History of the classical guitar
Encyclopedia
The history of the classical guitar and its repertoire spans over four centuries, including its ancestor the baroque guitar
Baroque guitar
The Baroque guitar is a guitar from the baroque era , an ancestor of the modern classical guitar. The term is also used for modern instruments made in the same style....

. Throughout the centuries, the classical guitar has evolved principally from three sources: the lute
Lute
Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....

, the vihuela
Vihuela
Vihuela is a name given to two different guitar-like string instruments: one from 15th and 16th century Spain, usually with 12 paired strings, and the other, the Mexican vihuela, from 19th century Mexico with five strings and typically played in Mariachi bands.-History:The vihuela, as it was known...

, and the Baroque guitar
Baroque guitar
The Baroque guitar is a guitar from the baroque era , an ancestor of the modern classical guitar. The term is also used for modern instruments made in the same style....

. The popularity of the classical guitar has been sustained over the years by many great players, arrangers, and composers. A very short list would include Gaspar Sanz
Gaspar Sanz
Gaspar Sanz was an Aragonese composer, guitarist, organist and priest born to a wealthy family in Calanda in the Spanish comarca of Bajo Aragón. He studied music, theology and philosophy at the University of Salamanca, where he was later appointed Professor of Music...

 (1640–1710), Fernando Sor
Fernando Sor
Josep Ferran Sorts i Muntades was a Spanish classical guitarist and composer. While he is best known for his guitar compositions, he also composed music for a wide range of genres, including opera, orchestra, string quartet, piano, voice and ballet...

 (1778–1839), Mauro Giuliani
Mauro Giuliani
Mauro Giuseppe Sergio Pantaleo Giuliani was an Italian guitarist, cellist and composer, and is considered by many to be one of the leading guitar virtuosi of the early 19th century.- Biography :...

 (1781–1829), Francisco Tárrega
Francisco Tárrega
Francisco de Asís Tárrega y Eixea was an influential Spanish composer and guitarist of the Romantic period.-Biography:Tárrega was born on 21 November 1852, in Vila-real, Castelló, Spain...

 (1852–1909), Andrés Segovia
Andrés Segovia
Andrés Torres Segovia, 1st Marquis of Salobreña , known as Andrés Segovia, was a virtuoso Spanish classical guitarist from Linares, Jaén, Andalucia, Spain...

 (1893–1987), John Williams
John Williams (guitarist)
John Christopher Williams is an Australian classical guitarist, and a long-term resident of the United Kingdom. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award win in the 'Best Chamber Music Performance' category with Julian Bream for Julian and John .-Biography:John Williams was born on 24 April 1941 in...

 (1941), and Christopher Parkening (1947).

Renaissance origins

While the precise lineage of the instrument is still unclear, historians believe that the guitar is the descendant of several ancient instruments. These ancient instruments from which the guitar has evolved include the Greek kithara, gittern
Gittern
The gittern was a relatively small, quill-plucked, gut strung instrument that originated around the 13th century and came to Europe via Moorish Spain. It was also called the quinterne in Germany, the guitarra in Spain, and the chitarra in Italy...

, lyre, European and Middle Eastern lutes, and the Spanish vihuela. The guitar is first mentioned in literature in the 13th century. The poem El Libro de Buen Amor
The Book of Good Love
The Book of Good Love , considered to be one of the masterpieces of Spanish poetry, is a semi-biographical account of romantic adventures by Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, dating from 1330....

 by Juan Ruiz
Juan Ruiz
Juan Ruiz , known as the Archpriest of Hita , was a medieval Spanish poet. He is best known for his ribald, earthy poem, Libro de buen amor .-Origins:...

 describes two early instruments, guitarra morisca and guitarra latina.
Allí sale gritando la guitarra morisca,
de las bozes aguda e de los puntos arisca.
El corpudo laúd que tiene punto a la trisca,
la guitarra latina con ésos se aprisca.

