The Origins of the Guitar
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There are many theories on the origin of the guitar. In fact, the ancient pictures, drawings, and paintings of many cultures suggest a guitar, though these are actually stringed instruments of varying types. For example, Babylonian excavations in Central Asia unearthed cave carvings dating back to 1900 b.c. that show musicians playing together. The carvings feature stringed instruments resembling guitars as well as techniques like strumming and plucking of the strings. Similar stringed instruments like the okongo or cora are still used in parts of Africa to this day.
EARLY GUITARS
Early Egyptian drawings show stringed instruments that resemble very complex lyres and harps. Ancient Rome was heavily influenced by Egyptian culture, and as a result there were many versions of these two instruments in early Western cultures. Around a.d. 400, for instance, the Romans brought their tanbur, also known as the chitara, to Spain.
Varying types of stringed instruments developed in the pre-Christian Babylonian, Egyptian, and Hittite cultures of the Middle East as well as in Roman Italy, Greece, and Turkey in the Near East. All these instruments had certain aspects in common. Each had some sort of sound box and a long neck. Cords or strings were stretched down the neck and over the sound box. Players used one hand to strum (perhaps with a plectrum, or pick, of some sort) and the other to stop the strings at various points along the neck; as a result, they could sound a wide variety of notes, both singly and together.
Medieval Europe
In the early Middle Ages, as the Moors passed through Egypt on their way to conquer North Africa and Spain, they brought the ud, a direct antecedent of the guitar, to Western Europe. The Moorish influence in Spain prepared the groundwork for the development of the guitar in Europe. By the thirteenth century, references to and pictures of guitar-like instruments begin to appear in historic documents from all over Europe.
The Four-Course Guitar
It is possible that makers of the Roman-style chitara and the Arabic ud influenced one another. By a.d. 1200, the four-string guitar had evolved into two types: the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar), which had a rounded pear-shaped back, a wide fingerboard, and several sound holes somewhat like a lute; and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar), which resembled a small version of the modern guitar, with one sound hole and a narrower neck. On either of these instruments, each pair of strings was called a course.
In 1487, a musical theorist named Johannes Tinctoris described an instrument he called the guiterra or the ghiterna, whose sides were “tortoise-shaped.” Guitar historians today believe that what Tinctoris actually saw was a round-back lute. In Italy, these instruments were known as the viola da mano and chitarra.
The Six-Course Guitar
While the guiterra was small and had four courses, the Italian chitarra was larger, with six courses. Both had thongs or cords tied at various places along the neck to make frets or squared-off divisions of the neck. These two instruments became the favorites of wandering troubadours or minstrels. These virtual one-man bands had to master a variety of instruments, including pipes, whistles, and flutes, plus perform songs, tell stories, and provide any other form of entertainment that would earn them money and keep them from facing the displeasure of aggravated patrons.
Here’s how an eleventh-century Swiss poet named Amarcius described a minstrel’s performance: “When the citharist appears, after arranging for his fee, and proceeds to remove his instrument from its cover of oxhide, the people assemble from far and near, fix their eyes upon him and listen with soft murmurs as he strikes the strings with his fingers stretched far apart, strings which he himself has fashioned from sheep gut, and which he plays now tenderly, now with harsh booming sounds.”
The Lute
The lute held court as the major stringed instrument for a long while, but it had a number of drawbacks. First of all, there was no standard lute, so some were large and some smaller. Some had eight strings, while others had twelve or even more. They were difficult to balance and play, and forget about keeping one in tune!
Soon after the reign of King Henry VIII, around 1550, the guitar became one of England’s more popular stringed instruments. But for some time to come, rival camps of lutenists and guitarists would lose no opportunity to badmouth each others’ instrument and musicianship. In 1556 in France, for example, it was reported that while the pear-shaped lute had been a popular instrument, people were playing the guitar even more.
