a character quite unlike its two
predecessors. Although Hambly claims that Loar only “refined” the F-4,
American F-5 luthier Lynn Dudenbostel argues otherwise:
The Loar mandolin is so different from anything Orville came up
with. It has some similarities to the F-4 as far as the shape and the
styling, but as far as the way it works, it’s a totally different
instrument. It’s graduated differently, and it features the first
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example of a cantilevered and elevated fingerboard. It also features
the first f-holes (Dudenbostel II).
Perhaps most significant, the circumstances surrounding the design and
production of the F-5 were unique. While Gibson, an amateur musician, designed
and produced mandolins during the heyday of the plucked instrument vogue,
Loar, a serious and renowned concert performer, designed and oversaw the
production of mandolins during a period in which the instrument’s popularity was
declining precipitously. In a profound sense, the unprecedentedly loud, rich,
complex, violinistic F-5 served as a last, desperate appeal to the realm of
“serious” music before the instrument sank into the depths of obscurity in the
early 1920s.
In this chapter, I begin by discussing the structure and production (from
1922 – 1924) of the original F-5s. Next, I examine the F-5’s violinistic
antecedents and posit that its design is symbolically motivated. Finally, I suggest
that the F-5 is a culturally active, expressive-aesthetic product characterized by an
inherent dualism between sound and material.
The Design and Assembly of the F-5
Figure 5 features a Loar F-5 with labeled components, which comprise the
following:
1. The body, which encloses the air chamber. It consists of carved top
and back plates as well as sides made from wood heated and bent into
shape. Primarily ovular, the body does feature a scroll (on the bass side
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beside the dovetail joint) and two points (on the treble side) that
organicize its contour.
2. The neck, to which the fretboard is attached. It is connected to the
body via the dovetail joint (for more on the dovetail joint, see Chapter
3).
3. The fingerboard, a long piece of dyed black pearwood glued to the
top of the neck. The fingerboard is slotted with 29 frets, or strips of
metal wire. A fingerboard extension (containing the frets closest to the
bridge) is typically affixed to the fingerboard’s body-end.
4. The peghead, which holds the tuning pegs in place and which is
affixed to the end of the neck opposite the body. Like the body, its
profile is notably organic.
17 (hidden)
1
6
5
14
2
4
12
11
8
16
10
9 (hidden)
3
13
7 (hidden)
15
Figure 5. A Lloyd Loar-signed F-5 mandolin. Date unknown. Image courtesy of George Gruhn.
O’Connor 18
More specific components (some of which are not visible) include: 1
5. The bridge, which sits on the top and is held in place by the tension of
taut strings. It is the mechanism that both transmits vibrational energy
to the top and maintains the spacing between strings.
6. Two f-holes, apertures that control the compression and rarefaction of
air as it travels between the air chamber (body interior) and the
surrounding environment.
7. Two longitudinal tone bars, which control the stiffness of the
soundboard and which are glued to the interior of the top.
8. The tailpiece, which anchors the strings to the body. Affixed to the
end of the body opposite the dovetail joint, the tailpiece typically
features eight small hooks around which string-ends are looped.
9. The truss rod, a steel contraption placed in a slot within the neck (and
under the fretboard) that counteracts the outward, bending force of taut
strings. The truss rod can be tightened or loosened whenever the neck
bows (e.g. due to changes in humidity).
10. The pickguard, which protects the top from plectral marring.
11. The truss rod cover, a small plate screwed to the peghead that covers
one end of the truss rod. It is via this small opening that truss rod
adjustments are effected.
12. The nut, usually made of bone or mother-of-pearl, which holds the
strings in place between fretboard and peghead.
1
See Siminoff’s Luthier’s Glossary (2008) for further details.
O’Connor 19
13. The tuning pegs, adjustable posts that protrude laterally from the
peghead. These feature small holes through which string-ends are
wound.
14. The strings, which are typically made of phosphor bronze wire. The
mandolin features four pairs of strings tuned to four notes: g-d’-a’-e”
(like the violin).
15. White binding, which seals the edges of the entire instrument (body,
neck, fretboard and peghead) and protects it from marring.
16. “Cremona brown” sunburst, a color gradient painted onto the top
and back. Typically, this comprises a light yellow or tobacco hue in
the center that gradually darkens to reddish brown near the edges. The
name “Cremona” is a tribute to the birthplace of the modern violin.
17. Varnish, a finishing medium that comprises particles of lac dissolved
in a spirit such as ethanol. Several coats of varnish are applied to the
entire body and neck (except the fingerboard).2
Figure 6 (p. 20) shows the thicknesses to which an F-5 built in 1923 was
graduated (i.e. chiseled and sanded).
I have already noted that Loar did not build any of the F-5s that bear his
signature; rather, a committee of roughly eight craftsmen – a number of whom
were likely skilled violinmakers and cabinetmakers from Europe – produced them
in batches of eight to ten (Dudenbostel I). Modern mandolin luthiers do not
2
Loar’s craftsmen applied several coats of alkyd resin varnish and a single coat of spirit varnish to
each F-5. The process by which shellac (i.e. the varnish derived from particles of lac) is applied to
an instrument is called “French polishing.”
O’Connor 20
Figure 6. Graduation maps of the top (left) and back (right) of a Loar F-5 built in 1923. All
numbers indicate thicknesses (in millimeters) at specific nodes on the top and back plates.
(Shading due to age of original document.) Illustrations by luthier Tom Ellis of Austin,
Texas. Courtesy of luthier Bill Collings of Austin, Texas.
characterize Gibson’s production methods during the 1920s as “mass production”
or “assembly line” because such descriptors imply a lack of craftsmanship and
attention to detail. Nonetheless, F-5s were “production instruments” (i.e. they
were built rapidly and for maximum profit), and each craftsman did specialize in a
different task: one worker carved parts, another worker sanded them, another one
glued them together, and so on. Without this division of labor, it would have been
nigh on impossible for Gibson to produce 250 mandolins in only two and a half
years.
Unfortunately, the exact procedure Gibson employed to produce F-5s was
never documented (Siminoff, “Undergraduate”). The original F-5 specification
sheet (Figure 7) contains instructions for wood-selection and graduation, but it
O’Connor 21
remains vague on most details. It does specify that both tops and backs were
“carved on a special F-5 carving form,” which would have been accomplished
with the help of a panograph-style duplicator, a machine that traces a wooden or
fiberglass mold with a stylus and duplicates it on (i.e. cuts its contour into) a
separate chunk of wood (either a top or back blank). Notably, the fact that the
rims (sides), top and back featured “dimensions…the same as the F-4” indicates a
strong link between the F-5 and F-4; however, the F-5 differed from the F-4 in a
number of significant ways (i.e. it featured different graduation specifications and
had f-holes and a cantilevered fingerboard, among other things) (Dudenbostel II).
Whether or not F-5s were “tap tuned” remains a source of controversy. Tap tuning
is a process by which a luthier adjusts the size and stiffness of an instrument’s
components (i.e. tone bars, backboards and air chamber) to determine its resonant
frequency (i.e. pitch to which it responds most sympathetically) and thus its
contribution to the tone and timbre of the instrument itself. Luthier and Loar
expert Roger H. Siminoff, who has published several popular manuals on luthiery,
firmly believes that Loars were tap-tuned.3 He cites as clear evidence the interior
label of each F-5, which reads, “The top, back, tone-bars, and air-chamber of this
instrument were tested, tuned and the assembled instrument tried and approved
(date) _.” Siminoff also invokes an article written in 1925 by Loar himself, who
apparently advocates for tap tuning (cont’d on p. 23).
3
Siminoff writes that the treble tone bar should be tuned to an A#, the bass tone bar to a G#, the
backboard to a C and the air chamber to a D#.
O’Connor 22
Figure 7. Copy of Lloyd Loar’s specification sheet for the F-5
(Davis 32).
O’Connor 23
Suffice it to say that when making sound-boards of wood, which is
very uneven in its standards, no two pieces ever being the same in
texture, strength, and sensitiveness, better results will be secured if
the vibration rate of various parts of the board and its resistance to
a standard degree of pressure [which measures stiffness] be taken
as manufacturing standards rather than measurements of thickness
or graduation (Siminoff, Tap Tuning 44).
Siminoff takes this advice to mean that F-5s themselves were tap tuned.4
Despite this apparently convincing evidence, a number of modern luthiers
dispute the idea that each F-5 was individually tap tuned. The graduation
requirements listed on the F-5 original specification sheet unambiguously indicate
that backs were carved “at center 3/16”, Fin[ished] 5/32”; at 7/8” from sides and
tail end 1/8”, Fin[ished] 1/10”,” while tops were carved “at center 7/32”,
Fin[ished] 11/64”; at 7/8” from sides and tail end 5/32”, Fin[ished] 1/8”.”
Dudenbostel notes that there is “no mention that the top should be tapped to a
certain note,” which he believes disproves the tap-tuning theory (I). One surmises
that, for the sake of expediency, Gibson simply did not adopt the advice Loar
offered in his article, which was published after he departed from the company.
Dudenbostel explains, “The goal was to produce F-5s, get them out the door and
sell them,” and as a result, “the attention to detail was not that good” (II). He
believes, for instance, that the sunburst strategically conceals production flaws.
4
In The Art of Tap Tuning, Siminoff describes an experience he had at “LoarFest West,” an event
that took place in February 2006 in Bakersfield, California. Nearly 25 Loar F-5s were present at
the event, and “while each instrument had its own character, the instruments played in that room
shared an incredible tonal resemblance…Clearly, it was a testament to the virtues and credibility
of tap tuning” (11).
O’Connor 24
“You look at a Loar, and it’s dark around the edges and concave areas, like at the
scroll,” he says. “Why is that? This is where the wood would have been bent over
a hot iron, and it would possibly have been scorched. [Moreover], if you look real
close at the scroll, you can see some filler around there, between the binding and
the wood.”
Both scorching and the need for filler evince the relative haste with which
F-5s were assembled. It seems implausible that Gibson’s production standards
could have accommodated a process as detail-oriented and time-consuming as tap
tuning. (Perhaps the F-5 graduation specifications were established on a tap tuned
prototype, although this would seem to negate the very principle of tap tuning,
which implies that each instrument is unique.) In any case, it is worth noting that
none of the four most respected F-5 luthiers in the world – all of whom are
renowned for their ability to capture “the Loar sound” – tap tune their mandolins.5
The nature of the process by which F-5s were evaluated also remains
obscure. The presence of Loar’s signature on the interior label leads many F-5
enthusiasts to assume that Loar personally inspected each instrument (Hambly
420). However, Dudenbostel warns that the labels can be deceiving.
I doubt seriously that Loar played every one of those mandolins. If
you look at the label dates – July 9, 1923, April 25, 1923, Feb 18,
1924 – a lot of those dates were Mondays. A lot of times Loar
would say, “Okay, we have a bunch of mandolins that are almost
done and need some labels.” So, he’d sit down on Monday
5
These four are Lynn Dudenbostel, Steve Gilchrist, Mike Kemnitzer and John Monteleone.
O’Connor 25
morning and sign labels. Also, if there was one that didn’t meet his
standards, did it get cut in half and thrown in the scrap pile?
There’s no evidence of any of them being rejected (II).
Some records suggest that Loar was even touring on a few of the dates he
purportedly tested a new batch of F-5s (Dudenbostel II). Given Gibson’s
production schedule, I find it unlikely that each F-5 was thoroughly
evaluated.
There is no doubt, however, that the F-5 was regarded as something of a
luxury accoutrement, which probably exacerbated Gibson’s financial problems
once the mandolin fell completely out of vogue in the mid-1920s. At a steep $250,
the F-5 was far more expensive than a number of other widely marketed
mandolins, such as Lyon and Healy’s $100 Neapolitan model (Tyler 129). For a
while at least, Gibson managed to convince the public that its F-5s deserved a
high price tag. I have already mentioned that the company frequently published
instrument catalogs whose covers featured young, joyful, winsome boys and girls
playing mandolins in idyllic settings (see Figures 2 and 3). Simultaneously, it
mounted a belligerent campaign against Neapolitan mandolins and their adherents
(Hambly 449). It also sponsored touring ensembles (“Gibsonians”) and developed
a network of music teacher-agents to market its products to students.
Notwithstanding these efforts, the mandolin began to lose ground to the tenor
banjo in the popular music sphere in the 1910s and 1920s. Williams’s prediction
that Loar’s fancy new F-5 would revitalize the mandolin market proved wrong,
O’Connor 26
and as a result, Loar broke ties with Gibson in 1925. In the ensuing years, F-5
production slowed almost to a standstill.
The Relationship Between the F-5 and the Violin
Modern proponents of Loar, citing the F-5’s reliance on Stradivarian
principles of violin construction, deem the instrument truly revolutionary (Tyler
129). Yet the F-5 was far from the first mandolin design to appropriate carved
plates, an elevated fingerboard, f-holes and other design specifications from its
bowed cousin. I suggest that the F-5 be perceived as a continuation – perhaps
even the culmination – of a century-long, bipartite luthieric quest to (1) adapt the
best and most transferable elements of the violin to mandolin design and,
resultantly, (2) make the mandolin a contender in the realm of art music.6
I exercise caution in drawing parallels between the mandolin and violin.
As F-5 luthier John Monteleone argues, “You can’t compare it to the violin, you
can’t. Structurally and physically, everything is a whole different shape and
different concept – different stresses” (Grisman, “Monteleone” 14). Dudenbostel
calls the two instruments “geometrical opposites.” On the violin, the constant
input of energy delivered by the bow necessitates an interior sound post and bass
bar; on the mandolin, the intermittent input of energy (i.e. the moments of contact
between plectrum and string) necessitates two longitudinal tone bars. These
disparate internal mechanisms require disparate body designs.
6
One could append “and capture an emerging popular audience” to (2), although Sparks and
Siminoff (1994) indicate that mandolin designers were more concerned with the status of the
mandolin in art music rather than the instrument’s general popularity.
