Message-Id: <01BDF527.88E54B60.lnktheriot@csi.com>
From: Ken Theriot <lnktheriot@csi.com>
To: "'minstrel@pbm.com'" <minstrel@pbm.com>
Subject: minstrel: guitars, aye!
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1998 14:57:56 -0400
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Cecily, was it the opera comment?

My lady, you wrote, "the figure-8 shaped instrument did not come into 
existence until the end of the 1700s".  This is FLAT WRONG.  I could 
literally bury you in copies of period artwork, diagrams, and other 
depictions of figure-8 shaped instruments, alternately referred to as 
guitarra, guiterne, cittern, quintern, vihuela; then there are the violin 
ancestors with slightly sharper cut-outs, usually called lira de braccio, 
but sometimes also as the above cognates.  In fact, the earliest depiction 
that I have of the "fiddle head" common to modern violins is a woodcut of 
1570 titled "quintern" and showing an instrument whose body is identical to 
a modern classical guitar (being played by a woman!).

The 13th-century manuscripts "Cantigas de Santa Maria" show two players, 
one on the guitarra latina which is already showing the shape which would 
be the gittern/lira de braccio, and the guitarra morisco, which is a lute 
body.  These distinctions moved around for awhile as each instrument 
developed (documents of 1349 of Duke Jehan of Normandy credit a "guiterre 
latine" and "guiterre morische", apparently distinguished not only by shape 
but by the fact that the latin guitar was strummed while the moorish guitar 
was plucked but was finally lost as European craftsmen started playing 
Frankenstein games with parts of instruments.  Additionally, the vihuela 
(whose name is from the cognate family from which fiddle, viol, and violin 
come) was originally two different instruments, the vihuela de mano, which 
was plucked, and eventually strummed, and the vihuela de arco, which was 
bowed, and presumably disappeared into the violin ancestry.

I gave two citations of period music (one of which you copied) which you 
should really check out before you dismiss them.  The French music of 1552 
for the "guiterne" shows an instrument which is by no means a gittern, it 
is a guitar (distinguishable from modern only in that it has the seventh  
 string chanterelle).  Alas, I do not own a scanner, but if you have no 
access to research sources, I will be happy to snail mail you some.

Was there a standard by which you knew that by "guitar" they meant a six 
(or twelve) stringed instrument tuned EADGBE?  No, but then neither was 
there a standard for most instruments.  Was there an instrument that looks 
like a guitar, is played like a guitar, and has evidence of 6 and 12 string 
versions which are, for all intents and purposes, modern guitars?  Yes.  If 
you really want to get wild, check Fritz Jahnel's Die Gitarre und Ihr Bau 
(The Guitar and its Construction) which has drawings of medieval guitars 
and antecedents, one of which looks, I swear, like a Fender Stratocaster. 
 As I said in my earlier post, I have trouble documenting a dreadnought 
body, although there is a fresco circa 1500 (Luca Signorelli's "Calling of 
the Elect" in the Cathedral of Orvieto, Italy) where the central angel is 
playing a guitar which takes up WAY more of her lap than my classical 
guitar does of mine.

About "plucking with callouses" rather than nails or plectra (picks), you 
are proceeding from an English bias related to the lute; guitarra latina 
was played "rasgado" by "ripping" the thumb across the strings (i.e., 
strumming).  Again, I can show you period artistic depictions where the 
position of the hand is obviously prepared to strum, not finger-pick.

Of course classical composers loved the guitar (doesn't everyone?).  The 
Musee Instrumental du Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris has a 
guitar which was a gift from Paganini to Berlioz, and is signed by both 
men, but I digress.

The name game can never be settled.  I quote Frederick Grunfeld from his 
The Art and Times of the Guitar, " It was the cittern, and not the guitar, 
that inherited the form and function of the medieval gittern.  The very 
word cittern, in fact, was a sixteenth-century formation that came to use 
in England just at the time when the obsolete gittern was being supplanted 
by the bigger and better-sounding Spanish guitar.  In the ensuing conflict 
between "gittern" and "guitarra" one of the names had to go..." He goes on 
to comment on an 18th century citation showing a cittern and calling it "an 
English guitar".

The British Isles bias towards plucked instruments is strong, and I would 
be surprised indeed to see a period Scotsman playing a guitar (so go right 
on singing a capella, Eogan), but for a lady of French extraction like 
myself, it is perfectly period (in fact, outside of Spain and Italy, period 
and just post-period depictions of guitars  much more often show  women 
players!).

Send me your mailing address and I'll furnish hard copy.

					Adelaide

T-shirt thought for the day-Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes


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