The origins of the guitar are much-discussed and much-disputed, and some pretty wild and unsubstantiated claims are made for its heritage, based on vaguely guitary-looking instruments in medieval and even pre-medieval iconography, about which we often know little or nothing beyond an indistinguishable drawing, painting or carving; or based on instruments which have guitary-sounding names. This article is an attempt to slice through the fog with a brief history of the instrument, charting its development from the renaissance, through the baroque to the modern day, based only on what can be claimed with certainty, illustrated with pictures and sound recordings.
The 4 course renaissance guitar
If we are to state only what can be asserted with clear evidence, we must start no further back than the renaissance guitar, the first evidence of which (as far as I can find or have seen anyone convincingly present) is 1488 in the Heidelberger Totentanz. This is a German book of 38 prints from woodcuts, author unknown, printed by Heinrich Knoblochtzer. The story in the book and its striking illustrations depict the dance of death, only the second book to have done so (the first being published by Parisian printer Guyot Marchant in 1485), in what was to become a major theme in art. The Heidelberger Totentanz woodcuts mostly feature the figure of death playing or holding musical instruments of the time – lute, bray harp, shawm, tromba marina, bagpipes, psaltery, etc. Two woodcuts depict renaissance guitars, one with a pegbox we’d associate with the (the medieval French word for ‘fiddle’), a flat, round pegbox with the pegheads on top, instead of the more usual renaissance guitar designbased on a rectangle with the pegheads at the back. The artist has helpfully flattened the pegs so we can see them, so they appear to be protruding from the side. This was a typical feature of art until the renaissance, as we also see on the other guitar, with the obtuse-angled pegbox likewise flattened sideways so we can see it. This is a pegbox more commonly associated with the , but certainly not unknown on guitars. It’s difficult to know how big a pinch of salt we should take with these representations. The vielle-headed guitar has an off-centre pointed end, unknown on any renaissance guitar I’ve ever seen, and the numbers of strings or courses are odd, too. I have no doubt this is the woodcutter’s artistic license, as illustrations of stringed instruments in this period and before often show the wrong number of strings for the instrument, and also different numbers of strings to tuning pegs, as we see with the Heidelberger Totentanz lute, drawn with 6 courses and only 5 pegs.Still, whatever the shortcomings of the iconography, it indisputably gives us an earliest date for the appearance of the renaissance guitar of 1488.
The strings of the guitar were made of gut – that’s the small intestines of sheep – as were the frets, which were tied on. It was strung with 4 courses – a course being a pair of strings, though the top string was single – tuned single a’, double e’, double c, then the fourth course was a split octave with a lower g and an upper g’. In other words, it was tuned in the same way as a modern guitar if you only play the top 4 strings and fret or capo it at the fifth fret, and of course the modern 6 string guitar doesn’t have the upper octave on the fourth course. Or, put another way, it was tuned the same as a modern ukulele, except that the ukulele has all single strings and has only the upper octave of the fourth course. Both the modern guitar and the ukulele are clearly descendants of the renaissance guitar. So the 4 course guitar was essentially a smallish treble instrument with a short pitch range and no bass response. The French drawing from 1570 at the top of this article gives anidea of its small size.
Names of instruments in early music can give rise to much confusion and it pays to be careful. For example, in the 16th century the 4 course renaissance guitar was also known as the gittern in England and France, and so it must not be confused with the unrelated mediaeval , carved from a solid piece of wood, nor indeed with the baroque gittern, which was a type of very small cittern. Confused? Many reference books, musical dictionaries and websites certainly are, even reputable ones.
The only surviving music for the renaissance guitar comes from Spain and France, where it therefore seems to have been most popular. There are contemporaneous English references to the instrument, but no surviving English music or even references to English guitar music. The first known music for guitar is in the publication Tres Libros de Musica en Cifras para Vihuela (Three books of music in figures – i.e. numbers = tablature – for vihuela) by Alonso Mudarra, 1546. This is a trio of books for the vihuela, a Spanish 6 course instrument shaped like a large guitar (compared to the small 4 course guitar) but tuned identically to the in a country where the lute didn’t catch on; and among the vihuela pieces in the first book are a few compositions for 4 course “guitarra”.
