Draft:Arik Kerman

Arik Kerman (born 1938) is an Israeli mandolin maker and player.

Life
Arik Kerman was born in Bat Yam, Israel in 1938, the son of Yisca née Shott and David Kerman, who was the first guard for Bat-Yam (then named Bayit VeGan). Kerman studied at the Nautical Officers' School, then served on the Israeli destroyer "INS Eilat", originally aspiring to continue as a seaman, but changed his mind and went on to study graphic design in the Betsalel School of Arts. After graduation, he established a design studio together with his cousin Danny Kerman, which operated for 14 years.

Mandolin builder
Kerman who played the balalaika and mandolin as a hobby, began to build musical instruments as a result of a friendship he struck up with the violin builder Mendel Segal. He spent his spare time learning to build violins in Mendel's studio, but the conservative style of violin building did not fit his creative soul and he moved to building mandolins, whose strings are tuned like those of a violin, but being folk instruments are more amenable to alteration.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Kerman was exposed to the Beer Sheba mandolin orchestra, which played a classical violin repertoire on mandolins made according to the conventional Neapolitan style, which restricted the musicians' performance and expression. Kerman set his goal to develop an improved mandolin whose tone and structure facilitated playing to enable musicians to express a repertoire of classical music on the mandolin as a solo instrument on concert platforms. He developed a double - resonant mandolin, with two gated apertures in addition to the usual main sound hole. The mandolin that Kerman developed is characterized by a high-quality, fine, strong sound, and enables musicians to reach optimal musical performance. Later Arik continued to make further improvements to the mandolin, developing two versions (see pictures).

In addition to the development of the mandolins, in 1993 Arik Kerman established a Foundation to lend his new style mandolins to gifted young musicians so that they could improve their playing and gain acceptance to the Music Academy. The quality of the notes and performance possibilities offered by the mandolin he developed led the Academy to recognize the mandolin for the first time as a classical instrument, like the violin and other instruments from the classical genre. The gifted musicians, who graduated from the Kerman Foundation, won titles of excellent musician and various competitions, and two of them, Yaki Reuven and Avi Avital went on to become world famous mandolin players performing as soloists accompanied by an orchestra in concert halls throughout the world.

Kerman acted in various ways to integrate the mandolin in the classical music world, including helping to form a mandolin quartet, equivalent to the string quartet including two mandolins, a mandolin-alto and a mandochello, instruments which he built especially for that quartet, which was named after him.

Over time, mandolin luthiers over the globe began to copy Kerman's mandolin model, which was considered the best in the world. Kerman has not registered a patent for the mandolin that he developed and his response to the imitation of his model was that it helps to achieve his goal, the improvement of the quality of the mandolin as a solo instrument, expressing his satisfaction that the model that he had developed had spread worldwide. In 2011, Kerman's son, Yam, joined him, learning the art of mandolin construction from him.

Books
In addition to his constant development of mandolins, Arik Kerman expressed his youthful connection with the sea, by writing two books on maritime issues:


 * "The Stoker", a prose book published by Sifriat Hapoalim.
 * "The Jewish Refugee Warship", a thorough historical research telling a story of the illegal immigration by sea to Palestine, published on Amazon, as well as several articles on maritime history in Hebrew and English.