O’Connor 27
However, the striking resemblance between the two instruments cannot be
denied. The F-5’s f-holes, “Cremona” brown color, scroll (albeit displaced from
its original position on the peghead), longer neck, elevated fingerboard,
fingerboard extension, “recurve” area (a ring of minimum thickness carved into
the top), increased neck angle, gently arching, graduated top and back plates and
(arguably) tuned apertures and air chambers are all nods to violin design
(Siminoff, “Lloyd Allayre Loar: 1886-1943”).
Almost none of these adaptations was unprecedented: throughout much of
the nineteenth century, Italian mandoline luthiers had looked to the violin for
inspiration. Generally speaking, as orchestras and concert halls grew larger,
instrument builders enhanced the volume and extended the ranges of their
instruments. In the early 1800s, the violin’s fingerboard was raised and extended
and its body strengthened to support new, high-tension steel strings. As early as
1835, Pasquale Vinaccia likewise raised and extended the mandoline’s
fingerboard, strengthened its body, increased its size and weight and strung it with
steel strings. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Luigi Embergher (with
the help of Giovanni De Santis and Giovanni Battista Maldura) developed a
Roman mandoline that appropriated a curved and narrowed fingerboard, a curved
bridge, a scroll peghead and, in some cases, wooden tuning pegs from the violin
(Sparks 67). Nevertheless these luthiers maintained the flat tops and bowl-shaped
backs characteristic of older mandolines.
The manufacture of mandolins in the United States did not take off until
the 1890s. Sparks believes this is attributable to the fact that high tariffs stifled
O’Connor 28
foreign competition in the American mandolin marketplace; moreover, he notes,
most mandolins imported from Europe were of poor quality (128). I believe the
Genoa Exhibition of 1892 (see Introduction), which featured competitions and
performance opportunities for hundreds of mandolinists and numerous mandolin
orchestras, was also responsible for the growth of the industry. Sparks notes that
the exhibition had “awaken[ed] mandolinists to the full range of musical
possibilities of their instruments, which were now seen to possess far greater
artistic potential than many of the players had hitherto realized” (Sparks 51). At
the conclusion of the exhibition, mandolin aficionados had become “fired with a
determination to raise the status of the mandolin family to the level of serious
concert instruments,” and as they began to work toward such a goal, the
instrument’s visibility increased (Sparks 53). Barely two years later, Chicagobased instrument manufacturer Lyon and Healy was producing 7,000 Neapolitan
mandolins per year; other manufacturers, such as C.F. Martin & Co. (renowned
for its guitars), were not far behind (qtd. in Sparks 129).
However, some ambitious luthiers eschewed the Neapolitan design. The
earliest known “flat-back mandolin,” called the “Estudiantina,” appeared in the
Jerome Thibouville-Lamy trade catalog, which was published in France in 1889
and released in the U.S. sometime during the early 1890s (Hambly 447). Soon
thereafter, Americans Neil Merrill, Lewis Edwin Pyle and Albert H. Merrill all
filed for patents for flat-backed, mandolin-like stringed instruments. The former
Merrill’s mandolins were built of cast-aluminum and marketed as “the Wonder of
the Age. For purity, sweetness and volume of tone THEY EXCELL ALL
O’Connor 29
OTHERS” (Sparks 129). Pyle’s heart-shaped mandolin-guitars featured arched
top and back plates (Hambly 439). The latter Merrill’s instrument, called a
chordola, was the first mandolin-like instrument to feature f-holes, although
apparently no chordolas were ever actually built (Hambly 441).
Orville Gibson acquired his lone patent (no. 598,245) on February 1, 1898
for an F-4 Florentine mandolin that featured a carved top and back, an extended
fingerboard and rims (or sides) sawn from single pieces of wood (Gibson).
Hambly argues,
Orville Gibson’s carved-top and -back mandolins, if not actual
progenitors, were at the very least catalysts toward a gradual
transmogrification of idealized mandolinic design from what can
generically be called a “bowl mandolin” to a “flat-back mandolin”
(447).
Indeed, Gibson himself (as well as some of his co-workers like Ted
McHugh, who devised the adjustable truss rod and height-adjustable
bridge) conceived of the basic structural template upon which the F-5
design would be modeled.
Thanks to Gibson’s success, the number of luthiers and manufacturers
producing violinistic mandolins swelled; I provide a small sample of them here.
Paul Pechenart received a patent on July 22, 1902 for a mandolin with a violin
scroll. G.H. Blair’s “American Lute,” patented on July 28, 1903, incorporated far
fewer elements of violin design than Gibson’s Florentine model but was
nevertheless advertised as “the mandolin with the violin tone. Shaped like a lute –
O’Connor 30
built like a fiddle. Made on the principle of a genuine Stradivarius violin” (qtd. in
Hambly 449). On March 6, 1906, Otto Herman Lemberg acquired a patent for a
violin fitted with mandolin machine heads and strings (Johnson, “Mandolin
Orchestra” 13). Most notably, on March 8, 1910, luthier Albert Shutt was granted
a patent for a mandolin that, like Merrill’s chordola, featured f-holes, an elevated
fingerboard and an arched soundboard.7 Driven by Gibson’s success, Lyon and
Healy, C.F. Martin & Co. and other major manufacturers began to design and
produce their own versions of flat-backed, carved-plate mandolins in the early
1910s.
Mandolin luthiers and manufacturers drew heavily from the violin for two
reasons. First, the mandolin and violin were similar in size, tuning and very basic
structural characteristics. In fact, mandolinists were often proficient on the violin
(and vice versa), and for over a century, mandolin virtuosi had developed
reputations largely by performing the violin works of Bach, Paganini, Sarasate
and others. Second, the violin had long represented the quintessential “serious”
concert instrument to many performers, audiences and writers. In his classic
Musick’s Monument (1676), Thomas Mace wrote that the sound of the viol, the
violin’s immediate ancestor, “disposes us to Solidarity, Gravity and a Good
Temper, making us capable of Heavenly and Divine Influences” (qtd. in Galpin
141). In 1895, luthier Peter Davidson wrote, “The most beautiful of all
instruments is the Violin; it has been termed the king of instruments” (54).
7
As Siminoff (“Lloyd Allayre Loar: 1886-1943”) notes, Shutt’s patent’s lasted only seven years,
so Gibson was legally permitted to use these design components as early as 1917.
O’Connor 31
American musicologist David D. Boyden offers a particularly eloquent
characterization of the instrument:
The violin is one of the most perfect instruments acoustically and
has extraordinary musical versatility. In beauty and emotional
appeal its tone rivals that of its model, the human voice, but at the
same time the violin is capable of particular agility and brilliant
figuration, making possible in one instrument the expression of
moods and effects that may range, depending on the will and skill
of the player, from the lyric and tender to the brilliant and
dramatic. Possibly no other instrument can boast a larger and
musically more distinguished repertory, if one takes into account
all forms of solo and ensemble music in which the violin has been
assigned a part (Boyden).
It is no wonder, then, that mandolin builders aspired to bestow upon their
instruments a violinistic capacity for musical expressiveness.
Thus, the production of violinistic mandolins in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries served both economic and symbolic purposes. As
mandolin orchestras proliferated in the United States, demand for louder
mandolins boomed. Broadly speaking, mandolins featuring flat backs and carved
bodies generated greater volume and thus satisfied this demand. Market forces
aside, violinistic mandolins also collectively represented an attempt to liberate the
instrument from the chains of “light” and “folk” music that had precluded its
approval in the art music realm for over a century and a half. One can only
O’Connor 32
presume that different luthiers entered the mandolin market for different reasons:
some sought to exploit the market, while others sought to enhance the mandolin’s
status for its own sake. For most, it was probably a combination of both.
For the Gibson Company, the tension between economic and symbolic
motivation likely manifested itself in the relationship between company
management and Loar himself. Loar’s own experience as a performing artist and
desire to enhance the status of the mandolin informed his acoustical designs.8
Hambly notes (420), “The design and manufacture of the F-5s was overseen by a
seasoned concertizer for the benefit and use of other concertizers, primarily
soloists playing fine art music.” The longevity of Loar’s performing career –
which began long before, and lasted until long after, his Gibson tenure –
corroborates the notion that he developed a set of aesthetic preferences that
guided his luthieric endeavors.
Such preferences mattered little to Gibson’s shareholders when they failed
to turn a profit. Unfortunately for them, the design of the F-5 was far from
conducive to expeditious production. Graduating tops and backs required
extensive time and effort. Furthermore, the scroll, body points and fancy peghead
contour alone cost some modern F-5 luthiers as many as 75 additional production
hours per mandolin; had Gibson abandoned these (almost purely) cosmetic
features, it may have been able to produce more mandolins and sell them at more
attractive prices, albeit at the expense of an appealing visual aesthetic. In any
8
Grisman (“Monteleone”), Sparks, Gruhn and Dudenbostel state that Lloyd Loar collaborated
with Guy Hart to design the F-5, but Carter (“Guy Hart”) explains that the Gibson Company hired
Hart as an accountant (not a designer or craftsman) in 1923, a year after the first F-5s were
produced (103).
O’Connor 33
case, once the tenor banjo became in vogue, the popularity of the mandolin
plummeted, and Gibson reaped few financial rewards from the sale of F-5s.
Siminoff writes that, as a result, Loar “departed Gibson to pursue other interests,”
but luthier Bill Collings believes rather that Loar “got fired because he didn’t
make the mandolin popular. Loar was fired because he wasn’t the magic thing.
Music was changing” (Collings). In fact, although Loar dedicated much of the rest
of his life to designing and promoting electric keyboard and stringed instruments,
he neither designed nor built another mandolin.
The F-5 as a Culturally Active Product
For all its visual flair, the F-5 was a humble product. It did not rescue the
mandolin market. It failed to elevate the status of the mandolin in the realm of art
music. Moreover, almost all “revolutionary” aspects of its structure – from its
bass-side scroll to its carved top and back plates to its elevated fingerboard – had
precedent in other mandolin designs. As unique as its particular configuration of
violinistic specifications may have been, it cannot be separated from the luthieric
trend of which it was part as well as the contemporary musical soundscape in
which it operated. As philosopher Philip Alperson writes,
It is important to realize…that [instruments] are not material
objects construed as mere hunks of physical stuff. We are speaking
of objects whose creation and whose musical capabilities are
infused with information and conceptual structures that reflect the
history and styles of musical sounds. That is to say, the material
O’Connor 34
objects we think of as musical instruments are culturally freighted
right from the beginning (41).
The F-5 reflected the musical circumstances prevalent in the era and environment
in which it was designed, such as the perpetual trend toward louder instruments
and louder music, the correlated trend toward the violinization of the mandolin,
the growth in popularity of mandolin orchestras (which called for loud
mandolins), and the rise of the mandolin virtuoso.9
Yet modern F-5 proponents’ awe at Loar’s creation is not at all
unfounded. Indeed, the F-5 has proven to be a superb performance tool. On a
deeper level, it can be perceived not only as a reflection of early twentieth-century
musical culture but also as a means of shaping it. Alperson’s argument is
undeniably valuable, but I contend that the F-5 was, culturally speaking, just as
active as it was “freighted.”
The notion of “culture” must be clarified here. I do not, like Edward B.
Tylor, mean “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society” (Tylor 64). Nor do I mean, like Alfred Kroeber, a system that is
inherited, that patterns individuals and that is independent of specific, even highly
influential figures (Kroeber 114). These static, supraindividual notions of culture,
ubiquitous in earlier anthropological writings, have been widely criticized for
their failure to consider the “dialectical interplay between individuals and broader
cultural patterns” (Turino 109). I am particularly inclined toward Bourdieu’s
9
Among the more notable such virtuosi were Italians Raffaele Calace and Silvio Ranieri and
Americans Samuel Siegel and Zarh Myron Bickford.
O’Connor 35
notion of the “field of cultural production,” which, in line with classical
sociology, maintains a broad definition of culture – science, law, religion,
“expressive-aesthetic” activities (such as literature, art and music) and other
cultural “goods” – but, unlike its predecessors, treats culture as existing in a
“field,” which can be modified (indeed, always is modified) by agents therein
(Bourdieu 34).
More specifically, a field (i.e. the economic, the political, the educational,
and so on) is a “structured space with its own laws of functioning and its own
relations of force” (Johnson, Introduction 5). Each human agent within the field
possesses a habitus, a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured
structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles
which generate and organize practices and representations” (Johnson,
Introduction, 5). Agents within the cultural field maintain particular “positions”
(habits and dispositions) that determine their “practices” (what they think, do and
make), which in turn can change the field’s structure (hence the notion of the
habitus as comprising “structuring structures”) (Turino 120). Moreover, agents
struggle to accumulate different kinds of capital (“resources”), such as economic
(wealth), cultural (knowledge and skills) and symbolic (honor and prestige).
Bourdieu conceptualizes the field of cultural production as a set of
dichotomies of power, capital and autonomy. The field of power, which exists in
the social space, is divided according to economic capital; thus, the field of
cultural production is oriented in the (economically) dominated fraction of the
dominant class. However, cultural producers acquire cultural capital (the opposite
O’Connor 36
of economic capital), which may be converted into economic capital in the future.
The field of cultural production itself is divided into two sub-fields, large-scale
production and small-scale production. Producers in the first sub-field, who are
less autonomous of the field of power (i.e. the influence of the dominant class),
produce “commercial” cultural goods, which cater to the market and thus earn
little symbolic capital; on the other hand, producers in the second sub-field
produce “art for art’s sake,” which accrues cultural rather than economic capital.
Finally, the small-scale production sub-field itself is divided between consecrated
cultural products/producers (i.e. possessors of symbolic capital) and bohemian
products/producers, which/who shun symbolic capital.
The value of Bourdieu’s theory lies in its hyper-contextualization of
cultural products (Johnson, Introduction 9). It considers not only the space of
“position-takings,” defined as “the structured set of the manifestations of the
social agents involved in the field” (i.e. literary and artistic works) and the space
of positions, that is, the distribution of specific capital (recognition and
reputation) among producers of those literary and artistic works; it also considers
the positions of consecrators and legitimators of cultural products, such as
patrons, dealers, publishers, critics, museums, academies, and the public. The
field of cultural production comprises a broad set of objective relationships that
governs the production, replication and dissemination of such products.
