history of guitars

2009-11-18T10:11:00.000-08:00

History

Main article: History of the classical guitar

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".^[1] The term is used to refer to a number of such related instruments that were developed and used across Europe in the modern era.^[2] Some types of guitars, which are themselves related to these European instruments, originated in the Americas. origin of stringed instruments once known in central Asia and India. For this reason guitars are distantly related to contemporary instruments from these regions, including the tanbur, setar and sitar, among others. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying the essential features of a guitar is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.^[3]

The modern word, guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra (German Gitarre, French Guitare),^[4] loaned from the medieval Andalusian Arabic qitara^[5], itself derived from the Latin cithara, which in turn came from the earlier Greek word kithara,^[6] a descendant of Old Persian sihtar (Tar means string in Persian).^[7]

Illustration from a Carolingian Psalter from the 9th century, showing a guitar-like plucked instrument.

The guitar is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania around 40 AD, and further adapted and developed with the arrival of the four-string oud, brought by the Moors after their conquest of Iberia in the 8th century.^[8] Elsewhere in Europe, the indigenous six-string Scandinavian lut (lute), had gained in popularity in areas of Viking incursions across the continent. Often depicted in carvings c. 800 AD, the Norse hero Gunther (also known as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as he lay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried.^[9] By 1200 AD, the four-string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the guitarra moresca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard and several soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which resembled the modern guitar with one soundhole and a narrower neck.^[10] In the 14th and 15th centuries the qualifiers "moresca" and "latina" were dropped and these four course instruments were simply called guitars.^[11]

The Spanish vihuela or (in Italian) "viola da mano", a guitar-like instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries, is often considered a major influence in the development of the modern guitar. It had six courses (usually), lute like tuning in fourths and a guitar-like body, although early representations reveal an instrument with a sharply-cut waist. It was also larger than the contemporary four course guitars. By the late 15th century some vihuelas began to be played with a bow, leading to the development of the viol. By the sixteenth century the vihuela's construction had more in common with the modern guitar, with its curved one-piece ribs, than with the viols, and more like a larger version of the contemporary four-course guitars. The vihuela enjoyed only a short period of popularity in Spain and Italy during an era dominated elsewhere in Europe by the lute; the last surviving published music for the instrument appeared in 1576. Meanwhile the five-course baroque guitar, which was documented in Spain from the middle of the 16th century, enjoyed popularity, especially in Spain, Italy and France from the late 16th century to the mid 18th century. ^[12]^[13] Confusingly, in Portugal, the word vihuela referred to the guitar, whereas guitarra meant the "Portuguese guitar", a variety of cittern.

Types of guitars

The guitar player (c. 1672), by Johannes Vermeer

Guitars can be divided into two broad categories, acoustic and electric:

Acoustic guitars

There are several notable subcategories within the acoustic guitar group: classical and flamenco guitars; steel-string guitars, which include the flat-topped, or "folk," guitar; twelve-string guitars; and the arched-top guitar. The acoustic guitar group also includes unamplified guitars designed to play in different registers, such as the acoustic bass guitar, which has a similar tuning to that of the electric bass guitar.

Renaissance and Baroque guitars

These are the gracile ancestors of the modern classical guitar. They are substantially smaller and more delicate than the classical guitar, and generate a much quieter sound. The strings are paired in courses as in a modern 12-string guitar, but they only have four or five courses of strings rather than six. They were more often used as rhythm instruments in ensembles than as solo instruments, and can often be seen in that role in early music performances. (Gaspar Sanz' Instrucción de Música sobre la Guitarra Española of 1674 constitutes the majority of the surviving solo corpus for the era.) Renaissance and Baroque guitars are easily distinguished because the Renaissance guitar is very plain and the Baroque guitar is very ornate, with ivory or wood inlays all over the neck and body, and a paper-cutout inverted "wedding cake" inside the hole.

Classical guitars

These are typically strung with nylon strings, played in a seated position and are used to play a diversity of musical styles including classical music. The classical guitar's wide, flat neck allows the musician to play scales, arpeggios and certain chord forms more easily and with less adjacent string interference than on other styles of guitar. Flamenco guitars are very similar in construction, but are associated with a more percussive tone. In Mexico, the popular mariachi band includes a range of guitars, from the tiny requinto to the guitarron, a guitar larger than a cello, which is tuned in the bass register. In Colombia, the traditional quartet includes a range of instruments too, from the small bandola (sometimes known as the Deleuze-Guattari, for use when traveling or in confined rooms or spaces), to the slightly larger tiple, to the full sized classical guitar. The requinto also appears in other Latin-American countries as a complementary member of the guitar family, with its smaller size and scale, permitting more projection for the playing of single-lined melodies. Modern dimensions of the classical instrument were established by the Spaniard Antonio de Torres Jurado (1817-1892). In recent years, the series of guitars used by the Niibori Guitar orchestra have gained some currency, namely:

buy musicle instruments

2009-11-13T11:40:00.001-08:00

2009-11-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

2009-06-22T20:35:00.003-07:00

The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara. Research done by Dr. Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution. The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to Spain.

The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity
between the Greek word "kithara" and the Spanish
word "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar
could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely
different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp,
or "lyre".

It would also be passing strange if a square-framed
seven-string lap harp had given its name to the early
Spanish 4-string "quitarra". Dr. Kasha turns the question around
and asks where the Greeks got the name "kithara", and points out that the earliest Greek kitharas had only 4 strings when they were introduced from abroad. He surmises that the Greeks hellenified the old Persian name for a 4-stringed instrument, "charter". (See below.)

The Ancestors
The earliest stringed
instruments known to
archaeologists are bowl
harps and tanburs.

Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilizations. Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear.

"Queen Shub-Ad's harp" (from the Royal Cemetery in Ur)

A tanbur is defined as "a long-necked stringed instrument with a small egg- or pear-shaped body, with an arched or round back, usually with a soundboard of wood or hide, and a long, straight neck". The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp as the neck was straightened out to allow the string/s to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt testify to the fact that harps and tanburs (together with flutes and percussion instruments) were being played in ensemble 3500 - 4000 years ago.

Egyptian wall painting, Thebes, 1420 BCE:

The oldest preserved guitar-like instrument:

At 3500 years old, this is the ultimate vintage guitar! It belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose. He was buried with his tanbur close to the tomb of his employer, Sen-Mut, architect to Queen Hatshepsut, who was crowned in 1503 BCE. Sen-Mut (who, it is suspected, was far more than just chief minister and architect to the queen) built Hatshepsut's beautiful mortuary temple, which stands on the banks of the Nile to this day. Har-Moses instrument had three strings and a plectrum suspended from the neck by a cord. The soundbox was made of beautifully polished “cedar wood” and had a rawhide "soundboard". It can be seen today at the Archaeological Museum in Cairo.

What is a guitar, anyway?

To distinguish guitars from other members
of the tanbur family, we need to define what
a guitar is. Dr. Kasha defines a guitar as
having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden
soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most
often with incurved sides" .
The oldest known iconographical
representation of an instrument displaying
all the essential features of a guitar is a
stone carving at Alaca Hayak in Turkey,
of a 3300 year old Hittite "guitar" with
"a long fretted neck, flat top, probably flat
back, and with strikingly incurved sides".

to be continued........

2009-06-22T01:56:00.000-07:00