“Then came out, with a strident sound, the two-stringed Moor’s guitar,
High-pitched as to its range, as to its tone both harsh and bold;
Big-bellied lute which marks the time for merry, rustic dance,
And Spanish guitar which with the rest was herded in the fold.”


What still remains unclear is whether the guitar is indigenous to Europe or rather it was brought to Europe by Arabs. Provoking further ambiguity, Ruiz describes both a Moorish and a Spanish guitar. Instruments called guitars in some variety were first mentioned in literature beginning in the 13th century, though many of these records describe what are now classified as gitterns.

The first incarnation of what is now called the guitar first appeared during the Renaissance. The Renaissance guitar contained four pairs of strings called courses. The Renaissance guitar shared most similarities with the Spanish vihuela
Vihuela
Vihuela is a name given to two different guitar-like string instruments: one from 15th and 16th century Spain, usually with 12 paired strings, and the other, the Mexican vihuela, from 19th century Mexico with five strings and typically played in Mariachi bands.-History:The vihuela, as it was known...

, a six-coursed instrument with similar tuning and construction. Many prominent vihuelists also composed and wrote instructional methods for guitar as well. Alonso Mudarra
Alonso Mudarra
Alonso Mudarra was a Spanish composer and vihuelist of the Renaissance. He was an innovative composer of instrumental music as well as songs, and was the composer of the earliest surviving music for the guitar....

's Tres Libros de Música en Cifra para Vihuela, (Sevilla, 1546) included music for both solo vihuela and solo four-course guitar. Another notable composer of both guitar and vihuela music is Miguel de Fuenllana
Miguel de Fuenllana
Miguel de Fuenllana was a Spanish vihuelist and composer of the Renaissance.-Biography:Little is known of his life. It is assumed from his name that his roots lie in the municipality of Fuenllana, in the province of Ciudad Real, although he was born in Navalcarnero, Madrid...

. Juan Bermudo
Juan Bermudo
Fray Juan Bermudo was a Spanish composer, music theorist and mathematician.In his Perfecting the perfect instrument 1555, a treatise on playing the vihuela, Bermudo lists the maestro de capilla of the Royal Chapel of Granada, Bernardino de Figueroa, and Cristóbal de Morales as having checked and...

 published Declaración de Instrumentos Musicales in 1555, a treatise containing a section on plucked string instruments. This publication examined the relationship between the guitar and vihuela, and also differentiated between four and five-course guitars. The five-course guitar did not phase out the four-course instrument until the Baroque period.

One of the first major methods published for five-course guitar is Joan Carles Amat's Guitarra Española de Cinco Órdenes published in 1596.Notable composers for the baroque guitar include Francesco Corbetta, Robert de Visée, and Gaspar Sanz.

From the mid 18th century through the early 19th century, the guitar evolved into a six-string instrument, phasing out courses by preference to single strings. These six-string guitars were still smaller than the modern classical guitar. The design of the modern classical guitar can be attributed to Antonio de Torres. The construction of these guitars has been considered the standard in "traditional" instruments since the mid 19th century.

Technique

The guitar is most commonly played with the right hand plucking, picking or strumming the strings and the left hand fretting the notes on the fretboard. Yet different styles of playing have evolved over the years, including country style fingerpicking techniques such as chicken picking, as well as plectrum style picking methods, such as sweep picking. Techniques such as tapping have also been developed. (Tapping involves the right hand tapping the note on the fretboard and then pulling-off to a note fretted in the left hand. This technique can thus be used to play higher pitched and then lower pitched notes in quick succession, which would previously be unattainable with conventional style playing.) More recently, picking styles have been developed to promote speed and accuracy in notes, such as sweep picking. Sweep picking involves using a plectrum, and it allows arpeggios to be played on the guitar at very accurate and fast speeds.

Repertoire

The first 'Golden Age' of the classical guitar repertoire. Composer-guitarists.