Yet although Bourdieu’s theory has gained credence in cultural studies
and the sociology of culture, it is biased toward restricted cultural production.
Hesmondhalgh decries this unbalanced approach:
O’Connor 37
It is simply astonishing how little Bourdieu has to say about largescale, “heteronomous” commercial cultural production, given not
only its enormous social and cultural importance in the
contemporary world, but also its significance in determining
conditions in the sub-field in which he is clearly much more
interested, restricted production (218).10
Bourdieu focuses heavily on the restricted sub-field at the expense of developing
a thorough approach to the “commercial” sub-field, with which Hesmondhalgh, a
media scholar, is especially concerned given that Bourdieu deems journalism a
form of commercial cultural production.11 Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s model is one
of the most elaborate and comprehensive sociological approaches to culture in the
literature, and its portrayal of culture as a fluid, dynamic system susceptible to the
influence of individual agency is particularly attractive.
As a position-taking in what one might call the sociomusical layer of the
cultural field, the F-5 (created by Loar, the agent) served two functions. (1) As a
hyper-contextualized product, it reflected the structure of relations in the field: It
was one of a wide variety of new mandolins to appear on the market between the
1890s and 1920s, many of which appropriated aspects of violin design for the
sake of either economic capital or symbolic capital (or both). Moreover, its overt
visual and structural reliance on the violin rendered it the subordinate of the two,
which in turn signified its own lack of prestige. (2) It possessed the potential to
10
See Hesmondhalgh for other applications of Bourdieusian theory.
Moreover, Bourdieu’s theories are framed by French culture; some critics question the
applicability of his ideas to all cultures. See Lamont, Michelle. Money, Morals and Manners: The
culture of the French and American upper-middle class. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992.
Print.
11
O’Connor 38
significantly change the structure: had it been perceived as a viable “serious”
instrument capable of producing music as powerful and expressive as its bowed
counterpart, it could have inspired musically inclined youth to learn the mandolin,
encouraged composers to write for the mandolin and, as a result, acquired
symbolic capital (on the vertical axis) in the realm of art music. Several sources
suggest that Loar operated in the cultural field (i.e. designed the F-5) with these
goals in mind.12 Although the F-5 did not noticeably impact the structure of any
field in Loar’s lifetime, it has, by now, strongly influenced the sonic landscape.
These observations suggest that the making of the F-5 was characterized
by three largely overlapping dualisms: design versus production, symbolic versus
economic capital, and Loar versus Gibson. Loar – who spent 30 years designing
new instruments (i.e. new sounds) that yielded few financial rewards – seemed to
have conceived of the F-5 with little regard for economic capital. On the other
hand, Gibson manifestly pursued such capital and treated the F-5 as a
“commercial” aesthetic product.13
Combining two critical notions – (1) the F-5, a single product, can be
perceived (culturally speaking) from multiple angles simultaneously, and (2) the
Bourdieusian idea that the F-5 was a culturally active product – I posit the
existence of a fourth dualism inherent in the means of cultural action itself. That
is, I believe the F-5 was culturally active on two planes, the visual (material) and
the sonic. Moreover, I suggest that the line of demarcation in this dualism does
12
Siminoff (all), Hambly and Dudenbostel.
Hesmondhalgh (214) suggests that large-scale production might be better translated as “mass
production,” but I interpret “large-scale” to refer to the scale of the target audience rather than the
mode of production per se.
13
O’Connor 39
not parallel those of the first three dualisms; rather, it runs perpendicular to them
(i.e. sound and material are addressed by both Loar and Gibson, implicated in
both design and production, and involved in the pursuit of both symbolic and
economic capital).
There are three simple pieces of evidence for this fourth dualism. First, the
F-5 boasted ties to the violin both visually (via its scroll and “Cremona brown”
sunburst, for instance) and sonically (via its carved plates and f-holes). Second, as
Alperson argues (and as many luthiers claim; see Chapter 2), sound drives
instrument design. More specifically, although certain features of the F-5 were
almost purely cosmetic (such as the scroll and sunburst), Loar designed the F-5
around an ideal mandolin sound. Third, broadly speaking, the mandolin had long
suffered in the art music realm due to deficiencies in its sound, not its appearance.
In the following chapter, I take a closer look at this dualism and contend
that the sound of the F-5, which was governed by a set of aesthetic principles,
both indexed and commented on the contemporary musical landscape. As a
culturally active and expressive creation, it was not merely a “good” that catered
to the market but rather a genuinely “expressive-aesthetic act.” Finally, I suggest
that instrumental sound itself can fall into the sacred domain of what Bourdieu
calls “art for art’s sake.”
O’Connor 40
Chapter 2: The Art of Tone
As historical documents, musical instruments are objects…of
particular significance, revealing the technological resources of
the art of the innovative designer in service to the art of music,
expressed through a decorative art influenced by social
convention. In this way, they are a living reflection of the Muses, of
art and society, their makers, and the generations of players who
preserved and cherished them as intimates, leaving with them
something of their presence and their communicated thoughts and
feelings. – Kevin Coates1
Musical Instruments as Works of Art
The definition of “art” is notoriously contested. As philosopher Kendall
Walton notes, “It is not at all clear that [the] words – ‘What is art?’ – express
anything like a single question, to which competing answers are given, or whether
philosophers proposing answers are even engaged in the same debate” (Walton
148). Walton explains that aestheticians now concern themselves with more
answerable questions, such as “Do readers of literary works empathize with
characters?” or “Is linear perspective ‘natural’ or ‘conventional’?” under the
assumption that the literary and visual works they study count as art (150).
Aesthetic value alone is an insufficient determinant of art, for fields not usually
deemed “art,” such as mathematics, politics, chess and sports, possess aesthetic
qualities of their own.
An examination of the history of the debate over the meaning of “art” lies
outside the purview of this paper; rather, a brief account should suffice. Plato and
Aristotle argued that the ultimate goal of art was to imitate nature (Mey). Aristotle
wrote that a work of art possessed internal order and symmetry as well as external
1
Coates 3.
O’Connor 41
“definiteness of beauty” that distinguished it from other, arbitrary features of the
world (1087b). The “mimetic” theory of art persisted through the Renaissance and
into the Classical era, when, as Kerstin Mey notes, “thoughts on the
arts…concentrated on establishing rules and systems, hierarchical canons of
styles, and genres governed by the principle of art as imitation of beautiful nature”
(Mey). Frenchman Charles Batteux’s The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle
(1747) was the first modern text to unambiguously express such an approach to
the arts. “We will define painting, sculpture and dance as the imitation of
beautiful nature conveyed through colors, through relief and through attitudes,” he
wrote (qtd. in Carroll 22). “And music and poetry are the imitation of beautiful
nature conveyed through sounds, or through measured discourse.”
Theories of art as an independent form of expression, rather than a means
of imitation, sowed the seeds of Romanticism. In Aesthetica (1750-58), Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten wrote that aesthetics could be perceived as independent
from morality and practicality. Friedrich Schiller’s Über die ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen—in einer Reihe von Briefen (1795) “encouraged an
idealized view of art as a realm that could inform and ennoble mankind by virtue
of its very independence of necessity.” As William Vaughan notes,
These theories underpinned the idea of the autonomy of aesthetic
feeling and the heroic role of the artist. New categories of
experience were also developed, greatly expanding the range of the
aesthetic. To the traditional concept of beauty was added a radical
new understanding of the Sublime (n. pag.).
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The notion of the sublime, or the “overpowering,” gained credence in the early
nineteenth century. Indeed, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William
Wordsworth claims, “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings” (246).
Romantic expression theory was, generally speaking, superseded by
modern formalism, a theoretical (and critical and historical) approach to art that
developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and emphasized the
primacy of formal qualities, such as line, color and texture, over representational
qualities (Williams). German writer Konrad Fiedler, sculptor Adolf von
Hildebrand and British artist James McNeill Whistler all argued that effective
representation presupposed a successful arrangement of compositional elements,
thus privileging form over content (Williams). As Robert Williams notes, “Such
ideas served the liberating impulses of Modernism, helping, as in the case of
Kandinsky, to open the way for abstraction,” and they prompted some modern
theorists to go as far as to claim that art was a “purely impersonal” process (n.
pag.).
The twentieth century was characterized by a proliferation of different
views, ranging from a revival of expression theory to Wittgensteinian anti-theory
to institutional theory to what Peter Kivy calls neo-representationalism, a return to
eighteenth-century mimesis (Kivy 126). Of these, the institutional perspective
deserves a closer look. In a seminal article in the Journal of Philosophy, Arthur C.
Danto (1964) attempted to address the challenges to art posed by Duchamp’s
Fountain (and other “ready-made” works of art) and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. He
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wrote, “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an
atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld”
(“Artworld” 580). An “artworld” consists of far more than artists alone. It
comprises critics, collectors, audiences, curators – namely, everyone involved in
the production, judgment and consumption of works of art. Sociologist Howard
Becker, influenced by Danto’s work, thus defines art as something that (1) has
aesthetic value; (2) is justified by a coherent and defensible aesthetic; (3) is
recognized by appropriate people as having aesthetic value; and (4) is displayed in
the appropriate places (i.e. hung in museums or played at concerts) (138). He adds
that a work of art need not exhibit all these characteristics, but it often does.
Along similar lines, Pierre Bourdieu (see Chapter 1) contextualizes the work of
art as a “position-taking” in the cultural field and holds that its value is generated
by “incessant, innumerable struggles” for cultural capital between agents
(“painters and dealers, authors and publishers, writers and critics,” etc.) (78).
Bourdieu defines a work of art as “an object which exists as such only by virtue of
the (collective belief) which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art” (35).
The status of musical instruments in the realm of “art” has varied
considerably. To early theorists, the artistic qualities of musical instruments were
subordinate to their spiritual significance. Aristotle perceived the musical
instrument as a mechanical contrivance that mimicked the human voice and thus
was a legitimate “mode of imitation,” or a work of art; however, Plato barred the
use of “inanimate instruments” (i.e. all instruments but the voice) from his ideal
city-state in Republic. Crucially, Hellenic Greeks believed that the human soul
O’Connor 44
responded sympathetically to stringed and wind instruments, whose sounds were
deemed analogous to the music of the celestial spheres (Kartomi 120). Early
Arabic theorists likewise focused on the moral, cosmological and numerological
attributes of musical instruments, though they also classified them according to
their proportions and methods of construction (Kartomi 133). Roman statesman
Cassiodorus himself expounded on the importance of musical instruments in
Christianity. Kartomi writes,
Why, he asked, are instruments so often mentioned in the Psalms?
For two reasons…One was a musical reason: that instruments are
functional, sounding objects in their own right. The other was a
Christian theory of music’s emotional and moral effects that held
that instruments are also nonfunctional objects of reflection,
signifying invisible realities (139).
These “invisible realities,” Kartomi explains, can “signify divine love” and affect
people’s morals and emotions (139). For the next millennium, theorists including
Boethius, Johannes Cottonius and Johannes de Grocheio addressed musical
instruments from this (chiefly theological) perspective.
From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, discussions of musical
instruments became more sociocultural and contextual and less religious and
speculative (i.e. impractical) (Kartomi 160). Structures of classification rooted in
Boethius’s tripartite system (strings, winds and percussion) began to
accommodate the physical dimensions, mechanics, tuning, social functions and
histories of instruments. Grocheio was among the first to develop such an
O’Connor 45
inclusive taxonomy, although Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum (1618)
features the most notable proto-organological treatment of musical instruments
both Western and non-Western.
As Western colonial powers expanded their spheres of rule and influence
between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, they amassed enormous
collections of musical instruments from around the world; as a result, organology,
the scientific study of musical instruments, developed into a legitimate academic
discipline (Libin). Arguably beginning with Guillaume André Villoteau (17591839), who conducted an extensive scientific study of Egyptian music and
musical instruments while traveling with Napoleon Bonaparte, organologists and
ethnomusicologists (most notably Charles Mahillon (1880), Francis Galpin
(1910), Curt Sachs (1913), and Erich von Hornbostel and Sachs (1914))
developed numerous taxonomies based on the physical descriptions, techniques of
performance, musical functions and sociocultural implications of musical
instruments (Hood, Ethnomusicologist 140). The Sachs-Hornbostel system
classed instruments according to the manner in which they produced sound; it
comprised idiophones (self-sounding instruments, such as gongs or bells),
membranophones (which feature vibrating membranes, like drums),
chordophones (instruments with vibrating strings, like mandolins or harps) and
aerophones (in which sound is produced via a vibrating column of air, as in flutes
or trumpets). This system, to which Sachs later appended electronophones
(electronic instruments), was widely endorsed in the twentieth century (Hood,
Ethnomusicologist 144).
O’Connor 46
Yet these more recent, scientific endeavors are rather unhelpful in the
quest to determine what constitutes “art” in musical instruments. Since the
Renaissance, some writers have perceived instruments as works of art by virtue of
their implication of architectural principles. In Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius
writes, “Musical instruments may be described as the ingenious work of able and
earnest artisans who fashioned them out of good materials and designed them in
the true proportions of art, such that they produce a beautiful accord of sound”
(viii). Praetorius subscribed to the Pythagorean notion that art presupposed good
numerical proportion. Sebastiano Serlio, one of the most notable architects of the
Italian Renaissance, also held that “Geometrie is the first degree of all good art”
(qtd. in Birkett 49). Elizabethan mathematician John Dee deemed architecture an
“ars mathematical,” that is, a “Mathematical Science which teaches the Art of
Building…according to Geometry and Proportion,” a description Birkett contends
can be extrapolated to the construction of at least some types of musical
instruments (49). More recently, Coates has deemed musical instruments a
reflection of the “deep-seated craving of man to create symmetries analogous to
his own” (29). He adduces Rudolf Wittkower’s influential Architectural
Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) to contend that the instrument designs
of successful luthiers employ formalized geometry and proportional knowledge
that, like architecture, inspire “wonder and curiosity” in those who behold their
material forms (3).
