Well, One's Musical Tastes are Really Pretty Subjective, But the Mando is Da Kine

     This writer, while not being a professional writer and not particularly educated in writing, realizes when he has written a bad piece of writing. The last post by this writer was a bad piece for one main reason. It was unfocussed. While the topic of the mandolin may have seen as the focus, the actual focus should have been what the mandolin is and can do and is an often ignored instrument.
     Having said that, your faithful correspondent would like to put forth the idea that classical piece do have to be played on violin to sound good.
     Not everybody can play the violin in the classical style, especially nowadays when one measures one's self against a Midori or Heifetz via YouTube.
     But, really, the violin is not really all that. There are several instruments that are not considered "class" instruments that can play the Western canon as well has violins and such.
      Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s John Sebastian presented a number of classical musicians with a recording and asked those musicians what the instrument in the recording was. Some of the musicians said that it was an oboe and others said that it was a violin. The instrument was, in fact, a chromatic harmonica.
     Here's an example of Bach's Air on a G string played on a chromatic harmonica:
     ▶ Bach - Air on the G String - YouTube
     There is, in the above example, no string involved.
     Unfortunately, there has been no readily available version of the piece done on the mandolin simply because all to many mandolinists  have fallen into the "hard pick" school of playing. They'd present the piece much better using match book covers as plectrums than hard picks like bluegrass players use.
     This following piece does well on a mandolin simply because the player realizes the strengths and weaknesses of the mandolin. And just a note: your faithful correspondent, for some reason, for all too a long a time, thought that this piece was called Taco Bell's Cannon:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNcsyvEIzpo
      A lot of mandolinists and harmoncaist really don't quite know what to do with classical music because the wider culture demands bluegrass, blues or rock. And that's pretty sad because they have limited themselves.
     There is, despite what the politically correct crowd say, a Western canon of music that goes beyond the nonsense that is played on the radio and that is far more complicated and rewarding than Asian or Middle Eastern  music.
     The following two examples need no comment except that one is hard pressed to imagine that such music being created in Asia or the Middle East:
      Air on a G String Original Instruments
      Canon in D: Pachelbel
      And just to show that that we at Bloody Nib Manor aren't awful snobs, consider this old thing from he 1930s. It's a great mando piece:
       ▶ Skillet Lickers-Hawkins Rag-1934 - YouTube