Notable composers:
  • Mauro Giuliani
    Mauro Giuliani
    Mauro Giuseppe Sergio Pantaleo Giuliani was an Italian guitarist, cellist and composer, and is considered by many to be one of the leading guitar virtuosi of the early 19th century.- Biography :...

     1781–1829
  • Johann Kaspar Mertz
    Johann Kaspar Mertz
    Johann Kaspar Mertz was a Hungarian guitarist and composer.NOTE: THE ORIGINAL CREATOR OF THIS PAGE PLAGIARIZED THEIR MATERIAL. It has been copied and pasted from the Mel Bay website: http://www.melbay.com/authors.asp?author=749 I tried to report this problem to wikipedia, but they do not make it...

     1806–1856
  • Giulio Regondi
    Giulio Regondi
    Giulio Regondi was an Italian classical guitarist, concertinist and composer.Regondi was a child prodigy. Fernando Sor dedicated his Souvenir d'amitié, op. 46 to Regondi in 1831, when the boy was just nine.There is a reference to his appearing in London in 1831, presented as a child prodigy of the...

     1822–1872
  • Fernando Sor
    Fernando Sor
    Josep Ferran Sorts i Muntades was a Spanish classical guitarist and composer. While he is best known for his guitar compositions, he also composed music for a wide range of genres, including opera, orchestra, string quartet, piano, voice and ballet...

     1778–1839

Modern classical guitar

In the 20th century, many non-guitarist composers wrote for the instrument, which previously only players of the instrument had done.

Francisco Tárrega
Francisco Tárrega
Francisco de Asís Tárrega y Eixea was an influential Spanish composer and guitarist of the Romantic period.-Biography:Tárrega was born on 21 November 1852, in Vila-real, Castelló, Spain...

, Roberto Gerhard
Roberto Gerhard
Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder was a Catalan Spanish composer and musical scholar and writer, generally known outside Catalonia as Robert Gerhard.-Life:...

 (1896–1970), Heitor Villa-Lobos
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Heitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known and most significant Latin American composer to date. He wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works...

 (1887–1959)

How it has evolved

The bowl shaped harp, or the ‘tanbur’ marked the start of the stringed instrument era we nowadays know as the guitar. Prehistoric people made these instruments out of tortoise shells and animal gut for strings. The Archaeological Museum in Cairo is home to ultimate vintage guitar which belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose. It was made from polished cedar wood and an animal hide soundboard. In Europe, an instrument called an ‘oud’ was brought to Spain by the Moors and the Europeans renamed this instrument to a ‘lute’, at the same time as adding frets and changing the body to a pear-like shape.

The lute was around in Europe from around 450AD all the way up to mid-renaissance and improvements to the instrument were made along the way; including better quality wood for the boy and freeboard, better quality strings and innovative shapes to produce slightly different sounds. In Central Asia and Northern India, the traditional folk-stringed instrument remained unchanged for several hundred years.

The prefix ‘tar’ was placed in front of the number of strings on the instrument to illustrate its full name. For example, in modern Persian, ‘do’ is two, ‘se’, is three, ‘char’, is four and ‘panj’ is five; hence, a dotar has two strings, a setar has three strings, a chartar has four strings and a panjchar/panchtar has five strings. Everything was logical.

In the European renaissance, the four string (four-course) instrument has become dominant. However, near the end of the 16th Century in Italy, the five course guitarra battente began to replace the four string instrument and the standard tuning for which was the modern day A, D, G, B, E for the top five strings. The amount of frets on the guitar also went up from eight, to ten and eventually twelve. The Italians were once again the driving force of the final developments from five course guitars to the big six and this was a fairly easy job as it consisted of replacing/reworking the nut and bridge and plugging in another tuning peg hole for the sixth and final string.

An incredibly ornate guitar made by a German man called Joakim Thielke (1641 – 1719), was altered in this way and became a success. The modern classical guitar ‘look’ took its present form when the Spanish maker Antonio Torres increased the size of the body, altered the whole guitars proportions and introduced the revolutionary ‘fan’ top bracing in around 1850. This design drastically improved the guitars tone, volume and durability and was so good and intuitive; it remains almost the same to this very day.

