Nomenclature

I recently posted on the Mandolin Café forum that I was making a “tenor and octave”.  As Mandolin Café members are mainly USA based, this caused some confusion, as Shaw said, England and America are two countries separated by a common language!

In the UK the tenor mandola is the instrument which is tuned to a fifth below the mandolin, in the same relationship as that of the viola to the violin but in USA it’s simply called a mandola. It makes perfect sense to me just to call it a mandola, why use two words when one describes it accurately.

And of course many in the UK call the octave mandolin (USA) an octave mandola, which doesn’t make much sense as it’s tuned an octave below a mandolin and not a mandola!  D’oh!

This got me thinking about the naming of my instruments; so below is Adrian’s mandola with all the construction work complete.