However, this discussion of instruments as forms of architecture risks
conflating art and craft, a dichotomy that, albeit often construed as a class
O’Connor 47
distinction, remains sociologically pertinent. Danto describes art as existing “in an
atmosphere of interpretation” (qtd. in Becker 149). As opposed to everyday
objects like crafts – some of which could certainly be regarded mimetic art in the
Aristotelian sense – art objects “use the means of representation in a way that is
not exclusively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being
represented…it expresses something about [its] content” (Kivy 127). On the other
hand, crafts privilege use value over artistic expressiveness. Becker defines
craftsmanship as “a body of knowledge and skill which can be used to produce
useful objects,” such a chair (for sitting) or a dish (for eating) (127). It also
consists of the capacity to “perform in a useful way,” e.g. to play music that can
be danced to or to serve a meal to guests efficiently. Like art, a craft can require
“virtuoso skill” and engender “aesthetic standards and canons of taste,” and it can
also be displayed in museums and earn the craftsman an artist-like reputation.
Unlike art, which is autonomous, craft is, above all, functional.
It is inarguable that an instrument is, by definition, an object with use
value. Alperson writes that musical instruments are typically defined as “discrete,
self-subsisting material objects, intentionally crafted for the purpose of making
music by performing musicians,” though in some cases they are also natural (e.g.
gourds) or “found” (e.g. typewriters, originally created for a non-musical purpose,
which are “found” to have percussive value) (38). He argues that musical
instruments “are intimately tied to performers’ bodies” so that, in some sense,
they are appendages; however, this only underscores the requirement that they
enable the execution of musical works (46). Tarabella and Bertini characterize
O’Connor 48
instruments as “compact tools which gather together the aspects…necessary for
stating and determining timbre and for controlling pitch and nuances of sound”;
they conceive of the relationship between performer and instrument as a
“feedback loop which enables continuous control of sound characteristics (pitch,
intensity, timbre, articulation, etc.) by means of continuous modifications of the
physical synthesis parameters” (qtd. in Reybrouck 66). According to this view,
the proper instrument gives the performer maximal control over sound production
and quality. Aesthetic qualities of design aside, instruments function chiefly as
mediators between performers’ physical movements and a resulting sound.
Yet the criterion of utility alone seems an insufficient determinant of craft.
Architecture, whose “history is more ancient than that of any other art,” is utile
insofar as it has traditionally satisfied the lasting human need for shelter.
(Benjamin 240). At the risk of stating the obvious, Duchamp’s Fountain certainly
had use value before it was flipped upside down, signed and proclaimed art; one
would only have to adhere it to a wall and hook it up to a plumbing line to revive
its use value. Becker’s curious notion that danceable music counts as a form of
craft may not sit well with the consummate performer who interprets and
brilliantly executes an allemande. The music he plays may well be danceable –
but does its danceability bar it from the realm of artistic expression?
Notions of reproduceability and value, on the other hand, decidedly
distinguish musical instruments from works of art in the institutional sense. In his
influential essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin
argues, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one
O’Connor 49
element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it
happens to be” (220). The aura of a work of art, which is linked to its “arthistorical location,” exists only in the original and cannot be transferred to its
reproductions. On the other hand, a craft, which does not possess such an aura, is
quite reproduceable. Becker illuminates this distinction well and thus deserves to
be quoted at length:
Instead of adhering to the conventional craft criteria, which of
course turn up in somewhat different form, the artists who enter a
craft field propose, rely on, and organize their work according to
criteria characteristic of worlds conventionally defined as high art.
In the art versions of any of these media, for instance, uniqueness
of the object is prized. Artists and their publics think that no two
objects produced by an artist should be alike. But for good
craftsmen that is not a consideration; on the contrary, the artistcraftsman’s control shows in his ability to make things as much
alike as he does. People who pay $200 for a small, beautifully
turned bowl will not feel cheated if they find there is another more
or less like it. What they bought exhibits the virtuoso
craftsmanship they paid for. Had they bought the same bowl on the
assumption that it was a unique work of art, they would feel
cheated to find that there were two. So artists who work in these
media sell their conception and its execution in that medium and
take care to be obvious about how each of their pieces differs from
O’Connor 50
all the others. No one wants to buy a copy from an artist, only from
a craftsman (279).
Indeed, an instrument exhibits “virtuoso craftsmanship,” but no one ever
problematizes its reproduceability. A luthier’s tenth instrument, albeit possibly
identical to his first, is no less valuable.
Igor Kopytoff offers a slightly different sociological perspective on the
art-craft dichotomy. He conceives of all “things” as falling on a spectrum of
singularity: on one end of the spectrum falls the entirely singular, unsellable thing,
whose singularity is attributable either to pricelessness or worthlessness; on the
other end falls the commodity, a thing that has use value and can be exchanged
for something else with use value, “the very fact of exchange indicating that the
counterpart has, in the immediate context, an equivalent value” (68). Kopytoff
continues,
A Picasso though possessing a monetary value, is priceless in
another, higher scheme…Singularity, in brief, is confirmed not by
the object’s structural position in an exchange system, but by
intermittent forays into the commodity sphere, quickly followed by
reentries into the closed sphere of singular “art” (82).
Art becomes temporarily commodified when it is forced to undergo an
inconvenient – one might say borderline artistically sacrilegious – exchange from
one art dealer or collector to another. On the other hand, musical instruments by
no means make “intermittent forays” (in Kopytoff’s sense) into the market except,
O’Connor 51
perhaps, for more expensive vintage instruments. Even these, however, were
originally produced for exchange and consumption.
Coates views this art-craft dichotomy as an ill-founded conception
altogether and challenges the notion that luthiers, among other instrument makers,
are “mere” craftsmen:
[There is a] widely held chain of ideas that the luthier was an early
Craftsman, and the Craftsman was a mortal born half-way between
the Artist and the Workman, by the wisdom of providence lacking
the undisciplined imagination of the one, but compensated by the
humble diligence of the other, enabling him to develop Special
Understanding as he became a Master Craftsman. This, clearly, is a
wearisome, lazy-minded, apriorist view, which, whilst wellmeaningly acknowledging the craftsman as a medium of intuitive
forces, simultaneously castrates him of any objective, directive
intellect, as though it were plainly impossible that two such diverse
processes could work together, and least of all through the mind
and products of a ‘manual’ worker (1).
Although Coates attacks the institutionalist mode of thinking, his polemic is
somewhat weak in that it fails to address any specific arguments institutionalists
develop in support of the art-craft dichotomy.
These arguments seem to pigeonhole musical instruments as a craft or
some other type of subordinate cultural good. However, the F-5 mandolin serves
as a compelling case study in that it illuminates the symbolic distinctions between
O’Connor 52
instrument-as-material and instrument-as-sound, which, I believe, solves the
debate over how instrument design (although not necessarily instrument
construction) constitutes a form of art. The key to understanding the F-5’s artistic
value – and perhaps the artistic value of any newly designed musical instrument –
lies in the ability to distinguish between these two conceptually disparate entities.
The Art of Tone
In a 1989 interview, F-5 expert Darryl Wolfe observed, “As a whole, the
Lloyd Loar instruments are extremely precise and consistent, and there is a
distinct Lloyd Loar tone” (Davis 35). This observation is intriguing for two
reasons. First, it establishes a conceptual divide between an instrument and its
sound; if multiple “Loar instruments” possess a single, distinct “Loar tone,” then
“instruments” and “tone” cannot be one and the same thing. Moreover, the idea
that there is a “distinct Lloyd Loar tone” indicates that the tone belongs to Loar. It
is not merely a consequence of the physical instrument itself; rather, it is an
independent – and, I would suggest, predetermined – entity.
Numerous authors and luthiers emphasize the subservience of instrument
design to preconceived sound. Tim Olsen argues that “The great engine which
drives musical instrument design is not available technology; it is music, and the
evolution of musical taste” (9). For instance, Stradivari, who lived in an era of
“pleasant, mathematical music of the baroque period,” specifically tailored the
tone of his instruments to accommodate music that was “quieter, sweeter and less
flamboyant” (9). Jeffrey Elliott concurs with Olsen: “Before [you] make each
O’Connor 53
instrument…hear the sound in your mind’s ear. Then you can begin to
conceptualize the instrument architecturally, select the materials, and visualize its
aesthetics. In a very basic way, the combination of design, woods and intent will
make up that sound” (23). Tonal pre-conceptualization, Elliott argues, is a
prerequisite to building an instrument that possesses “allure” (compare to
Benjamin’s “aura”), which is “not something that can be measured” – rather, it
“strikes people emotionally” (22).
Indeed, luthiers often speak of “shaping” tone – defined as timbre, or
character of sound – so that their instruments come to possess this allure. Loar
writes that a stringed instrument’s top-plate must be chiseled, scraped and sanded
so that it accommodates the average vibration rate of the instrument itself,
whereas the f-holes, air chamber and back are planned and shaped so that they
“lend themselves more fully to vibration to which the top is not so friendly” (qtd.
in Siminoff, Tap Tuning). If shaped correctly, the instrument can have “a wellbalanced scale from its lowest to its highest note; that is, no one note will be
stronger than any other note, and neither will there be any sudden uncontrollable
changes in tone color as the scale progresses from note to note” (qtd. in Siminoff,
Tap Tuning). Other features, such as species of wood, varnish, string gauge and
bridge height, also affect tone. However, the most important tonal determinant is
a well-sculpted instrument body.
The tone of a well-sculpted instrument may satisfy what some authors call
“cognitive hedonism,” an Aristotelian notion that one can find delight in pure
sensory stimulation (Alperson 5). Davidson posits that tone itself can elicit such
O’Connor 54
delight (and other emotions) and that poorly sculpted tone prevents even the most
consummate performer from connecting with his audience:
When the air-mass is in proper relation with the balance of
construction in the instrument, it reinforces the tone power
throughout the complete range of the instrument. We may safely
say that inferior Violins are soul-less, dead things, for no matter
who may play upon them, they fail to respond to the infusion of
life into his music. But let the performer change that instrument for
a perfect one, one in which the air-mass and plates harmoniously
correspond, then he can, so to speak, freely mingle his own soul
with that of the instrument, and either sink his listeners into sorrow
and tears, or upon the contrary elevate them to joy and pleasure
(52).
One might analogize the instrument’s body to an exoskeleton and its tone to a
soul. Luthier Bill Collings approaches stringed instruments from this dualist
perspective. Referring to the Eastman Company, a mass-production instrument
manufacturer based in China, he explains,
You got a bunch of people over there in China, at Eastman, who
duplicate that Loar mandolin? Not even close…it’d be nice. Can
they make a great violin? Great violin objects, I think! That’s
going to fulfill a lot of people, make them happy. But that’s not
what we do. We have to intervene with the wood. We have to get
in there and make our judgment calls (Collings).
O’Connor 55
Collings suggests that although Eastman produces visually satisfactory
instruments, they fail to cultivate within them allure or an “aura.” By merely
adhering to specification sheets, they do not capture tone – rather, they create
instruments from which tone merely results. To the most highly respected and
knowledgeable luthiers today, this kind of tone is anathema.
These luthiers’ observations corroborate the notion that tone-shaping
presupposes a skill set distinct from that of the chairmaker, the cabinetmaker or
the instrument-object-maker; however, while tone may possess aesthetic qualities,
I hesitate to seek within it expressive qualities characteristic of other forms of art
because it is doubtful that pure sound, or sonic design, can, like a poem, painting
or sculpture, “express” anything. Absolute music – music without a “program” or
intended narrative – serves as a case in point. Through the late eighteenth century,
absolute music was usually deemed an inferior, “decorative” art (Kivy 126). Just
before the turn of the nineteenth century, Romantic expressionists like Gottfried
Weber wrote that music was “the art of expressing emotions through the medium
of sound,” but as numerous authors have since pointed out, the nature of that
expression is impossible to determine (Hanslick 30). In his seminal work, The
Beautiful in Music, Eduard Hanslick challenged the notion that music could
represent or express definite emotions:
At this stage of our enquiry it is enough to determine whether
music is capable of representing any definite emotion whatever. To
this question only a negative answer can be given, the definiteness
of an emotion being inseparably connected with concrete notions
O’Connor 56
and conceptions, and to reduce these to a material form is
altogether beyond the power of music…The ideas which a
composer expresses are mainly and primarily of a purely musical
nature. His imagination conceives a definite and graceful melody
aiming at nothing beyond itself (35).
Hanslick suggests that absolute music can express a certain class of ideas, such as
intensity, motion and the “ingeniously complex,” but such ideas describe musical
phenomena, not extra-musical “subjects” (36). Along the same lines, Kivy argues
that absolute music is “pure sonic design that does possess, as part of that design,
expressive properties, but not semantic or representational ones” (127).
Expression, he contends, can also exist on a “sheerly sensuous” level. In short, the
criteria that govern the visual and textual arts cannot readily be applied to the
sonic arts, though few writers today would exclude music from the realm of fine
arts.
My aim here is not to redefine the arts; rather it is to argue that tone, as a
form of “sonic design,” qualifies as an art form. That is, the “art” of luthieric
design lies not, as other writers have averred, in its use of numerical proportion
per se; rather, it lies in the use of numerical proportion to capture an expressive,
aesthetically governed, culturally constitutive, preconceived tone. Tone can be
understood as an expression of what the instrument designer, or tonal artist, finds
beautiful, what he or she perceives as the ideal sonic resource for the creation of
music in the contemporary musical environment. From this, one concludes that
tone can be, in Alperson’s terms, “culturally freighted” (i.e. it caters to changes in
O’Connor 57
the sound of contemporary music), or it can be, in my terms, culturally active (i.e.
it advocates for changes in the sound of contemporary music). One need not read
further into the expressive meaning behind tone to attempt to classify it as an art
form.