We have to thank French musician Adrian le Roy for the majority of renaissance guitar music: in 1551-1555 he published nine books of guitar tablature, not all of which have survived. Another French composer, Guillaume de Morlaye, published three books of guitar compositions in 1552–53 but, like many other guitar publications of the period, only the titles have survived. What we do have is perfectly lovely but, just as Mudarra’s Spanish guitar pieces are stylistically indistinct from vihuela music, French guitar pieces are stylistically indistinct from lute music. It would take the changes present in the 5 course baroque guitar to give the instrument a distinctive voice of its own.
The 5 course baroque guitar
There is evidence for the addition of a fifth course in France, Spain and Portugal in the middle of the 16th century – and, indeed, the earliest surviving guitar is a small 5 course made by Belchior Dias of Lisbon in 1581 – but that fifth course did not begin to gain wide acceptance until the last decade of the 16th century and into the first decade of the 17th century, by now the beginning of the baroque period, when the guitar also radically increased in size and therefore lowered its overall pitch. From 1600 and through the 17th century, a few players still preferred the small 4 course guitar, or a 5 course guitar made in the old, small size; but the new size became the popular choice, and it is this larger-bodied instrument that we now call the ‘baroque guitar’ for the period roughly 1600-1750.
There was a huge variation in shape – thin bodies, wide bodies, tapered bodies, flat backs, fluted backs, bowl backs, various lengths of necks – and some variation in tuning. The first three courses were all tuned in unisons (sometimes with a single first string) – e’ b g – while the fourth course was either strung in octaves with the upper octave positioned so it is played first on the downstroke – d d’ – or both strings were an octave above the modern guitar, at the same pitch as the third fret of the second course – d’ d’. Likewise, the fifth course could also be a mix of the two octaves with the upper octave played first on the downstroke – A a – or two strings of the upper octave, playing the same note as the second fret of the third course – a a. These combinations gave the possibility of three different tunings (fourth and fifth course both in octave pairs; fourth and fifth course both at the upper octave; fourth course in an octave pair and fifth course both at the upperoctave), according to the preference of the composer or player, so if a guitar player today wants to have a really accurate baroque guitar repertoire, then either three baroque guitars or a lot of restringing is called for.
The larger size and the extra course marked a fundamental shift in the way the guitar was played. A new simplified style of playing was created for the guitar – the strum or rasgueado – consisting entirely of chords played rhythmically using various combinations of fingers or fingers and thumb. This is the entire idea behind the first tutor for the instrument, The Five Course Spanish Guitar, by Joan Carles Amat (also spelt Juan Carlos Amat), published in Barcelona in 1596. The author was a pastime musician – he worked as a physician – who created a new shorthand for chords using a series of numbers. He clearly saw the guitar as an instrument that could be easily picked up by anyone, a notion reinforced by the very simple principles in his book. His idea was further developed by Italian singer and composer Girolamo Montesardo’s seminal Nuova inventione d’intavolatura (New invention of tablature) of 1606. For this book, Montesardo created his own shorthand for chords, alfabeto notation,based on Amat’s scheme but using letters instead of numbers, which was to become standard for the new rasgueado repertoire.
Thus we see the very beginning of modern guitar style, for four key reasons:
(1) Guitarists, in common with lutenists, were now using a ‘thumb outside’ right hand position (assuming a right handed player), much more like the hand position we’d recognise today. No longer was the hand parallel to the strings with the thumb placed inside the hand for a smooth, full sound; now the hand was at an angle to the strings, with the thumb completely outside of the hand, to enable the strumming style and give a sharper, more trebly tone.
(2) This is the first evidence of a style we’d most associate today with rhythmic flamenco dance music and song.