COMPOSITIONS FOR THE GUITAR
The earliest known music for the guitar was written for a Spanish form of the instrument known as the vihuela. “El Maestro,” by the Spaniard Luis Milan, was published in 1535 for the use and enjoyment of Spanish courtiers and aristocracy. Seven books of music survive, written in tablature. This early form of music is a sort of diagram showing each string of the guitar and indicating where it should be stopped along the neck. Above the diagrams are notes indicating time values, or how long each note should be sounded. The diagrams show pieces of varying degrees of difficulty, including a series of regal dances known as pavanes.
Ten years later, Alonso Mudarra published a music book called Tres Libros de Musica en Cifras para Vihuela. This book contains several sophisticated, sometimes even dissonant, pieces that include a recurrent bass line that gives the music a syncopated, energetic feel.
By the early seventeenth century, there were a number of books and primers on playing the guitar, particularly in France, where the instrument had become popular. Adaptations of lute music and arrangements of dances and fantasias encouraged the use of the guitar as a member of an ensemble or as an accompaniment to songs.
The music of this period was not played with the same rigid structure as classical music is today. There was room for improvisation, particularly when it came to variations of melodic phrasing and ornamentation. Advanced players, as always, could perform florid single-note passages and counterpoint and figured bass runs. Generally, however, the fashion for most guitar players of time was to play rather basic music, mainly strummed chord patterns.
By 1600, the five-course guitar had replaced the earlier four-course and six-course guitars. The tuning also became more standardized, predominantly ADGBE. The Italian guitarist Giovanni Paolo Foscarini wrote some sophisticated new pieces for the instrument in the 1630s, while a fellow countryman, Francesco Corbetta, became one of the foremost guitar virtuosos. Corbetta traveled widely throughout Europe, popularizing the instrument.
MANY MUSICAL MODIFICATIONS
By the end of the Baroque period, two significant changes had occurred. The guitar’s five courses were replaced by six single strings, and they were tuned in the modern style of EADGBE.
Many changes were taking place musically by this time. The modern piano made its first appearance, and the guitar began to fade from popularity. It was soon considered a more frivolous instrument of seduction and amour. A German diarist wrote, “The flat guitar with its strum we shall happily leave to the garlic-eating Spaniards.”
Romance, lasciviousness, and the guitar have been fairly consistent partners for a while, not just in the modern age of heavy-metal rockers. For example, Ronsard, a famous fifteenth-century French poet, wrote:
It is the ideal instrument
For ladies of great learning,
Lascivious ladies also play
To advertise their yearning.
Gaspar Sanz, guitarist to the viceroy of Aragon, Spain, was as much a philosopher as a musician. His comments about the instrument and its players stand as well today as they did when he wrote the introduction to his method book on the guitar in the late seventeenth century: “[The guitar’s] faults … lie in whoever plays it, and not in the guitar itself, for I have seen some people accomplish things on one string for which others would need the range of an organ. Everyone must make of it what he can, good or bad.”
The Napoleonic war, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was responsible for making the guitar popular again. The war, which raged throughout Europe, reintroduced Europeans to the guitar-based music of Spain. This period led to the work of such composers and performers as Fernando Sor, Mauro Guilliani, Matteo Carcassi, and Fernando Carulli.
The first modern concerto for guitar and orchestra, “Concerto No. 1 in A Major,” was composed and performed by the Italian virtuoso Mauro Guilliani. Among other things, it uses the right-hand thumb for bass notes and features a strong orchestral structure, with variations on a theme, a slow second movement, and finally a lively third movement.
THE CLASSICAL GUITAR
Two people are responsible for the classical guitar as it is known today. The first was the brilliant guitar-maker Antonio Torres. Torres revolutionized the process of the building of a guitar, making a careful study of how it made its sound, where the sound came from, and how he could improve it. The other was the Spanish virtuoso Francisco Tarrega.
The Torres guitar, developed between the 1850s and the 1890s, had more volume than previous designs. It included a larger, deeper body and an aesthetically pleasing shape that is familiar today. Torres was the first maker to use “fan” bracing underneath the top. He once built a guitar with a spruce top and papier-mâché back and sides to prove his theory that it was the top that produced most of the volume.
Tarrega adopted the newly designed instrument and composed and arranged hundreds of pieces for it. Ironically, Tarrega did not perform much in public. He was, however, an influential teacher, with a close circle of students and friends who acted almost like disciples in the world outside Tarrega’s home and studio.
