From Spanish Courts to Stadium Stages: The Story of the Guitar
Valencia, 1536. A nobleman and musician named Luis de Milán published a book of music for the vihuela, a waisted, guitar-shaped instrument beloved at the Spanish courts. It is generally regarded as the first printed collection of music for that instrument, full of fantasias and songs written in tablature, a system that showed players where to put their fingers rather than which notes to read.
To a modern eye the vihuela looks unmistakably like a guitar, and in many ways it is a family ancestor. Over the next five centuries, its relatives would move from royal courts to taverns, from Spanish concert halls to American front porches, and finally, with the help of electricity, to the largest stages on earth. Few instruments have travelled so far or changed shape so many times while keeping the same simple idea: strings stretched over a fretted neck, played with the fingers.
Lutes, gitterns and the vihuela
The guitar's deep ancestry lies with the broad family of plucked string instruments with necks. One important relative, the lute, descends from the Arabic oud, which reached Europe through Moorish Spain and other contacts around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. The lute became the great solo instrument of Renaissance Europe. Alongside it, smaller instruments such as the gittern were played across medieval Europe, though historians still debate exactly how each one relates to the later guitar.
In Spain, the vihuela took the place the lute held elsewhere. It usually had six courses (pairs of strings) and a flat back, and composers such as Milán, Luys de Narváez and Alonso Mudarra wrote sophisticated music for it. At the same time a smaller, simpler cousin with four courses was popular for strumming songs and dances. That modest four-course instrument is one of the direct forerunners of the guitar.
The baroque guitar
By the early seventeenth century, the vihuela had faded and the five-course baroque guitar had taken its place. It became fashionable across Europe, from Spain and Italy to France, where King Louis XIV is known to have played. Players developed a rich style mixing strummed chords, known in Spanish as rasgueado, with plucked melodies. The Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz published an influential instruction book in 1674, and some of his melodies are still played by classical guitarists today.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, makers moved from paired courses to six single strings, the arrangement we use now. Early nineteenth-century virtuosos such as Fernando Sor from Barcelona and Mauro Giuliani from Italy toured, taught and composed, and the guitar enjoyed a wave of popularity in the salons of Paris, Vienna and London.
Antonio de Torres and the classical guitar
The instrument we now call the classical guitar owes its shape largely to one Spanish maker, Antonio de Torres Jurado (1817–1892), who worked in Seville and Almería. Torres enlarged the body, settled on a string length that became standard, and refined a fan-shaped pattern of wooden struts under the top so that a thin, light soundboard could resonate freely without collapsing. His guitars were louder and richer than earlier ones, and makers around the world still follow his basic design.
Players soon showed what the new instrument could do. Francisco Tárrega composed and arranged music that expanded the guitar's concert repertoire in the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century Andrés Segovia took the classical guitar into the world's major concert halls, persuading composers to write new works for it. At the same time, in the south of Spain, the guitar became the beating heart of flamenco.
Steel strings in the New World
Across the Atlantic, the guitar was taking a different path. Christian Frederick Martin, a German-born maker, emigrated to New York in 1833 and later moved his workshop to Nazareth, Pennsylvania. The Martin company became closely associated with a cross-shaped pattern of internal bracing, known as X-bracing, which proved strong enough for the higher tension of steel strings when they became common in the early twentieth century. Steel strings were louder and brighter than gut, and they helped the guitar hold its own alongside banjos, fiddles and voices.
Other American makers pursued their own ideas. Orville Gibson, working in Michigan in the late nineteenth century, applied violin-style carved tops to mandolins and guitars, leading to the archtop guitars used in dance bands. Martin's large-bodied dreadnought guitar, first made in the 1910s and sold under the Martin name from the 1930s, became the classic shape for folk, country and bluegrass. The steel-string acoustic travelled with blues musicians, cowboys, folk singers and, later, singer-songwriters around the world.
Plugging in: the electric guitar
Even with steel strings, an acoustic guitar struggled to be heard over a big band's horns. The solution was electricity. In the early 1930s, George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker produced one of the first commercially successful electric instruments, a lap steel guitar nicknamed the Frying Pan, which used a magnetic pickup to turn string vibrations into an electrical signal. In 1936 Gibson introduced the ES-150, a hollow archtop with a pickup, and the jazz guitarist Charlie Christian used one to step forward as a soloist.
Hollow guitars tended to howl with feedback at high volume, so inventors turned to solid bodies. Les Paul built an experimental solid-body guitar around 1940, and in 1950 Leo Fender's company in California began selling the solid-body guitar that became known as the Telecaster, followed by the Stratocaster in 1954. Gibson launched its Les Paul model in 1952. Paired with ever more powerful amplifiers, these guitars defined the sound of rock and roll, blues, soul and rock. Players soon discovered that pushing an amplifier into distortion was not a fault but a new voice, and the electric guitar became the emblem of popular music in the second half of the twentieth century.
The guitar today
Today all of these guitars live side by side. Nylon-string guitars carry the classical and flamenco traditions and the gentle sway of bossa nova; steel-string acoustics anchor folk and songwriting; electric guitars range from clean jazz tones to the heaviest metal. Learning has changed too, with tablature, the same idea Milán used in 1536, now shared freely online.
If you would like to hear the differences for yourself, you can play a virtual guitar free in your browser on HarmonyHub, switching between acoustic, classical, electric and 12-string sounds, and explore its relatives in the strings category. Five centuries after the vihuela, the guitar is still the instrument many people reach for first.