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Milwaukee Is Home to One of the World’s Oldest Mandolin Orchestras

You’d be forgiven for hearing “mandolin orchestra” and thinking of Italy, not Milwaukee. But our city has one of the oldest ensembles in the world. Formed in 1900, the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra was part of a turn-of-the-century craze in America for mandolins, a smaller type of lute with steel strings.

“To really master it takes a lot of time, but you can learn some basics and sound pretty good fairly early,” says board president Fred Pike. Even though the fad died out in the 1930s, Milwaukee’s 30-person amateur orchestra has been kept alive by devoted members and ambitious music directors.

Most recent of those is René Izquierdo, a classical guitar professor at UW-

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