Of course, I could, like many writers on absolute music, attempt to
analyze the semantic and expressive properties of tone:
On an F-5, one generates tone via a single stroke of the plectrum,
which yields a sound that blossoms, curls, pulses and then sinks
slowly beneath the threshold of aurality. One tonal iteration may
last twenty seconds or more. During its brief lifespan, its violinistic
richness mocks the conservatism of its Neapolitan forebear, whose
outmoded flat top and bowl-shaped back stubbornly cling to a thin,
soft, metallic tone representative of a bygone era. Simultaneously,
this tone symbolizes the culmination of a century’s worth of
luthieric struggles. Shaped by the ear of a steadfast classical
mandolinist, its unprecedented sustain contrasts the capriciousness
and ephemerality that had characterized the relationship between
the mandolin and the general public for years on end.
This may sound ludicrous, but upon closer examination of representationalist
writings, so do those descriptions of overtures, sonatas and symphonies as
“about” love or battle or the death of a king. This mode of analysis need not apply
to tone, just as it need not and cannot be applied to absolute music.
O’Connor 58
The perception of tone as a form of art ironically reflects an institutionalist
way of thinking. Again, I take the F-5 as an example. Dudenbostel has remarked,
“The F-5 is the sound that’s in my head. That’s what drives me to build these” (I).
The implications of this claim are not as simple as they may seem. At first, one
might conceptualize the relationship between a Dudenbostel F-5 and a Loar F-5 in
the following manner:
Figure 8. Instrumental Model.
According to the Instrumental Model (Figure 8), a Dudenbostel F-5 is merely a
replica of a Loar F-5, which itself would have been a replica of a prototype
developed around June 1922. Ostensibly, the prototype functions as a work of art
of which all subsequent F-5s are mere copies. However, I have come across no
luthier who bestows particularly high value on his or her prototype; any extra
value in this regard is typically sentimental. There is no clear delineation of status
between prototype and “replica.” This, in conjunction with Wolfe’s and
Dudenbostel’s comments on the “tone” and “sound” of the F-5, leads to an
alternative conceptual model. The Tonal Model (Figure 9, p. 59) posits that every
F-5 – that is, every F-5 built by a luthier who possesses the set of skills necessary
to capture the F-5 sound – references the same tone.
O’Connor 59
Figure 9. Tonal Model.
The latter model accomplishes several things. First, it accounts for the
luthieric endeavor to capture a particular sound, described by Olsen, Elliott,
Alperson, Dudenbostel and others. Second, it makes sense of statements such as
“There is a distinct Lloyd Loar tone” and “The F-5 is the sound that’s in my
head” in that it portrays tone as a single entity (italics mine). Third, it escapes
Becker’s and Kopytoff’s classifications of craft and commodity: Tone itself is not
reproduced and therefore not exchanged. Material F-5s are reproduced and
exchanged, but as tangible products, they are conceptually distinct from their
tone, a form of sonic design that is, by definition, immaterial and
unreproduceable.
The Tonal Model, especially as it pertains to the F-5, also challenges the
standard definition of “luthier”:
Originally the word for a lute maker, it has become a general term
for a maker of violins or other string instruments. Though French,
the word has gained currency in English and German. Similarly,
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the derivative ‘lutherie’ (lute making) has acquired the meaning of
instrument making in general (“Luthier”).
The word “luthier” contains no distinction between the solitary luthier (e.g. Lynn
Dudenbostel) and what may be termed the “collective luthier,” such as the Gibson
Company, Collings Guitars or even Stradivari’s workshop (when he employed
apprentices). More critically, the word “luthier” fails to account for differences
between tonal artists (or luthieric designers), sonic brokers (whose instrument
reproductions capture the tone of a particular tonal artist, as judged by other
producers, critics and consumers), and material brokers (whose instrument
reproductions fail to capture the tone of any tonal artist).2 This tripartite typology
of luthiery, though not meant to serve as a rigid system of classification by any
means, is nonetheless a valuable heuristic device. (For instance, one places Loar
in the first category, Dudenbostel in the second, and the Eastman Company in the
third.) Critically, given the conceptual predominance of sound over material, the
sonic broker is also a material broker, but, as implied above, the reverse is untrue.
The definition of the second type of luthier, the sonic broker, demands
clarification. What does it mean for a luthier to “capture” a tone? How does one
distinguish between following a design specification sheet and, as Collings puts it,
“intervening with the wood”? Are those in the second category of the typology
artists? In the next chapter, after briefly reviewing the history of the F-5 from the
year Loar left Gibson to the present day, I draw upon my fieldwork in Lynn
Dudenbostel’s shop in an attempt to answer these questions.
2
See Conclusion for further discussion about the line of demarcation between these two types of
broker.
O’Connor 61
Chapter 3: Lynn Dudenbostel, Sonic Broker
The F-5 from 1924 – 2010
Lloyd Loar departed from the Gibson Company in 1925, shortly after an
unassuming accountant named Guy Hart became general manager. Ironically,
Hart, who sat “like a period at the end of [a] list of dynamic businessmen” that
preceded him, soon ushered Gibson through its most prolific period to date. He
oversaw the production of several models of electric guitar – most notably the
Super 400, the SJ-200 and the ES-150 – that have collectively been dubbed the
“greatest innovation for the guitar since the emergence of the six-string guitar in
the late 1700s” (Carter, “Guy Hart”). Meanwhile, the mandolin became a mere
afterthought in the American music scene.
A number of unfinished F-5s remained hanging on Gibson’s workshop
walls; unsurprisingly, F-5 production nearly ceased. Loar’s departure also
signaled a change in the nature of the instruments themselves. Necks became
chunkier and neck angles shallower; Loar’s preferred varnish was replaced by one
more susceptible to wear; sunbursts took on different hues and gradients;
hardware (tailpieces and tuning pegs) changed from silver to gold; binding
changed from white to ivoroid; and the standard peghead inlay changed from the
now-classic flowerpot to a floral design called the “fern.” Gibson produced far
fewer Ferns than Loars, and some argue that Ferns, though more variable in
craftsmanship and sound quality, are comparable to Loars (Dudenbostel I).
Nevertheless, once Gibson began to attain commercial prestige in the guitar
O’Connor 62
market in the 1930s, the quality of the company’s mandolins fell and, arguably,
never quite recovered.
Those who did manage to earn a living as mandolinists remained divided
on the quality of the F-5. One of the instrument’s chief proponents was Dave
Apollon, a Russian immigrant who performed exclusively on F-5s throughout his
career as a Vaudeville entertainer, film music recording artist and, later, serious
concertizer (Grisman, “Apollon,” 7). William Place, Jr., who frequently
performed the works of Italian classical mandolin composers such as Raffaele
Calace and Carlo Munier, also promoted the F-5. Some, such as acclaimed
mandolin orchestra director Herman von Bernewitz and Gibson historian Julius
Bellson, preferred the oval-hole F-4. Others eschewed Gibson mandolins
altogether. Classical mandolinist Walter K. Bauer, who promoted the Larson
Brothers’ Maurer flat-back mandolin, notoriously dubbed F-5s “miniature
lumber-yards painted up like prostitutes” and even tried to persuade Loar to
change his designs (Carter, “Strad”). Bernardo de Pace, a Vaudeville entertainer
and soloist with the Metropolitan Opera, belonged to a steadfast classical cohort
that remained loyal to the Neapolitan mandolin.
However, none of these performers influenced the mandolin world as
much as a “hillbilly musician” from Rosine, Kentucky, who recalls the first time
he encountered a 1923 Loar F-5:
It was in nineteen and forty-one, I believe. I was in Miami, Florida
and I was just shopping around, you know, looking in store
windows, things like that. I passed by this barber shop and this
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mandolin was laying in the window there and had this little card up
there with the price on it…$150.00. I went in and listened a little,
played it a number or so and bought it. It was a great mandolin
(Grisman, “Monroe” 5).1
The customer, mandolinist and vocalist Bill Monroe, had formed an acoustic
ensemble called the Blue Grass Boys three years earlier.2 Drawing upon various
folk traditions of the Appalachian region, the Blue Grass Boys performed (often
at breakneck speed) a mixture of traditional and original songs that featured threeand four-part vocal harmonies and virtuosic solos. By the late 1950s, this new
style of music, which had theretofore been known as “hillbilly music” (thanks to
its origins in the “hillbilly” regions of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee,
eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia) acquired the name “bluegrass.”
Although bluegrass owes much of its success to radio and other
commercial means of dissemination, the dramatic increase in the popularity of the
F-5 itself correlates with the rise of the bluegrass festival circuit in the 1960s and
1970s. Beginning in 1965 with Carleton Haney’s Roanoke Bluegrass Festival
(which was modeled after the Newport Folk Festival), small, independent
bluegrass festivals began to crop up in the southeast to cater to a burgeoning
bluegrass fan base. As Gardner notes, “the extended mobility of the American
population and the migration of residents of the upland South both northward and
1
Curiously, the earliest known photograph of Monroe playing an F-5 dates to 1945; moreover, the
Blue Grass Boys did not perform in Florida in 1941. Monroe may have simply misremembered
the year he acquired his F-5.
2
The original Blue Grass Boys comprised Monroe, guitarist/singer Cleo Davis, fiddler Art
Wooten and bassist Amos Garren. The most famous lineup, however, featured an entirely different
set of sidemen: guitarist Lester Flatt, banjoist Earl Scruggs, fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist
Howard Watts (also known as Cedric Rainwater).
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westward created the fertile soil from which the…bluegrass festival circuit
sprouted in the early 1970s” (159). By the late ‘70s, such festivals were held
everywhere but parts of the Rocky Mountains and northern plains. Performers like
Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, Jim and Jesse McReynolds,
Mac Wiseman and Jimmy Martin were among the top acts on the circuit, but the
most popular and influential of them all were Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.
As Monroe became an international music icon, his Loar F-5 came to
index the sound and tradition of bluegrass. Country and bluegrass mandolinists
like Bobby Osborne, Jesse McReynolds, Frank Wakefield, John Duffey and
Ricky Skaggs began to emulate Monroe in the 1960s, at which point the F-5
mandolin itself became the “paragon of mandolinic value and capacity” (Hambly
475). (Dudenbostel notes, “There’s always this debate: What if Monroe had
picked up a Lyon and Healy and played it? Well, we might all be looking for
Lyon and Healys these days” (I).) Resultantly, demand for F-5s began to exceed
the existing supply. Mandolin manufacturers such as Lyon and Healy, Martin,
Harmony and Epiphone had been producing mandolins for years (in some cases,
decades) before the ‘60s; however, many of these instruments were either poor
reproductions of the F-5 or different mandolin models altogether.
Thus began the era of the F-5 luthier. Randy Wood of Savannah, Georgia,
built the first non-Gibson F-5s in the late 1950s, and many others, including Tom
Morgan, Robby Robinson, Bob Givens, Tut Taylor, Randy Wood, Wayne
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Henderson and John Paganoni, soon followed suit.3 These luthiers also heralded a
tradition of producing A-5 mandolins, which lack the scroll and other floral
ornamentation of the F-5 but which are substantially easier to produce and thus
less expensive.4 Three of the most noteworthy F-5 luthiers today – John
Monteleone, Steve Gilchrist and Mike Kemnitzer (of “Nugget” mandolins) –
began building F-5s during the 1970s and have each produced several hundred
mandolin-family instruments since. Luthier Roger Siminoff wrote the first F-5
construction manual, entitled Constructing a Bluegrass Mandolin, in 1973.
Commercial instrument manufacturers both domestic and abroad also
exploited the booming F-5 market. Gibson, Lyon and Healy and Epiphone, among
other American corporations, continued to produce F-5s, though none of these
attained the tone quality and craftsmanship characteristic of those built by
independent luthiers. Moreover, domestic manufacturers faced stiff competition
from mass-production firms overseas. Japanese corporations, such as Kentucky,
Ibanez, Alvarez and Aria, began to produce vast quantities of F-5s in the 1970s.
The quality of these instruments was fairly low, but their affordability rendered
them quite popular in the United States. Their wide availability also helped
cultivate a significant bluegrass scene in Japan.
Since the 1970s, demand for the F-5 has followed an upward trajectory
thanks in part to a general acknowledgement of its stylistic versatility. Mandolin
virtuoso David Grisman, who started his career in the New York City string band
3
Most of these luthiers were either self-taught or peer-taught. A number of them also had previous
experience building guitars and/or banjos.
4
These A-5s, albeit roughly modeled after an A-5 prototype Loar designed during his tenure at
Gibson, feature specifications more akin to Gibson’s older oval-hole, A-style mandolins.
O’Connor 66
scene during the 1960s, invented a style called “Dawg” music, which one writer
describes as “bluegrass-jazz-Gypsy-rock-Middle-Eastern-Hebraic-folk-classicalGrisman” (Hood, Artists, 145). Sam Bush, who rose to prominence via the
bluegrass festival circuit, spearheaded the development of a style known as
“Newgrass,” which also incorporates elements of jazz and rock but which, unlike
“Dawg” music, features vocals prominently. Evan Marshall developed a duo-style
technique that allows him to perform sophisticated pieces like Brahms’s
Hungarian Dances Nos. 5 and 6. More recently, F-5 proponents Mike Marshall
and Chris Thile have mastered Bach partitas and explored Brazilian choro music;
both are prolific composers of pieces that exhibit a multiplicity of stylistic
influences.5
As the stature of the F-5 has grown, so has the number of F-5 builders. In
addition to Monteleone, Gilchrist and Kemnitzer, hundreds of other independent
luthiers, such as Dudenbostel, Michael Heiden, Lawrence Smart, Tom Ellis,
Oliver Apitius, Paul Duff, Roger Siminoff, Will Kimble and many others, have
set up shop in the United States, Australia, the Czech Republic and at least 28
other countries.6 In the early 1990s, Bill Collings established a roughly 70employee guitar- and mandolin-production plant that is unique in its capacity to
turn out hundreds of well-crafted, esteemed F-5s each year. Gibson itself remains
active, as do larger manufacturers such as Kentucky and Fender. Some consumers
order F-5s from luthiers themselves, although most purchase mandolins through
5
Thile, in particular, has achieved an unprecedented level of virtuosity on the mandolin and has
inspired thousands young and old to take up the instrument.
