Economics you might say is my day job.
I am also a musician.
I started playing guitar in the third grade.
I gradually became interested over time in playing classical guitar.
I discovered I could actually bridge the gap between instruments
and so I decided, well, why stop there?
This is a modern, American mandolin where for a time it was the most popular instrument.
It never has been a very loud instrument,
and once concert halls got bigger
where people wanted to dance, it died out.
But then it became popular again.
There now are a number of mandolin orchestras.
I play in a group called the Providence Mandolin Orchestra.
So, let's turn to Neponset Valley Suite.
So, mandolas, guitars...
A mandolin has four courses, eight strings.
The strings are though tuned in unison so they are actually
the same note they're just doubled. The mandolin
like this is tuned like the violin so G, D, A, E.
These instruments are instruments where you have to play the note precisely.
They don't have a margin for error.
On the guitar when you're playing you try to keep
your hand parallel and your fingers as perpendicular
as possible to the fret board.
If you don't do that you'll hear what you often hear when
you hear guitars play and the note, you know,
goes splat. The mandolin is proportionally
more difficult in this regard because it's
smaller, right, and if you can see as you
go up the frets, they get closer and closer together
until you can hardly see the distance between them.
So you have to imagine having to fit your finger in that distance and still making a clear sound.
One of the things I like about the mandolin, it's just a challenge to try to make it sound beautiful.
And on the mandolin you can create the illusion of multiple lines through a technique called duo style.
Where you're doing this...
And what I was doing there was I was playing a bass note like that
and my pick was moving hopefully too fast for you to see, so you hear the illusion
of the single line and the bass. It's called duo style. It's the mandolinist
accompanying himself by playing the bass and the treble at the same time.
But that's an illusion, that's not actually playing the notes at the same time
and so in the late 15th century
lutenists discovered that they could actually play two notes at the same time by
plucking them at the same time so...
What was essential to Renaissance music was the voice.
In order to imitate voices that were interweaving in this counterpoint
you had to be able to pluck all those notes at the same time.
The lute sort of took off at that point in some ways
and became the most popular musical instrument during the Renaissance.
I tend to think there are connections between what I do for a living, you know, as an economics
professor and playing music. There are elements of art in both. In economic history you
have to make connections often times between very disparate elements. You have to see the big picture,
and in music you have to do the same thing.
There's a bunch of little notes
on the page, it's like, you know, a writer using letters, and you have to connect them
on a micro-level so you have to connect one note to the next note, but then you have to
see the whole picture of it.