Middle Ear Music
Alexander MacAllister
Middle Ear Music
Brannvaktveien 30
Grefsen
Oslo, Norway 0489
Norway
ph: 99876800
amaca
The instrument
The picture on the left is a record of my first tentative contact with my new guitar, with Mr. Algrinati trying to ignore my technical fumbling and concentrate on the sound!
For some reason the images below have been clipped by the software, but you can still see the radical design of this splendid-sounding instrument. Primarily I am playing music from the nineteenth century, and asking myself "How would Mertz have played this?" (independant of whether the work is actually by Mertz).
It was built by Lipgrin and Algranati of London, who were carefully chosen because they had already built jazz guitars with the sound-hole in one shoulder and the other cut away; while they had built ten-string classical guitars for people like Simon Wynburg.
Two views of a unique intrument
The inspiration for the name of this guitar - it is called a Lyric Decacorde - lies in the fact that two eminent virtuosi who were active in Paris in the 1800s also played on similarly developed instruments: namely, Fernandino Carulli and Fernando Sor. The former may have been among the first to experiment with a ten-string guitar (his Decacorde), while Sor played a multi-stringed Lyre-guitare.
Middle Ear Music
Brannvaktveien 30
Grefsen
Oslo, Norway 0489
Norway
ph: 99876800
amaca