6
Visit <http://www.mandolincafe.com/builders.html> for further information.
O’Connor 67
intermediaries, the most respected of which include Gruhn Guitars (Nashville,
Tennessee), Greg Boyd’s House of Fine Instruments (Missoula, Montana), and
the Mandolin World Headquarters (Henrico, Virginia). Both independent luthiers
and bluegrass festivals, such as the Telluride Bluegrass Festival (Telluride,
Colorado) and Rockygrass (Lyons, Colorado), host luthiery workshops and
perpetuate the tradition of F-5 construction. Within the last few years, the
Mandolin Café (http://www.mandolincafe.com) has become an extremely popular
online network for luthiers, vendors and consumers alike; moreover, it serves as
an index for the F-5 market, since up to 25 new advertisements for F-5s are posted
on its “Classifieds” page each day.
One luthier whose instruments are seldom advertised in the Mandolin
Café’s “Classifieds” is Lynn Dudenbostel, one of the foremost F-5 builders in the
world. Although Dudenbostel has built only about 60 mandolins – a small number
compared to the output of other prestigious F-5 luthiers – his instruments exhibit
unparalleled craftsmanship and possess a rich, mystical tone. Dudenbostel has
traveled the country to teach budding luthiers the basics of F-5 construction, and
his instruments are played by some of the most notable figures in the
contemporary bluegrass scene. The process by which he builds F-5s, which I
document here, offers crucial insight into a concept left unexplained at the end of
the last chapter: sonic brokerage.
O’Connor 68
Case Study: Inside Lynn Dudenbostel’s Workshop
Lynn Dudenbostel’s ascent to luthieric prominence transpired over a
relatively short span of time. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Dudenbostel
earned a B.S. in management and an associate’s degree in chemical engineering
from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 1980. Although he worked in
engineering and industrial safety at Union Bancorporation and Lockheed Martin,
he developed an interest in bluegrass thanks to the frequency with which
bluegrass ensembles passed through town. Although he had played a little guitar
and banjo himself as a teenager, it was not until he acquired a Gilchrist F-5 in
1982 that he developed a strong interest in luthiery. “It was really the mandolin
that first grabbed my eye,” he says. “Something about the F-5 is to me the most
beautiful instrument made.” The allure of the F-5, combined with its constant
presence in the area, inspired Dudenbostel to build one.
He purchased every manual on luthiery he could find, but his initial
attempts to make an F-5 fell short. “I made some failed attempts at building a
mandolin from scratch. I didn’t have the tools, I didn’t have the place to do it, and
I didn’t have the knowledge.” It was not until 1987, when he built a dulcimer for
his wife, Amy, that something clicked. Over the next two years, he built three
more dulcimers. Then, in 1989, he built his first guitar. He sold his second guitar
for $700, whereupon he realized his hobby could become financially selfsustaining.
Thus, in 1991, Amy and he established Dudenbostel Stringed Instruments
as a sole proprietorship, and throughout the next five years, Dudenbostel built 15
O’Connor 69
more guitars, which fetched increasingly lucrative sums. He did not build his first
F-5 until October 1996, at which point he was still employed full-time at
Lockheed Martin. Working during the days and building instruments in the
evenings, Dudenbostel recalls, “There were a lot of weeks when the grass got way
too tall.” Once Lockheed Martin downsized and eliminated his office in 1997,
Dudenbostel became a full-time luthier.
Even to many trained eyes and ears, Dudenbostel’s F-5s are almost
indistinguishable from Loar’s F-5s. Dudenbostel has developed a reference set of
graduations based on a conglomeration of specifications taken from four or five
Loars and Ferns, including one Loar (Serial # 73747) dated July 9, 1923 (the same
as Bill Monroe’s F-5). Dudenbostel perceives himself as a hybrid architectdesigner-engineer-archeologist seeking to discover what made Loar’s F-5s so
special. “The F-5 is perfect just the way it is,” he says. “I’m not trying to innovate
– I’m just trying to achieve what they achieved back in the 1920s.” Yet he does
not merely adhere to specification sheets. Drawing from his own background as
an amateur photographer (he had attended a 10-day workshop with Ansel Adams
in 1976), he applies the principle of pre-visualization to luthiery. “Unless you previsualize each component, it’s not going to come out right.”
To realize these luthieric visions, Dudenbostel employs an array of hand
tools and industrial machinery. Scattered about his workbench are clamps, chisels,
gouges, exacto knives, scalpels, carving knives, dremel tools, sandpaper and a
jeweler’s saw, which are used for everything from top- and back-graduation to
inlay-cutting. Lined up along one wall are a belt sander, a thickness sander, a
O’Connor 70
bandsaw, a drill press, a joiner and a downdraft sanding table (a type of dust
collector), while an oscillating spindle sander, a router table and a shop-vacuum
are situated in the middle of the workshop. These machines, most of which are not
indispensible, greatly expedite those stages in the process that require less fine
skill (see Appendix for photographs of machines and tools used in the F-5
construction process).
Perhaps the most useful machine in the shop is the $12,000 CNC
(Computer Numerical Control), a machine that Dudenbostel uses to “rough out”
(i.e. cut from wooden planks) tops and backs and cut peghead veneers. Unlike the
duplicator that Gibson used in the 1920s, the CNC does not need to trace the
contour of a physical mold in order to operate on a new plank of wood; rather, it
cuts according to digital templates stored on a hard drive (in Dudenbostel’s case, a
somewhat ancient, 2-GB PC equipped with Microsoft Windows 98). In fact, the
CNC’s microstep motors execute cuts with 0.001-inch accuracy, although some
newer CNCs feature servo drives that are accurate to within 0.0001 inches.
Some contend that the use of a CNC improperly dehumanizes the luthieric
process, but Dudenbostel justifies its use as long as the machine does not dictate
the design. “A lot of people have the misconception that – although this is an
exaggeration – you put a piece of wood in one side of the CNC and out comes a
finished mandolin on the other side,” he says. He explains that some luthiers,
especially instrument-manufacturing companies, do rely heavily upon the CNC;
however, Dudenbostel, who switched to the CNC from a panograph-style
duplicator in 2003, emphasizes the subservience of his machines to his own
O’Connor 71
manual labor. “I don’t think people realize the amount of handwork that goes into
building one of these,” he says. “All the machine is doing is replicating something
I’ve already carved with my hands. The whole idea is that you have to let your
machinery serve your design. If you start changing your designs to accommodate
a new way to do it on the machine, then you’ve lost.”
Such designs mean little without high-quality lumber.7 Although Loar
used exclusively Eastern Red spruce for tops and Curly maple for backs,
Dudenbostel experiments with a variety of woods in order to improvise around
the core F-5 tone. For tops, he frequently uses Engelmann spruce, which is
slightly warmer and darker than red spruce, and he has become increasingly
interested in Carpathian spruce, an eastern European species of wood that comes
in a variety of densities and thus runs the bright-to-dark tonal spectrum.8 He often
sticks to Loar’s preferred Curly maple for backs, but he is also fond of Bigleaf
maple, which yields a darker sound, and Red maple, which is a little brighter than
Bigleaf. The rest of the mandolin (i.e. the sides, neck and peghead) is also made
of maple. Before any wood is ready for use, it must be aged (i.e. dried) for years
in a carefully monitored indoor environment (usually 72 degrees and 45-50%
humidity).
Once he acquires and ages the proper wood, Dudenbostel commences
work on the top, back and sides, which constitute the entire F-5 body. First, he
joins top- and back-plates, a process that entails finding, cutting and gluing
7
Dudenbostel acquires most of his wood from John Preston, a distributor based in West Virginia.
It was illegal to fell red spruce trees in the United States until the 1980s, when luthiers Ted Davis
and John Arnold discovered an abundance of such trees in West Virginia’s Monongahela National
Forest and acquired a permit from the U.S. Forest Service to chop them down sell their wood. Red
spruce is one of the most popular tonewoods among mandolin- and guitar-builders today.
8
O’Connor 72
together slabs of two planks of wood with closely matching grain patterns. Many
backs comprise “bookmatched pairs,” two slabs of wood cut from the same plank.
Once the plates are joined, Dudenbostel affixes the top- and back-blanks to the
CNC, which is programmed to “rough cut” specified contours into each. In the
meantime, he saws the rim (i.e. the sides) from a hunk of maple, thins it to around
0.08 inches on the thickness sander, bends it over a moistened and heated piece of
galvanized plumbing for ten minutes, and places it in a mold to dry. After the rim
has dried sufficiently, Dudenbostel trims it to the proper length. He proceeds to
carve a head block, a tail block, a scroll block and two point blocks out of
mahogany and adheres them all to the interior of the rim to enhance its structural
integrity. Once he attaches kerfed lining (strips of wood that eventually serve as
glue surfaces) to the rim and ivoroid point protectors to the rim’s pair of points,
the rim assembly is complete.
After a couple hours, the CNC is finished rough-cutting the top and back,
which are now ready to graduate. Dudenbostel first sands the outer contours of
both, after which he takes the top to his workbench, flips it over and begins to
graduate it – that is, he meticulously whittles various regions of its interior down
to certain thicknesses (each usually within a fifth of a millimeter) so that it attains
an acoustically optimal contour – with a bronze alloy ibex plane. This process is
quite remarkable. Every once in a while, Dudenbostel stops graduating either to
measure his progress with a caliper or to suspend the top in the air and tap on it;
O’Connor 73
as the top thins, it opens up and rings in response to Dudenbostel’s taps.9 It takes
around two hours for Dudenbostel to finish graduating the top, which he
subsequently sands with fine-grit sandpaper. He repeats the entire process (albeit
adhering to a different set of thicknesses) with the back.
The top remains to be equipped with two crucial features: f-holes and
tone bars. The CNC takes care of the f-holes, but the tone bars, which serve to
spread vibrations across the top, require considerable manual labor. Made of highquality red spruce, each tone bar blank is roughly seven inches in length and half
an inch in diameter. Dudenbostel uses a cabinet scraper to plane each bar until it
fits into the contour of the graduated top. Next, he uses hide glue to adhere the
bars to the underside of the top (one near the bass f-hole and the other near the
treble f-hole).10 The glue dries quickly. Dudenbostel proceeds to scrape away at
each bar, shaping it so that it adopts the form of a triangular polyhedron that
flattens and tapers at each end. He notes that many budding luthiers misconstrue
tone bars as structural formations and thus abstain from scraping them to an
optimal degree of thinness. Thick tone bars kill sound, whereas thin tone bars
significantly enhance it.
The F-5 soon begins to take shape. Dudenbostel glues the top onto the rim
assembly and lets it sit overnight. Next, he cuts a triangular segment, called a
dovetail cut, from the head block. He proceeds to bandsaw a neck blank (which
9
Dudenbostel does not tap tune, but he does graduate tops until his taps yield rings as opposed to
thuds.
10
Dudenbostel makes hide glue by heating hide granules, water and Urea crystals (a type of gel
suppressant) in a crock-pot.
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will eventually be shaped into the neck) from a hunk of maple.11 The shape of the
dovetail cut is traced onto a paper template, which is subsequently adhered to the
neck blank. Dudenbostel carves the neck blank around the template so that it
acquires a dovetail, which is then fine-chiseled and fitted into the dovetail cut to
form what is called the dovetail joint, perhaps the most crucial structural locus in
the instrument. He then trims excess wood off the body-end of the neck blank and
glues the back onto the rim assembly (which also must sit overnight). Structurally,
the F-5 is nearly complete.
Dudenbostel shifts his focus to the neck (which requires a fingerboard)
and the peghead (which needs a set of veneers). He cuts the fingerboard from a
chunk of ebony, slots it for frets with a table saw, and binds it, or adheres long
strips of ivoroid (0.06 inches thick) and black-white purfling (0.04 inches thick) to
its edges with duco cement.12 Next, he “locates” the fingerboard by outlining it in
pencil onto the neck so that its fifteenth fret slot lies atop a crosspiece, a strip of
binding that connects the underside of the cantilevered fingerboard extension (a
device that strengthens the upper end of the fingerboard) to the head block. He
then locates the nut (a slotted chunk of bone that aligns the strings) at the base of
the peghead and subsequently commences work on two peghead veeners made of
strips of ebony 0.11 inches thick. Dudenbostel inlays his last name (made of gold
mother-of-pearl) and a floral design (made of abalone) into the top veneer, binds
it in ivoroid and purfling, and glues it onto the top of the peghead. The bottom
11
Loars feature three-piece necks, but Dudenbostel sometimes carves one-piece necks.
Binding serves no acoustical effect – it is solely cosmetic and functional (i.e. it protects edges
from marring).
12
O’Connor 75
veneer, which is bound but otherwise unadorned, is then glued to the bottom face
of the peghead.
Only a few steps remain before Dudenbostel applies the finishing touches.
First, he wrenches the neck out of the dovetail joint so that he can rout (cut into)
and bind the edges of the body. Although the depth of the rout must be accurate to
within thousandths of an inch, Dudenbostel literally eyes it. (He knows of no
micrometric device capable of measuring routing depth, although he speculates
that he could team up with a local custom machinist to design and patent one.)
Once he finishes routing, he binds the entire body (using a solvent-based duco
cement adhesive), lets it sit for a couple days, and then scrapes the binding flush
with the top, back and sides. He then adheres the button (a wooden covering) to
the neck heel (the area near the bottom of the head block), sticks a double-action
truss rod in a long cavity within the neck, and glues the fingerboard to the top of
the neck. After its heel, neck and peghead are shaped and sanded, the nearly
finished F-5 enters a brief phase entitled “in the white” in reference to its natural,
light wooden hue. Were it equipped with hardware and strings at this stage, it
would be fully functional, but it would lack two of its most appealing visual
components: its color gradient and its gloss.13
The first of these is, as on the old Loars, a reddish-brown sunburst; the
second results from varnish. Dudenbostel attempts to paint similar sunburst
gradients on the top, back and neck; the rest of the instrument (the sides and
dovetail region) is painted dark, as though it were a continuation of the edge of
13
It would also lack varnish, which yields a more mature, complex tone and slightly higher
volume.
