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Former publisher of the Mandolin World News, Grisman now heads his own mandolin-dominated record label, Acoustic Discs, which will release its 22nd CD this spring. "It really all comes from players," says Grisman, who has collaborated with artists ranging from jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli to the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.
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The mandolin isn't on the upswing because of the wood and strings it's made of. introduced the mandolin sound to a new generation. With its 1991 hit "Losing My Religion," the alternative-rock band R.E.M. Mahler, Schoenberg and Stravinsky wrote the mandolin into several of their 20th-century orchestral works. Picasso used the instrument as a motif in his cubist paintings Thomas Edison showcased it in some of his first recordings. In "Don Giovanni," Mozart put a mandolin in Don Juan's hand for one of opera's most famous balcony seduction scenes. Now they're harkening back to their roots." The shimmering, Old World sound of the mandolin has symbolized romance, antiquity, progress. They've gone through their hallucinatory-fog mode of the 1960s with electric guitars. "There's definitely a resurgence of interest," agrees David Eisner, president of the House of Musical Traditions music store in Takoma Park, which stocks about 15 used and new mandolins at any given time. Amateurs are blowing the dust off their great-grandparents' mandolins and signing up for lessons. Or, like Evan Marshall, Mark Marshall, Radim Zenkl and Andy Statman, they're reinventing the old - classical, Celtic, European folk and Jewish klezmer music. But it is growing." Professionals like Grisman are using the mandolin to invent new genres of music. "To say it's snowballing - well, snowball is a relative term when you're starting from nothing. Now, as the calendar turns toward 2000, "I don't want to kid you about the mandolin," says Norman Levine, who runs the Plucked Strings music publishing company from his Rockville apartment and who in 1986 helped found the 300-member Classical Mandolin Society of America. A hundred years later, thousands of new mandolin pieces entered the European repertoire on the cusp of the 20th century, America became mandolin-mad. Beethoven and Mozart wrote for the mandolin in the late 1700s.
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"It's not a big scene - but it's big enough for mandolin players," says David Grisman, one of the first to move the mandolin from classical music and bluegrass into the realms of swing, Latin, Gypsy, jazz and his own original hybrid known as "Dawg." "The mandolin seems to catch on every 100 years or so," explains Neil Gladd, Washington-based editor of Mandolin Quarterly and one of the country's best-known classical mandolinists. Hundreds of mandolin fans will descend upon Washington in November 1998 for their annual convention.
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Some dozen sites on the World Wide Web are dedicated to the old-fashioned instrument and its newfangled practitioners, and groups like the Modern Mandolin Quartet are playing to packed houses. This descendant of the 12th-century lute is undergoing something of a renaissance: In the past decade, mandolin orchestras have cropped up in Louisville, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Wichita, adding to the 15 or so already in existence. And yet, in the 1990s, the mandolin is back. Nothing today approaches America's mandolin mania from 1890 to 1920, when college mandolin clubs were as popular as university sports teams are now, when the mandolin was a staple of vaudeville and working-class shopgirls strutted through town with mandolin cases instead of a handbags, trying to look stylish. "It means sustained." A century ago, these players would have been participating in the biggest musical craze of their time. "Sostenuto," she repeats, pointing to the term on her musical score. "It's sostenuto!" von Bernewitz insists as she conducts one of the oldest mandolin orchestras in the United States. Outside it is a chilly winter night in 1996. A young woman holds a mandolin pick in her teeth as she flips through the pages on her music stand. A player leans his ear toward the fretboard of his mandocello. One by one, mandolins have been snuggled into laps and calloused fingers press across metal strings. Some two dozen amateur musicians have shaken off the winter drizzle to gather in this church basement in Arlington, stuffing the coat rack with their woolens and leaving their well-worn mandolin cases sprawled on the floor. Karen von Bernewitz raises her baton and the Takoma Mandoleers prepare to tremolo.