Contemporary classical guitar

Instrument

Modern concert guitars occasionally follow the Smallman design which replaces the fan braces with a much lighter balsa brace attached to the back of the sound board with carbon fiber. The balsa brace has a honeycomb pattern and allows the (now much thinner) sound board to support more vibrational modes. This leads to greater volume and longer sustain.

Repertoire

Short list of significant compositions for the contemporary classical guitar. For a longer list see the article Selected contemporary repertoire for guitar
Selected contemporary repertoire for guitar
This is a list of selected contemporary repertoire for guitar. The pieces in this list were composed by notable composers , or composers whose work has significance in contemporary classical music history...

.
  • Luciano Berio
    Luciano Berio
    Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...

     Sequenza XI
    Sequenza XI
    Sequenza XI for solo guitar is one of a series of Sequenzas by Luciano Berio. Written for the American guitarist Eliot Fisk, it is an innovative investigation into the dramatic and virtuosic possibilities of musical performance.-Form:...

  • Stefan Beyer Schabefleisch
  • Elliott Carter
    Elliott Carter
    Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music...

      Changes
  • Aldo Clementi
    Aldo Clementi
    -Life:Aldo Clementi was born in Catania, Italy. He studied the piano, graduating in 1946. His studies in composition began in 1941, and his teachers included Alfredo Sangiorgi and Goffredo Petrassi. After receiving his diploma in 1954, he attended the Darmstadt summer courses from 1955 to 1962...

     12 Variazioni, Fantasia su frammenti di M.G.
  • Franco Donatoni
    Franco Donatoni
    Franco Donatoni was an Italian composer.Born in Verona, he started studying violin at the age of seven, and frequented the local Music Academy...

     Algo, Åse (Algo II)
  • Brian Ferneyhough
    Brian Ferneyhough
    Brian John Peter Ferneyhough is an English composer. His music is characterized by the extensive use of complex rhythmic tuplet notation which features in all his works...

     Kurze Schatten II
  • Alberto Ginastera
    Alberto Ginastera
    Alberto Evaristo Ginastera was an Argentine composer of classical music. He is considered one of the most important Latin American classical composers.- Biography :...

     Sonata
  • Hans Werner Henze
    Hans Werner Henze
    Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...

     Royal Winter Music I and II
  • Ernst Krenek
    Ernst Krenek
    Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...

     Suite
  • Bruno Maderna
    Bruno Maderna
    Bruno Maderna was an Italian conductor and composer. For the last ten years of his life he lived in Germany and eventually became a citizen of that country.-Biography:...

     Y Después
  • Tristan Murail
    Tristan Murail
    Tristan Murail is a French composer. His father, Gérard Murail, is a poet and his mother, Marie-Thérèse Barrois, a journalist. One of his brothers, Lorris Murail, and his younger sister Elvire Murail, aka Moka, also write, and his younger sister Marie-Aude Murail is a French children's writer...

     Tellur
  • Maurice Ohana
    Maurice Ohana
    Maurice Ohana was an Anglo-French composer of Sephardic Jewish origin.Ohana was born in Casablanca, Morocco. He was a British citizen until 1976, as his father had been born in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. He originally studied architecture, but abandoned this in favour of a...

     Si le jour parait....., Tiento
  • Giacinto Scelsi
    Giacinto Scelsi
    Giacinto Scelsi , Count of Ayala Valva was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French....

     Ko-Tha
  • Michael Tippett
    Michael Tippett
    Sir Michael Kemp Tippett OM CH CBE was an English composer.In his long career he produced a large body of work, including five operas, three large-scale choral works, four symphonies, five string quartets, four piano sonatas, concertos and concertante works, song cycles and incidental music...

    The Blue Guitar


External links

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