O’Connor 76
the sunburst. After letting the sunburst dry overnight, Dudenbostel spends an
entire day laboriously scraping the sunburst stain from the binding. Afterward, he
seals the entire instrument with shellac and coats it with several layers of varnish,
a finishing medium that consists of particles of resin dissolved in ethanol, a
volatile solvent. After each coat of varnish dries for a day, Dudenbostel wet-sands
the whole instrument with 2000-grit sandpaper and French polishes it, or buffs it
to a gloss. Finally, he fits it with a tailpiece, a bridge, a set of tuners and 29 frets,
and he inlays the fingerboard with dots made of either mother-of-pearl or abalone.
The result is shown in Figure 10.
Throughout the entire process, which takes roughly 200 hours,
Dudenbostel does deviate from the original Loar design. “Loar is the gold
standard,” he says, “but the hardware – the
tuning pegs, tailpiece and truss rod – can be
improved upon.” Modern tuning pegs and
tailpieces comprise higher-quality metal
and operate far more smoothly than those
used on Loars. Moreover, Dudenbostel and
many other F-5 luthiers use double-action
truss rods as opposed to Loar’s singleaction truss rod, which Dudenbostel deems
“very marginal in terms of its
effectiveness.” Dudenbostel also uses
Figure 10. An hours-old Dudenbostel
F-5 mandolin.
different adhesives (i.e. hide glue rather than fish glue) and different fingerboard
O’Connor 77
material (ebony instead of dyed black pearwood). Unlike Loar’s fingerboards,
Dudenbostel’s are usually radiused (curved) to promote ease of playability.
Perhaps the quality of craftsmanship in Dudenbostel’s F-5s represents the most
significant deviation from Loar’s F-5s. “Modern builders have surpassed the
craftsmanship of what was going on in the early ‘20s,” he says. “F-5s were
production instruments – they weren’t made to the exacting details that the better
builders today are doing.” However, it is notable that none of these deviations
significantly impacts tone: Different hardware, adhesives, fingerboards, and even
the differences in craftsmanship to which Dudenbostel refers all correspond with
differences in mechanical functionality and cosmetics rather than sound.14
Furthermore, unlike the Gibson Company, Dudenbostel accepts custom
orders and thus infuses each F-5 with a unique personality. “I try to find out what
customers want, what they expect sound-wise,” he says. “If they say, ‘I’m a
Monroe-style bluegrass player,’ then I’ll graduate [the mandolin] a lot like the
Haynie Fern. I usually get some kind of guidance.”15 Typically, customers who
prefer a “Monroe-style” sound opt for harder woods, such as Red spruce tops and
Sugar maple backs, as well as thicker graduations, which render the sound louder,
brighter and “woodier.” Those who prefer a darker, softer and sweeter sound
request softer woods, usually Engelmann spruce tops and Bigleaf or Red maple
backs, and slightly thinner graduations, especially near the dovetail. However,
custom specifications are not limited to woods and graduations; customers may
14
While varnish impacts tone on any stringed instrument, differences between types of alkyd resin
varnish – the primary kind of varnish applied to F-5 mandolins – are usually inconsiderable.
15
The “Haynie Fern” is a Gibson Fern F-5 owned by prominent Tennessean fiddler/mandolinist
Aubrey Haynie.
O’Connor 78
also dictate hardware (color and type of tuners and tailpiece), sunburst (i.e. subtle
vs. dramatic), inlay design and material, fret size (mandolin vs. banjo fretwire),
pickguard material and size, binding (side-bound vs. triple-bound), radius and
neck thickness. As a result, each F-5 Dudenbostel builds is slightly different. “If I
see ten of my instruments lined up, I should be able to look from halfway across
the room and remember each one of those. You want them to have some
individuality, just like your kids.”
Yet each of Dudenbostel’s F-5s is also unique simply because it is
handmade. “I think a lot of factory-built instruments are so cookie-cuttered.
They’re so alike that they don’t have individuality.”16 Dudenbostel limits his
reliance on the CNC in part because he adheres to the notion that each instrument
should have its own personality. “Loars have been described by some people has
having the perfect amount of imperfection,” says Dudenbostel. “There is a
wonderful continuity between the instruments, but there is a certain deviation
between each instrument just because they’re made by hand. To me, that’s
important.” He also notes that Gilchrist, Kemnitzer, Monteleone and he all refer
to several of the same Loar F-5 plans, yet all four builders produce F-5s that
sound different from one another.
Dudenbostel, Gilchrist, Kemnitzer and Monteleone constitute the elite
among F-5 luthiers thanks to the quality of tone and craftsmanship in each of their
instruments, although Dudenbostel, the youngest of the four, is (intentionally)
16
Birkett reinforces this notion. “It must be emphasized that the primary motivation for modern
manufacturing practice is economic, viz. automation and standardization. Out of necessity,
assembly-line manufacturing demands that the individual identity of a particular specimen of the
product is lost, i.e. all products are as similar as possible” (45).
O’Connor 79
perhaps the least innovative. Namely, a combination of his success and his
preference for traditional construction methods precludes him from exploring
many new instruments or modes of production. For instance, although other F-5
luthiers also build F-4s, A-5s, A-4s, H-5 and H-4 mandolas, K-5 and K-4
mandocellos and even octave mandolins, Dudenbostel sticks to the F-5 and A-5.17
“There is as much [labor and material] in an F-4 as there is in an F-5, and you can
buy the finest vintage Gibson F-4 for a fraction of what I could build one for,” he
says. “It just doesn’t seem economically wise.” Moreover, he has no plans to
expand. “It’s never been tempting. I think it would cease to be fun if it became a
big venture.” Neither does he accept apprentices. “It would be great, but the
problem is that it would only slow me down,” he says. “The bottom line is this is
how we make our living. This is our sole source of income. I just can’t afford to
have what I am building to be part of somebody’s learning process. It’s got to be
my hands, and my hands only.”
Although Dudenbostel counts among his customers Chris Thile, one of the
most successful and influential mandolinists in the world, the $25,000 price tag of
his F-5s keeps them out of financial reach for most professional mandolinists.18
“It’s very much lopsided in the collector and casual player category,” he says.
“I’ve been in a unique position in which I’ve never really had to set prices on my
instruments except initially, when I first started building them. The market has
done that for me.” Yet Dudenbostel does not regret the fact that his F-5s are
17
However, Dudenbostel is planning to build a series of unadorned H-5 and A-5 mandolas within
the next few years.
18
Thile plays Dudenbostel #5, which Dudenbostel completed on October 24, 1998.
O’Connor 80
usually not used as performance tools. “It gives me great joy to see Chris up there
playing one on stage as it would anybody else of that caliber, but I get a great
amount of joy out of seeing anybody enjoy the instrument. It doesn’t really matter
whom the instrument goes to.”
The Nature of Sonic Brokerage
As I watched Dudenbostel build an F-5, I instinctively began to categorize
his tasks. One category included logistical-preparatory tasks, such as
programming the CNC and mixing glue. Another category comprised
mechanical-structural tasks, including cutting the dovetail and carving the neck.
A third comprised cosmetic tasks, such as cutting inlay and applying the sunburst.
Dudenbostel excels in these three categories, but so do a number of other F-5
builders and manufacturers whose instruments sound quite inferior. This suggests
the existence of a fourth, more elusive category, which includes those tasks
involved in “shaping the sound” (recall from Chapter 2), which I label sonic tasks
for lack of a better descriptor. Unlike the majority of F-5 producers, Dudenbostel
expertly judges and interacts with the wood that constitutes his top and back
plates. He does not simply memorize the structure of the air chamber; rather, he
bends it to his will, manipulates it in very subtle ways so that it captures the F-5
sound he hears in his head. Dudenbostel understands the sonic implications of
chiseling every wood peel from a top, back or tone bar. Superior sound does not
result from the structure Dudenbostel’s F-5s; superior sound itself dictates the
structure.
O’Connor 81
Yet I hesitate to perceive Dudenbostel as a tonal artist. Undoubtedly, he
possesses virtuoso skill – far more, in fact, than Loar ever did. However, he freely
states that his objective is to capture either the “Loar sound” or something very
close to it; as he said on several occasions during my fieldwork, “They got it right
then! It still works today.” Moreover, the influence of economic capital cannot be
underestimated: when Dudenbostel says, “The bottom line is this is how we make
our living,” he reminds us that luthiery is, for most, a trade above all else. One
might argue that Dudenbostel’s F-5s constitute works of art by virtue of the fact
that each possesses a unique personality or aura, but I am more inclined to view
them as “unique examples of a homogenous class” of commodity rather than
singular works of art. (Appadurai 17). As Igor Kopytoff explains, “When we feel
that selling a Rembrandt…is trading downward, the explanation for our attitude is
that things called ‘art’…are superior to the world of commerce” (Kopytoff 82).
This kind of attitude does not apply to Dudenbostel’s F-5s. (If it did, one
speculates that Dudenbostel, along with all other post-Loar F-5 luthiers, would be
accused of plagiarism.19)
Rather, I perceive Dudenbostel, a sonic broker, as an agent whose
activities in the cultural field are crucial to the sanctification of the F-5. Recall
that Loar’s work of art is not the F-5 design per se but rather the tone that guides
the design. Dudenbostel’s F-5s, like the hundreds of thousands of other F-5
19
The Gibson Company patented some of the F-5’s parts (such as the tailpiece, truss rod and
adjustable bridge) and trademarked some its more visually striking elements (such as the “Gibson”
logo and bell-shaped truss rod cover); however, it never patented the F-5 design itself. No lawsuit
concerning any component of the F-5 has ever been filed, but on June 28, 1977, Norlin, the parent
company of Gibson, sued Elger Co., which owned Ibanez, for plagiarizing one of its guitar
headstock designs. The case was settled out of court in 1978.
O’Connor 82
commodities around the world, aspire to capture this tone, which, as I have
already established, is singular. Yet Dudenbostel, who shapes each F-5 around
this tone, does not “sell” it. Instead, he sells access to it. In this sense,
Dudenbostel negotiates the boundary between Loar’s work of art and the public.
As a result, Dudenbostel’s reputation depends on Loar’s, and both of their
reputations depend on the existence of an F-5 market. Bourdieu asks, “Who is the
true producer of the value of the work – the painter or the dealer, the writer or the
publisher, the playwright or the theater manager?” (76). The answer is: neither.
Rather, it is the field of cultural production, the “site of struggles for the
monopoly of the power to consecrate,” in which works of art acquire their value
(79). Bourdieu explains,
The source of the efficacy of all acts of consecration is the field
itself, the locus of the accumulated social energy which the agents
and institutions help to reproduce through the struggles in which
they try to appropriate it and into which they put what they have
acquired from it in previous struggles. The value of works of art in
general – the basis of the value of each particular work – and the
belief which underlies it, are generated in the incessant,
innumerable struggles to establish the value of this or that
particular work, i.e. not only in the competition between agents
(authors, actors, writers, critics, directors, publishers, dealers,
etc.)…but also in the conflicts between agents occupying different
O’Connor 83
positions in the production of products of the same type: painters
and dealers, authors and publishers, writers and critics, etc. (78).
The work of art de-contextualized means nothing. It only becomes “consecrated,”
or acquires symbolic capital, via various conflicts between all agents in the field,
from artists to dealers to critics to consumers. Becker concurs. “The theory of
reputation says that reputations are based on works,” he writes. “But, in fact, the
reputations of artists, works, and the rest result from the collective activity of art
worlds” (360).20 From a sociological point of view, reputation (i.e. symbolic
capital) presupposes collective activity.
Dudenbostel interposes himself between Loar and Loar’s work of art. As a
qualified sonic broker embroiled in the struggle to consecrate the F-5 tone, he
disproves the “charismatic” ideology, which holds that the artist creates himself
(Bourdieu 76). With this notion in mind, I conclude by elucidating the
relationship between Loar and modern sonic brokers of Loar’s F-5 tone.
20
Becker’s “art world” differs from Bourdieu’s field of cultural production in that the first
emphasizes cooperative activity while the second emphasizes conflict. Nevertheless, these two
sociological approaches to art share much in common.
O’Connor 84
Conclusion
There are qualities that we acquire only through the judgments of
others.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
The popularity of Bill Monroe’s 1923 Loar F-5 engendered significant
misconceptions about the nature of Loar’s involvement in mandolin production at
Gibson and perhaps even the quality of the instruments themselves. It is worth
noting that the name Lloyd Loar did not mean anything to Monroe when he
purchased his F-5 in the 1940s. Mandolin virtuoso David Grisman also knew
nothing about Loar when he acquired one of his F-5s in the mid-1960s. “When I
bought my first Lloyd Loar F-5 they were not called ‘Lloyd Loar F-5s,’” he says.
“I didn’t care about the model or the history. I just picked the one that sounded
the best to me that day” (Carter, “Strad”). However, as the popularity of the F-5
grew in the second half of the twentieth century, players and critics began to
assume that, because Loar’s signature graced the label inside the original F-5s,
Loar must have been entirely responsible for their production (Dudenbostel I).
A recent article on Monroe’s F-5, which appeared in Southern Cultures in
2007, illustrates how this notion has been perpetuated. Entitled “The MillionDollar Mandolin: Bluegrass Music’s Finest Relic Finally Finds a Home,” the
article begins with a description of an afternoon in 1985 during which Monroe
entered his house only to find his already-legendary instrument smashed to pieces
by an intruder. (It would later be re-assembled by expert repairmen at Gibson.)
