The mandolin is a beautiful, strange, difficult instrument, tuned like a violin but with a flat, fretted fingerboard and eight strings instead of four. Played with a plectrum, it is capable of ...

LOGAN — Building the perfect mandolin is like resurrecting a tree, at least in a philosophical sense. "You're putting the wood back into a different shape, and it becomes alive again," said John ...

When it comes to provocatively suggestive titles, composers’ intentions are seldom as successfully realized as with, say, Scriabin’s “Poem of Ecstasy” or P.D.Q. Bach’s affectionate Philip Glass parody ...