And then, at the dawn of the twentieth century, there arrived a young, self-taught musician named Andrés Segovia. Before Segovia, people believed it was not possible for a solo guitarist to perform effectively to a large audience in a concert hall. Since Segovia, the world has become filled with guitarists in concert. In 1924, he made his debuts in London and Paris. He performed, transcribed, taught, and discovered a tremendous amount of music for the guitar. He also encouraged many composers to write for the instrument. He managed to reawaken the public interest in the music of J.S. Bach, and he arranged many Bach pieces for the guitar, which he also performed and recorded.
Of Segovia’s many gifts to the world, perhaps his most lasting was to make the guitar the popular instrument of the twentieth century. He also standardized the way guitar fingering is notated on scores (by showing the string number written within a circle over a series of notes that could be played elsewhere on the instrument), and settled the debate among classical guitarists about nails versus fingertips (by popularizing the use of plucking the strings with the nails of the right hand). By traveling and performing throughout the world, Segovia brought respect and recognition to the instrument and left behind a vast body of work and pupils who have gone on to become maestros in their own right.
FLAMENCO
There are many different styles of playing, and while the guitar was gaining legitimacy in concert halls, a parallel evolution was taking place in the bars and cafés of nineteenth-century Spain. Flamenco has three aspects: singing, dancing, and guitar playing. It grew from the melding of Arab, Christian, Jewish, and Spanish folk music and the Middle Eastern influence of seven centuries of Moorish and Arabic occupation, particularly in Andalusia, in the north of Spain, where a large population of gypsies lived.
The Heartbeat of Spain
It was the Andalusian gypsies who turned flamenco into the heartbeat of Spain, although its roots are probably in Roman-occupied Spain. The composers Kodaly and Bartok discovered in their research into folk tunes that beautiful folksongs have a way of ending up as “beggars’ songs.” In the same way, the outcasts of Spain—the gypsies—adopted and preserved the musical traditions of the Moorish Arabs who had once ruled the land.
What remained, and became idiosyncratically gypsy, were the traditions of whip-cracking dance rhythms, and the troubadour’s ability to improvise, composing verses about anything and everything at the drop of a hat. In the underground jargon of eighteenth-century Andalusia, someone flamenco was a dazzler, a “dude with attitude.” And the music came to be popularized by performers considered by many to be the haughtiest and most flamboyant of the gypsies.
Spain is a dancing country, and the simplest nineteenth-century village dance orchestra might consist of a guitar and a tambourine, with dancers wielding castanets. By the 1850s and beyond, it was also a country at war with itself. But whether royalist or revolutionary, the tradition was never to shoot a man with a guitar—at least until he was given a chance to play, anyway.
Flamenco on the Move
The rhythmic and melodic early forms called seguidilla and rasgueado developed new and exciting forms in the café cantantes, bars with areas for performers. Gradually, guitar players developed short instrumental melodic interludes with variations called falsetas.
What had for centuries been campfire entertainment suddenly found itself on a stage attracting the attention and applause of Europe’s leading writers, poets, painters, and musicians—including Chopin, Liszt, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Edouard Manet, and Jules Verne—who discovered the joys and inexpensive excitement of Spain on their “grand vacations.”
Ramon Montoya is considered the father of modern flamenco guitar. He was influenced by Patino, Paco Lucena, and Javier Molina. Before his passing in 1949, Ramon Montoya pioneered the recording of the style and developed its traditions and techniques. In doing so, he enriched the music’s vocabulary and established himself as one of the first flamenco virtuosos of the twentieth century.
His real contribution, however, was to be the first person to break free of the role of accompanist and become established as a solo instrumentalist. When he performed in concert in Paris in 1936, he met with great acclaim.
It has been said that as flamenco has moved from the cafés to the nightclubs, the players have become more circus-like in the manner in which they play the guitar—wearing gloves, putting the instrument behind their heads, anything to attract and hold an audience’s attention. Nevertheless, the twentieth century has produced some stunning players, such as Sabicas, Carlos Montoya, Nino Ricardo, Paco de Lucia, and Paco Pena.
