Ring of Fire III

Charles William Battenberg, B.A., M.A., Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, Schwarzberg Chair of Musicology, Oxford University 1979, Oxford University Press
Chapter Eleven-There Came Sweet Strings

Not all musical advancements from the knowledge of Grantville were made via the road to Magdeburg…the knowledge of the advanced mature instruments, as has already been noted, began to spread out very soon…

With the exception of the piano, no other stringed instrument made as great an impact as the banjo…considered a humble instrument by the up-timers, in the hands of Monteverdi and others it quickly joined the ranks of concert instruments along with the mandolin and guitar, which had supplanted the lute in much quicker fashion than it apparently did in the up-time…down-timers had no knowledge of the banjo, as it had been developed well after the Ring of Fire period of history…

The rise of the banjo was due in no little part to the efforts of one Giouan Battista Veraldi. Little is known of the man. By his name, musicologists assume that he was born in northern Italy, but exactly where has not been determined. It is known that he was a lutenist in the royal court of Sweden for some time. But he enters the Ring of Fire stage in 1634, when he became the student of Atwood Cochran. Therein began the partnership that lifted both the mature guitar and the unknown banjo…

…Veraldi arrived in Venice with guitar and banjo in hand, and addressed himself to Maestro Monteverdi and to the masters of the Sellas family, foremost luthiers in Italy…saw the innovation immediately…Monteverdi’s “Sonatas for Banjo and Continuo” were published within the year, and swept through Italy and southern Germany almost by storm…The literature for banjo began to expand almost exponentially…Veraldi’s “Etudes for Solo Banjo” are part of the standard repertoire…

The Sellas family had received an almost incalculable advantage…samples of the mature instruments were in their hands for weeks as they measured…far in advance of the Voboams and other luthiers of France and Spain.

After a few years, Veraldi began returning to Grantville to visit his teacher. Before long, he was bringing other students with him…a school developed…students from all over, but especially from northern Italy…Master Cochran was the head, but il primo Veraldi was the driving force…The journals of several musicians who later became of note record seeing Master Cochran in his eighties playing together with Veraldi…loved a piece named Dueling Banjos, and played it with great glee…significance of the title is unknown, since by all accounts Master Cochran would play a guitar in these performances…unfortunately the music has been lost in the passage of time…