GUITAR
Copyright © 2006 Shlomo Pestcoe. All rights reserved.
Scholars believe that the term guitar is derived from kaitara, the name of a North African lute-type instrument that was introduced into Spain by the Moors in the 10th century. The guitar can also trace its roots to the Arab oud, the Persian rubab, and the Byzantine cythara, the forbearers of related early Western European plucked string instruments, such as the lute, citole, cittern, gittern and vihuela.
The guitar itself first emerged in Europe in the 15th century as a delicate, small-bodied instrument with eight strings in four courses (pairs of strings). By the 1590s, the guitar had evolved into a five course instrument. An additional course was added in Spain around 1780.
The modern 6-string guitar first appeared in Italy and France in the late 18th century, yet it was in Spain that the instrument took root and fully blossomed. Beginning in the early 1800s, the Spanish city of Cadiz became the epicenter of guitar innovation and manufacture and, in the second half of the 19th century, Spanish maker Antonio de Torres Juarado perfected the modern classical guitar.
Meanwhile, makers throughout Western Europe in the early 19th century took the modern 6-string guitar in a different direction which led to the development of a continental European style, the Romance guitar. (Note: The term "Romance" is not an allusion to the guitar's use in serenading the object of your heart's desire. Rather, it's a reference to the Romantic Period of Western European art music [c. 1790-1910], which followed the Classical Period [c.1750-1825].) Perhaps the single most influential maker in this style was Viennese luthier Johann George Stauffer (1778-1853). His revolutionary inventions and innovations in guitar design paved the way for the creation of the modern acoustic guitar, as well as strongly influencing the look of the first solid-body electric guitars created by Californian rivals Paul Bigsby and Leo Fender in the late 1940s.
It was in the United States that the next great stages in guitar evolution occurred. Starting in the mid-19th century, American instrument manufacturers (many of whom were European immigrants, primarily German) began making sturdier guitars with innovative designs.
Foremost among them was German luthier Christian Frederick Martin (1796-1867), who, at age 15, traveled to Vienna to apprentice under Stauffer. Within a few years he became the foreman of Stauffer's workshop. In 1833, Martin emigrated to America, whereupon he opened a workshop in New York City and began manufacturing unique guitars which incorporated both his original ideas and those of Stauffer. (Martin moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania in 1839, where the company still is based)
By the 1880s, guitars were being churned out of American factories and workshops on an unprecedented scale. Thanks to mail-order mass marketing (introduced by Montgomery Ward of Chicago in 1872), for the first time in history, people of all classes and walks of life had access to affordable musical instruments representing the full spectrum of different types, which, hitherto, had been the exclusive privilege of the well-to-do "upper crust." As a result, the guitar-- along with the banjo, mandolin, and other instruments-- became extremely popular. With the dawn of the 20th century, the constant flow of new American innovations in guitar design and manufacture would revolutionize the instrument and help change the face of music the world over forever.
Some of those landmark "firsts," include:
- 1852 -- The Martin "0," the first modern American-style "flat-top" guitar with "X"-bracing by C.F. Martin & Company. (Like most guitars back in the 19th century and early 20th century, all the guitars made by Martin were gut-strung. Martin's earliest steel string guitar was the redesigned 2-17, introduced in 1922. By 1928, Martin was producing mostly steel-strung "flat-top" guitars.)
1903 -- The Gibson Style "O," based on Orville Gibson's designs, the first arched-top guitar with a rounded carved top and back.
1906 -- The first modern steel string guitars by the Larson Brothers.
1916 -- The large and powerful Dreadnought (named for a class of big battleships) by Martin for the Ditson Company.
1923 -- The Gibson L-5, designed by Lloyd Loar, the first arch-top "orchestra" guitar which heralded the emergence of the popular "jazz" guitar.
1927 -- The National "Tri-Plate" (tricone), the first metal-bodied resophonic or resonator guitar.
1932 -- The Rickenbacker A-22 Hawaiian lap steel guitar, better known as "the Frying Pan," the first commercially viable electric guitar.
1936 -- The Gibson ES-150 archtop guitar, the first commercially viable electric "Spanish" (regular) guitar.
-- Shlomo Pestcoe
Illustration Credits:
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A group of young guitarists with a fiddling friend. Sweden, c.1910 (Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe)