THE ELECTRIC GUITAR
In combination, the European troubadour traditions of folk music and the spiritual music of African slaves evolved into a guitar- and banjo-based music that first became ragtime and then morphed into jazz. The guitar’s role was problematic, though, because it never seemed loud enough to cut through all the other instruments of the group. That was one reason for the banjo’s popularity. It might not be as sophisticated a musical instrument as the guitar, but in an ensemble situation it held its own against a blaring cornet, braying trombone, squawking clarinet, and the thumping of a drummer and the crash of his cymbals.
In 1907, Lee DeForest invented the triode. A triode is a vacuum tube capable of (are you ready?) amplifying weak electrical signals. This component provides an output strong enough to be fed into a loudspeaker. This invention would soon lend itself to the circuitry found in radios and old phonographs.
More Volume
The search for more volume led Lloyd Loar, an engineer at the Gibson guitar company, to play around with electrified guitars and amplifiers. In 1924, his experiments with magnetic coils led to the development of a basic pickup, which was, in effect, a giant magnet shaped like a horseshoe that acted as a microphone for each of the strings of the guitar. The signal was then fed through a speaker with a volume control and a tone control. It was all very rudimentary stuff. Gibson didn’t get the idea, though, and Loar left and formed the Vivitone Company, which produced commercial guitar pickups during the 1930s.
The First Commercial Electric Guitar
The real breakthrough came in 1931, when Paul Barth and George Beauchamp joined forces with Adolph Rickenbacker to form the Ro-Pat-In Company (later renamed the Electro String Company). They then produced the first commercially available electric guitar, the A22 and A25 cast-aluminum lap-steel guitar, known as the “frying pan” because of its shape.
Strictly speaking, the “frying pan” wasn’t really an electric version of a traditional guitar; rather, it was more of a lap-steel or Hawaiian guitar. However, in 1932 Ro-Pat-In produced the “Electro,” which was an archtop, or F-hole, steel-string guitar fitted with a horseshoe magnet. Gibson finally caught on and adapted their L-50 archtop model into the now famous ES-150 electric model, which first appeared in 1936.
The musician who was to make the electric guitar a household word, Charlie Christian, was not actually the first electric guitar player. That role fell to Eddie Durham, who played a resonator guitar in Bennie Moten’s jazz group from 1929 and recorded the first electric guitar solo, “Hittin’ the Bottle,” in 1935, with Jimmie Lunceford’s band. He then made some historic recordings in New York City in 1937 and 1938 with the Kansas City Six, a spin-off group of musicians from Count Basie’s Big Band that featured Lester Young on clarinet as well as saxophone. For the first time, the guitar was easily a match in volume and single-note improvisation for Young’s saxophone and clarinet as well as the trumpet of Buck Clayton.
There was one fundamental problem with the electric guitar, though—it kept feeding back. The amplified sound from the speaker would cause the body of the guitar to vibrate until a howl started that could only be stopped by turning the volume off. Guitarists found they were continually adjusting their volume levels to stop their instruments from feeding back. The answer was to create an instrument that didn’t vibrate in sympathy with its amplified sound.
The Solid-Bodied Guitar
There’s no definitive agreement about who produced the first solid-bodied guitar. Guitarist Les Paul created a “Log” guitar, using a Gibson neck on a flat piece of wood. He went to Gibson to get it into production, but Gibson, once again, was not impressed and turned him down.
At the same time, country guitarist Merle Travis was working with engineer Paul Bigsby, and they produced about a dozen solid-body guitar prototypes. However, the man who made the first commercially available solid-body guitar was Leo Fender, the owner of an electrical repair shop. In 1946 he founded the Fender Electrical Instrument Company to produce Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers. Encouraged by an employee, George Fullerton, Fender designed and eventually marketed a line of solid-body guitars called the Fender Broadcaster in 1950. The Gretsch drum company manufactured drums called Broadcaster, however, and told Fender he couldn’t use that name. So Fender changed the name of his guitar to the Telecaster. The rest is history.
