A cheap instrument becomes more of decorative prop.

Daniel Jewesbury gave me a mandolin of his to repair. Strictly speaking it wasn’t broken, it was just bad quality. The problem was that it was impossible to tune properly. Either he could get the high notes right, or the low ones, but not all at the same time, which of course makes it sort of useless. This got me thinking about how instruments often act as decorative statements, or accessories. It doesn’t matter that the mandolin standing in a corner in the sitting room is unplayable, when guests see it, they know this to be the home of musical people. But couldn’t the unplayable instrument at least be given n additional function, since it’s just standing there?

A very discrete text on the side is the only visible change.

I wanted to add a function, that was simple, that didn’t alter the exterior of the instrument, and that would also act more as a possibility, than something actually being used. The image of clowns smashing instruments over each others heads came to me, the cliché of splinters and dust flying and the impact of the light weight instrument being so flimsy as to act almost as a slap or insult rather than a real attack. Maybe this image is so well imprinted also in other peoples memories, that if you surprised a burglar in your house, and came at him with a raised mandolin, he would just disregard it and take the blow expecting it to just splinter off his thick skull. This could be taken advantage of, by clever double crossing. I filled the body of the mandolin with cast concrete, so that it now, still invisible from the outside, became a most formidable instrument of destruction. Anyone hit over the head with this instrument would likely visit the hospital afterwards, or more likely, the morgue. Considering that northern Belfast, where Daniel lives, has it’s reputation as a rough place, I found it very suitable, and also given that Daniel is more of the sophisticated gentleman and academic than the ruffian, I think it appropriate that he would go into battle swinging a mandolin if any blunt instrument.

Only the weight tells the difference.

object no. 40