O’Connor 85
The author writes that the F-5 was “built by craftsman Lloyd Loar,” and he
proceeds to quote an article in Frets Magazine that had called the destruction of
the F-5 “sheer sacrilege” (Rudder 126). Three components – the title, the
falsehood about Loar, and the dramatic quote from Frets Magazine – combine to
portray Loar as a legend by association.
Loar’s fame has engendered the assumption that his F-5s possess
Stradivarian qualities. Violin virtuosi prefer instruments built by ingenious
craftsmen like Stradivari, Guarneri and Amati, and mandolin virtuosi, like
Monroe, prefer instruments built by Loar; thus, Loar must be an ingenious
craftsman (or at least the committee who actually built the F-5s comprised
ingenious craftsmen). In the 1970s, the belief that Loars would become collectors’
items by virtue of their purported quality, age, scarcity and association with an
increasingly popular style of music led speculators (primarily in the United
States) to buy them up. As a result, their market value skyrocketed. (As of
November 2009, the most expensive Loar F-5 had netted one collector about
$250,000 – almost 420 times the price (adjusted for inflation) that Monroe paid
for his F-5!) Undoubtedly, as the value of Loar’s F-5s grew, so did Loar’s
mystique.
Today, Loar’s admirers speak of him as though he were a minor deity;
however, underlying the praise of the well-informed is the notion that the F-5s of
some modern builders have probably surpassed Loars not only in craftsmanship
and playability but also in sound quality. Anecdotal evidence supports this notion.
O’Connor 86
In a 1983 interview, mandolin virtuoso Mike Marshall, who owned F-5s by both
Loar and John Monteleone, expressed his preference for the latter.
Dix Bruce: What is it about a Loar? Are you crazy about Loars?
Mike Marshall: Well, I’m not so crazy about Loars, but I
am crazy about old-sounding instruments. I just think old
instruments are neat. I don’t think by any means you have
to have a Loar. This Monteleone that I’ve been playing and
recording with is fine. I have to admit, I bought the Loar as
much for its aesthetics and as an investment. I bought the
Monteleone strictly for its sound (Bruce 11).
Marshall pigeonholes Loars into a broader category of “old instruments,”
suggesting that their value lies in their age rather than in their sound
quality.1 Several years ago, a Floridian collector who owned four Loars
purchased an F-5 from Lynn Dudenbostel; however, he returned it within
a year, complaining that he simply could not put it down (and that his
Loars were collecting too much dust). In a recent interview with
instrument dealer Greg Boyd, I learned that “people think Ronnie
McCoury [a major bluegrass mandolinist] sounds much better on his
Gilchrist than his Loar” (Boyd). These examples illustrate that the F-5s of
three luthiers, at least, may have tonally superseded Loar’s F-5s.
1
Ironically, Marshall’s primary instrument today is a Loar F-5. However, he has had it adjusted to
such an extent that many listeners believe it sounds nothing like a Loar anymore.
O’Connor 87
Luthier Bill Collings, who has been building stringed instruments for
nearly 40 years, posits that only a few Loars truly possess the sound quality for
which they are famous.
Between you and me and probably a lot of people, few Loars really
had “the Loar sound.” Most probably didn’t – most were too tight
that I ever heard…If you could put every Loar in the room we have
today and get an equal number of great handmade Gibsons, who
knows what – those Loars probably aren’t going to be the ones we
gravitate to. Some of the Loars are. They will be the winners. But
there are only a few…You put a Loar next to a new mandolin, and
the new mandolin sounds better to most people than the Loar
(Collings).
However, even “the winners” possess two things modern builders cannot invent:
old wood and nearly 90 years of age in instrument-form. Collings believes that
“people didn’t care about [Loars when they were first built] because they
probably didn’t sound that good.” The common knowledge that mandolins (like
violin-family instruments) improve with age suggests that an increasing number
of modern F-5s will overshadow Loars within a few decades.
The F-5 exemplifies Bourdieu’s notion that reputation does not manifest
itself independently. Certainly, Loar’s reputation is tied up considerably with Bill
Monroe’s. But I would also argue that when most F-5 consumers judge mandolins
built by sonic brokers such as Dudenbostel, Monteleone, Gilchrist, Kemnitzer and
Collings, they implicitly make judgments about Loar’s F-5s, which are the
O’Connor 88
collective benchmark against which modern F-5s must be compared. Even if a
modern luthier built an F-5 whose tone was more alluring than that of the best
Loar F-5, it would nevertheless remain a testament to Loar, the designer of the F5 tone.
Thus, drawing upon my observations and arguments from the three
chapters in this paper, I propose the following:
Loar and modern sonic brokers of the F-5 enjoy a symbolically
symbiotic relationship: sonic brokers earn a living by mediating
between Loar’s tone and the public, and the F-5s they produce
acquire symbolic capital for both Loar and themselves.
In other words, modern sonic brokers of the F-5, all of whom operate in the name
of Loar, literally construct some of the legendary status of Loar’s instruments.
From a Bourdieusian perspective, sonic brokers of the F-5 struggle against
luthiers of all types of mandolin to advocate for the dominant definition of the
tonal artist.2 Of course, new F-5s may compete against each other in the
marketplace, but their collective meta-function is to accumulate symbolic capital
on behalf of the F-5 tone (as opposed to the tones of all other mandolin models).
This capital accrues not only to modern sonic brokers but also to Loar himself, the
creator of the aesthetically governed, culturally active, sonically expressive tone
that all material F-5s built by sonic brokers aspire to capture.
2
This is especially pertinent thanks to an increasing awareness and appreciation of what the F-5
has to offer all styles of music, including those, like classical, still largely under the dominion of
the Neapolitan mandolin.
O’Connor 89
My arguments raise a number of questions, including (but not limited to)
the following:
(1) How does one “predetermine” tone? Is it not possible that
Loar’s tone simply resulted from a set of design specifications he
believed would produce any kind of pleasant tone?
(2) Does the “Loar tone” really exist? Some argue that it
does not because no two Loars sound exactly the same.
Moreover, some esteemed F-5 builders claim to strive for
tone other than the “Loar tone.”
(3) How does one demarcate one tonal artwork from
another? (For instance, John Monteleone developed a
model of mandolin called the “Grand Artist,” which looks
and sounds similar to (i.e. is clearly influenced by) the F-5.
Do Monteleone’s “Grand Artist” mandolins also acquire
symbolic capital on behalf of Loar?)
(4) How does one demarcate a sonic broker from a material
broker? Are not sonic brokers are merely hyper-material
brokers who are better at adhering closely to design
specifications than (and have access to better materials than
do) material brokers?
(1) The best answer to this is that it is indeed difficult, if not
impossible, to ascertain whether or not the tones of most new models of
stringed instruments are “predetermined.” I ascribe to the Bourdieusian
O’Connor 90
notion that all works of art are position-takings – that is, they are created
in reference to all other position-takings in the field, and so nothing is
truly revolutionary. Thus, a “predetermined” tone must have a referent.
Admittedly, I have not investigated the tones of other models of stringed
instruments. It is clear to me that the tone of the F-5 references the tones
of the F-4 and the violin, and given that the F-5 has much in common with
the F-4 (i.e. given that the F-5 is not a completely revolutionary mandolin
design with no clear antecedent), it would seem that Loar’s tonal
modifications were deliberate, not accidental.
(2a) The notion that the “Loar tone” does not exist is based on concrete
evidence, (i.e. that no two Loars sound exactly alike). However, my arguments
proceed from a theoretical perspective – that is, the Gibson Company followed
the same specification sheets and used the same woods for every F-5, so the intent
was to create F-5s that essentially sounded the same. Ironically, this mechanical
adherence to design specifications seems to indicate that craftsmen at Gibson did
not engage in any sonic tasks, those crucial to capturing a particular tone, but the
truth is that graduation thicknesses do, in fact, vary in some Loars. There is no
obvious reason for this variation. It could be evidence for tap tuning, but a number
of Loars whose top- or back-thicknesses deviate far from the norm are judged to
have poorer sound quality than others. Perhaps variation in graduation indicates
that craftsmen poorly executed sonic tasks at the request of either Loar or other
acoustical engineers at Gibson. (Such tasks may have been called for if, for
O’Connor 91
instance, the wood in a particular mandolin top was considerably less dense than
usual.)
(2b) One might also recall that different combinations of woods as well as
different luthieric tendencies (e.g. tools used, speed of production) yield different
“tones.” I suggest that such variation represents a form improvisation around the
core F-5 tone (see Chapter 3).3
(3) If art theorists and organologists find value in my concept of the tonal
artwork, I call upon them to address this question in the future. Tonal works of art
are undoubtedly rare. One cannot merely tweak the design specifications of a
violin or a mandolin and claim to have created a new tone. Moreover, the
interplay between the tone of the F-5 and the sociomusical circumstances under
which it was conceived is manifest; I am not aware of a clear analogy. I suspect
that the Industrial Revolution (late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and
the advent of electric instruments (1930s and 1940s), for instance, would yield
further examples.
(4) Categories in the humanities (i.e. genres, styles, eras, etc.) almost
never have clear boundaries. I conceive of these two types of broker as ends on a
spectrum (or prototypes of family resemblance categories) rather than two distinct
entities. It is true that F-5s produced by sonic brokers (like Dudenbostel) almost
always feature higher-quality materials than those produced by material brokers
(such as the Eastman Company). Furthermore, it is easier to adhere exactly to a
3
Although most F-5 luthiers and players would argue that a mandolin can only possess the “Loar
tone” if it is made of Eastern Red spruce and Curly maple, I interpret “Loar tone” more liberally
for the sake of argument in this paper.
O’Connor 92
set of design specifications when working slowly (e.g. 200 hours per mandolin,
like Dudenbostel) rather than quickly (e.g. around 10 – 15 hours per mandolin,
like Eastman). Nevertheless, insiders’ perspectives (such as Collings’s
comparison between instruments and instrument objects), consumer tastes
(Dudenbostel’s F-5s are compared to Loar’s all the time, but I have never heard
anyone seriously compare an Eastman F-5 to a Loar F-5) and market prices (there
is a reason Dudenbostel’s F-5s are worth 50 times more than Eastman F-5s) call
for such a dichotomy.
(In response to these and other potential questions, I remind the reader that
my inferences are based upon articles published by (and conversations held with)
F-5 luthiers, critics and consumers themselves.)
My inquiry into the F-5 mandolin is motivated by the dearth of scholarship
on luthiery. Despite the ubiquity of stringed instruments both in academic
institutions (as subjects of study and tools for performance) and in culture more
broadly, luthiery remains a somewhat misunderstood practice. Although my
arguments concern a narrow subject in the world of luthiery, I feel that they take a
stride toward the development of a theory or philosophy of luthiery, in whichever
field (musicology/organology, art history, philosophy, etc.) that might gain a
foothold. If no such theory or philosophy arises in the near future, then at the very
least, this is my contribution to F-5 mandolin scholarship – or, one might say, the
lore of Loar.
O’Connor 93
Works Cited
Alperson, Philip. “Instrumental Music and Instrumental Value.” Journal of
Aesthetic Education 27.1 (1993): 2-10. Print.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun
Appadurai. New York: Cambridge, 1986. Print.
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Interviews
Boyd, Greg. Personal Interview. 5 Jan. 2010.
Collings, Bill. Personal Interview. 17 Aug. 2009.
Dudenbostel, Lynn. Personal Interview, Part I. 10 Aug. 2009.
---. Personal Interview, Part II. 11 Aug. 2009.
---. Personal Interview, Part III. 12 Aug. 2009.
Siminoff, Roger H. “Regarding a Harvard thesis on the mandolin…” E-mail to
Forrest O’Connor. 24 Dec. 2008.
---. “Regarding undergraduate thesis on the F-5.” E-mail to Forrest O’Connor. 4
Nov. 2009.
O’Connor 103
Suggested Discography
Apollon, Dave. The Man With the Mandolin. Acoustic Disc, 1997. CD.
Calace, Raphael, Alison Stephens and Steven Devine. Raffaele Calace: Mandolin
Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Rapsodia Napoletana. Naxos, 2007. CD.
Lawson, Doyle & Quicksilver. School of Bluegrass. Crossroads, 2004. CD.
Marshall, Mike and Chris Thile. Into the Cauldron. Sugar Hill, 2003. CD.
McCoury Brothers, The. The McCoury Brothers. Rounder Select, 1995. CD.
Monroe, Bill. The Essential Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys. Sony, 1992. CD.
New Grass Revival. New Grass Revival. Southern Music Dist., 1986. CD.
Old & In the Way. Breakdown: Live Recordings 1973. Acoustic Disc, 1997. CD.
Stanley, Ralph. The Very Best of Ralph Stanley. Audium Entertainment, 2002.
CD.
Thile, Chris. Not All Who Wander Are Lost. Sugar Hill, 2001. CD.
Vivaldi, Antonio. 3 Concertos for Viola d’Amore; 2 Concertos for Mandolin.
Odyssey, 1967. CD.
O’Connor 104
Appendix: Inside Lynn Dudenbostel’s Workshop
Bandsaw.
Belt sander.
Table sander.
Drill press.
O’Connor 105
The CNC (Computer Numerical Control) “roughs
out” a top for an A-5.
Dudenbostel graduates the top of an A-5 using an ibex
plane and a caliper.
With the help of a drill press, Dudenbostel cuts inlayholes in a fingerboard.
O’Connor 106
With the aid of a clamp, Dudenbostel drills a
truss rod cavity in the neck.
Dudenbostel employs a jeweler’s
saw to cut a floral inlay pattern out
of abalone.
Peghead veneer and fingerboard.
An unfinished F-5 rim assembly.
O’Connor 107
These six gold mother-of-pearl “Dudenbostel” logos
will be inlaid in six forthcoming F-5 pegheads.
An A-5 top is glued to a rim
assembly with the assistance of
numerous clamps.
Ivoroid binding is glued to an A-5
top.
Dudenbostel signs the underside of each
mandolin top.
O’Connor 108
An F-5 body.
An F-5 “in the white.”
Sunburst is applied to the
back of an F-5.