(3) The rasgueado style was also used regularly to accompany song in a way that was completely different to the renaissance but not too far removed from the strummed guitar-led pop music of the 20th century.
(4) The instrument was now more the size of the modern guitar, with nominally the same pitch as today’s guitars.
The new style made the guitar popular among dancers in the theatre and the street; and with singers, no doubt because it was now an instrument with a style that could be mastered relatively easily, compared to the lute. But for this reason the guitar had a terrible reputation among lovers of the lute, who thought the guitar crude and easy; and among commentators on religion and morality, who were horrified at the lewd and suggestive dances the guitar was now used to accompany.
By 1630 the ‘mixed’ style had developed – battute e pizzicate in Italian – a combination of strummed chords and individually plucked notes, as first shown in Italian composer Giovanni Paolo Foscarini’s Il primo, seco[n]do, e terzo libro della chitarra spagnola (The first, second and third book of the Spanish guitar). It is repertoire in this style that you’ll hear today by players of baroque guitar music, as pure rasgueado strumming is now of limited interest at best to listeners.
The new ‘mixed’ style made good use of the stringing on the fourth and fifth courses to create an effect known as campanelas, or little bells. This involves playing consecutive notes on different strings so that the sound of each note continues to ring as the next one starts, like a peel of bells. The baroque guitar’s re-entrant tuning – where strings are out of the usual pitch sequence of high to low and so have to re-enter the sequence – makes campanelas much less effort on the left hand and so technically much easier to achieve. (.)
The popularity of the guitar spread across western Europe and to all levels of society, from rural dancers and singers right up to royalty. Though, for reasons given above, it was not universally celebrated, the fact that serious composers with good connections were writing music for it certainly helped its status. Chief among these were Francesco Corbetta (c. 1615–1681), an Italian attached to the Court of Carlo II, Duke of Mantua; Gaspar Sanz (1640–1710), Aragonese composer, Professor of Music at the University of Salamanca, Spain; and Robert de Visée (c. 1655–1732/1733), lutenist, guitarist, theorbo and viol player at the court of French Kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, and singer and composer for lute, theorbo and guitar.
The 6 string guitar
The first-known guitar to have single strings rather than courses was a 5 string guitar built in 1774 by Ferdinando Gagliano in Naples, which had the innovation of brass frets rather than tied gut frets. The first 6 string guitar to have survived was built in 1791 by Giovanni Battista Fabricatore, also in Naples. Guitars with 6 single strings, first made in Italy in the last decade of the 18th century, were copied in Vienna and other European cities in the early 19th century. This was the beginning of the guitar which today we call ‘classical’, which now uses synthetic nylon strings instead of gut.
The steel string guitar
The steel strings of the modern folk guitar are a more recent development. In the renaissance and baroque periods, instruments such as the cittern, bandora and orpharion were strung with ‘wire’ – that’s iron for the upper pitches and brass for the lower – but guitars were always gut-strung. A small but ground-breaking change in the chemical composition of iron string material enabled the creation of steel strings, developed in the U.S.A. in the 1880s. A new build of guitar was developed for the new strings, to cope with the extra tension on the body created by using steel.
This new guitar grew rapidly in popularity in the United States and throughout Europe during the 20th century, becoming the instrument of choice for a great many performers of blues, jazz and folk music. A convergence of musical styles gave rise to innovations in guitar technique, as blues and jazz influenced folk music. Then the temporary popularity of skiffle, with its simple chordal playing style, made the guitar accessible to almost anyone, rather like the rasgueado style did in the late 16th and into the 17th century.
In the 1960s and ’70s, ground-breaking English folk guitarists distilled the influences of blues and jazz on their technique, influenced in particular by the black American blues players who visited England, such as Bill Broonzy. They experimented with non-standard tunings to create, in effect, a different sort of instrument. Foremost in this new folk guitar movement were Martin Carthy, Davey Graham and Nic Jones, whose huge influence is still felt today by steel string guitarists.