Raffaele Calace

After Calace graduated with high honors from the Regio Conservatorio di Musica in Naples, he set out to elevate the mandolin's place in music.

To achieve this, he toured Europe and Japan, giving concerts on the Neapolitan mandolin and liuto cantabile.

The liuto cantabile is a bass variant of the mandolin family that scholars believe Neapolitan luthiers of the Vinaccia family created in the last decade of the 19th century, and that Raffaele Calace subsequently perfected.

Raffaele Calace made three long-playing phonograph records on which he plays mandolin and liuto cantabile.

The Calace school forms a bridge between other modern methods for mandolin, such as those by Raffaele Calace's countryman Silvio Ranieri (1882-1956), a Roman virtuoso who settled in Brussels, and the American-based Italian mandolinist Giuseppe Pettine (1874-1966).

Lutenist Rafaelle Calace holding a liuto canabile. This photo was taken by 1901 and was featured in Samuel Adelstein's book Mandolin Memories , printed that year.