The solid-bodied electric guitar paved the way for the popularization of urban blues and an R & B boom in the 1950s, with such great musicians as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and so forth. These musicians in turn influenced a generation of young rock-and-roll players in the 1960s in England, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Robert Fripp, and Jimmy Page.
AND BEYOND …
Perhaps the most revolutionary advance of the last thirty years has been the development of MIDI, or musical instrument digital interface, a computer protocol that allows computers, synthesizers, and other equipment to talk to each other. While electronic music has been primarily a computer- and keyboard-oriented process, the guitar synthesizer is coming into its own. In the past it has had some problems with delay and tracking (which deals with how quickly, in effect, you can play one note after the other), but that seems to be disappearing with each new generation of equipment.
An example of the new guitar is the SynthAxe, developed in England in 1984. This guitar synthesizer is played via an innovative fretboard touch system. The neck acts as a MIDI controller, allowing the player to produce a full range of synthesized and sampled sounds.
Other guitarists have experimented with adding extra strings to the existing six, ranging from seven to forty-two or more. But one thing seems constant: All of the players of the experimental guitars end up going back to the traditional, simple six-string guitar, regardless of what else they play.
Where the guitar goes from here is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain. Somewhere in the background of just about any music you like, you’re likely to hear the twang and strum of a simple six-string guitar.
History of the Guitar at a Glance
1700 B.C.
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Rumor has it that Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, invents the seven-string lyre, the forerunner of the guitar. Meanwhile, at about the same time in Egypt, pictures of a guitar-like instrument are being painted on the walls of tombs.
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500 B.C.
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The kithara develops from the lyre.
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1265
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Juan Gil of Zamora mentions the early guitar in Ars Musica.
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1283–1350
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The guitarra latina and guitarra moresca are mentioned multiple times in the poems of the Archpriest of Hita.
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1306
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A “gitarer” is played at the Feast of Westminster in England.
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1381
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Three Englishmen are sent to prison for making a disturbance with “giternes.”
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1404
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Der mynnen regein, by Eberhard Von Cersne, makes reference to a quinterne.
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1487
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Johannes Tinctoris describes the guitarra as an instrument invented by the Catalans.
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1535
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“El Maestro,” by Luis Milan, is published, and contains the earliest known vihuela music, including courtly dances known as pavanes.
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1551–1555
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Nine books of tablature are published by Adrian Le Roy. These include the first pieces for five-course guitar. The addition of the fifth course is attributed to Vicente Espinel.
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1552
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Guillaume Morlaye’s book of songs and dances for the guyterne is published in Paris.
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1674
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The Guitarre Royal, by Francesco Corbetta, is published. Dedicated to Louis XIV of France, it increases the guitar’s popularity.
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1770–1800
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The instrument’s five courses (doubled strings) are replaced by single strings, and a sixth string is added to the guitar.
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1800–1850
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Fernando Sor, Mauro Guilliani, Matteo Carcassi, Ferndinando Carulli, and Dioniso Aguado all perform, teach, write, and publish their compositions. The guitar begins to enjoy wide popularity.
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1833
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Christian Frederick Martin arrives in New York City and founds the Martin guitar-manufacturing company.
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1850–1892
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Guitar maker Antonio Torres develops the larger, more resonant instrument known today as the guitar.
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1902
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The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company is founded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and quickly becomes one of the most famous guitar manufacturers in the world.
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1916
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Segovia performs at Ateneo, the most important concert hall in Madrid. Previously, it was thought that the guitar did not have the volume for this type of venue.
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1931
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The Electro String Company is founded, and the A22 and A25 cast-aluminum lap-steel guitars, known as “frying pans” because of their shape, become the first commercially produced electric guitars.
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1950
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The Fender Solid Body Telecaster first appears.
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1960
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The guitar is finally accepted as a serious musical instrument for study at the Royal College of Music in London.
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1960s
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Jimi Hendrix falls off stage by mistake and breaks his guitar trying to throw it back on stage. It becomes part of his stage act and starts a trend.
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1969
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The Alembic Company is founded by Ron and Susan Wickersham.
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1974
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The “Chapman Stick” is finalized by Emmett Chapman.
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1982
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The Roland Guitar Synthesizer becomes commercially available.
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