The Fifth Course

As you may or may not know I am the moderator over at the Santa Cruz Guitar Players Forum. Recently on that discussion board one of our regular posters posed the question, "One instrument or multiple instruments?" It’s an interesting question, and one that can only be answered definitively for oneself.

But that doesn’t mean examining the topic is pointless. The examination alone may prove useful reinforcing your own opinion. Or it can serve as an opportunity to change your opinion in light of new information.

Ever since I was a kid, I have been amazed by people who have the ability to play more than one musical instrument. The amazement continued as a I struggled for and finally achieved competence on guitar. And then it dimmed a little after I took up mandolin. But my childhood impressions were not then and are not now unique. Many non-musicians are mystified by the ability to play any single instrument, and that mystification jumps an order of magnitude when they witness the act of switching from one instrument to another in person. Since the vast majority of people in the world do not play a musical instrument, their estimation of multi-instrumentalists seems the most prevalent view.

On the other hand, Joshua Bell, Yo Yo Ma, John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yehudi Menuin, and a host of other classical and jazz artists all focus (or focused) on a single instrument. Even our own David Grisman and Don Stiernberg focus on mandolin, though they can play guitar.

But therein lies an inconsistency worth noting. There’s a difference between “focus” and “play.” Classical music conservatories require students who focus on anything except piano to learn to play piano. The idea is to provide the student with a practical grounding in music theory and give them an understanding of music broader than their instrument. So conservatory trained classical musicians generally play at least two instruments, and focus on one.

Like classical musicians, Grisman and Stiernberg (and nearly all mandolinists I have ever met) play more than one instrument. In their cases, Grisman and Stiernberg also play guitar. You can hear Grisman’s guitar playing on Tone Poems II and you can hear Stiernberg’s guitar playing on Jethro Burns’s last two albums, Bye Bye Blues and Swing Low Sweet Mandolin.

And just as violinists who learned piano have a deeper understanding of music, so too do mandolinists like Grisman and Stiernberg (and Tim O’Brien and Mike Marshall and Mike Compton, etc) who also play guitar. So the ball seems to have landed in the multi-instrumental side of the court.

But that’s not the whole story.

Next time I’ll look into the difference between “play” and “focus” to see if we can’t tease out some better understanding of what it means to be a multi-instrumentalist.

Daniel