The guitar: a brief history from the renaissance to the modern day

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 guitar-like 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 names that sound like ‘guitar’. 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 period to the modern day, based only on what can be claimed with evidence. The article is illustrated with pictures, videos and sound recordings, beginning with a short video of guitar history.

This is an expanded version of an article originally published in 2015, with a new video.

Modern confusion over instrument names

The relationship between the word for something and its identity can be complicated. A ladybird, for example, is neither a lady nor a bird. A chickpea is neither a chick nor a pea. A butterfly isn’t made of butter and isn’t a fly. Starfish and jellyfish are neither stars, jellies, nor fish. Words can change their meaning over time. A man in the 1920s who had ‘a night out with his gay friend’ would be surprised at how the meaning of the phrase had altered by the 1960s. Someone in the 16^th and 17^th century who ‘pandered to your desire’ was a pimp. And pimp: there’s another word that has expanded its meaning and usage over time. Words can also mean something very different in different places at the same time: football, fanny, jumper, pants and biscuit could be the current cause of confusion in a conversation between English speakers in the UK and the USA.  

The misunderstanding which can arise due to mistaken word association is central to our subject: names of instruments in early music can lead the unwary to make erroneous connections, so it pays to be careful. If we see a medieval reference to, for example, a citole – or its spelling variants citola, cithola, cistole, citolent, sitole, citule, sitol, chytole, etc. – we can be sure the instrument in question is a citole. But a citole isn’t always called a citole. In the 14^th century Berkeley Theory Manuscript, for example, what appears to be a citole is called a cithara.

Cithara is the Latin for the Greek kithára (κιθάρα) and Assyrian chetarah, a lyre for which there is evidence dating back to the 9^th or 8^th century BCE. In ancient usage, the word came to be used for any plucked stringed instrument. Wishing to tie their music theory to ancient sources, medieval and renaissance writers used kithára / chetarah / cithara as the root word for citole, cittern, gittern, guitar, etc., or used the actual word indiscriminately for lyres, citoles, harps, psalteries, gitterns, citterns, guitars and indeed for any instrument with plucked strings. On the right we see another example of this practice from the 17^th century, an illustration of an orpharion from Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis, Rome, 1650. Instead of calling the orpharion by its distinguishing name, Kircher calls it “Cythara communis”, Latin for common stringed instrument.

So not only can the same instrument have different names in different sources, the same name may be used for different instruments. In the 16^th century, the 4 course guitar was also known as the gittern or guiterne in England and France, so it must not be confused with the unrelated medieval gittern, carved from a solid piece of wood. The gittern meaning guitar should also not be confused with the gittern (gitterne, gyttern, gyttron, etc.) that was a small cittern (cithern, cistre, psittyrne, cythara, etc.), known in England before 1550 and popular in the 17^th century. The 4 wire courses of the gittern that was a small cittern were not tuned the same as the larger cittern, but the same as (or very near to) the gut-strung guitar, though its style of playing was very different to the guitar. The account of Sir Peter Leycester (1614–1678) explains: “Like vnto this [the psittyrne] is the Instrument, we now vsually do call a gitterne, which indeed is only a Treble Psittyrne … havinge the same number & the same Order of Wyre = strings, & playd vppon with a Quill, after the same order as the Psittyrne: onely some variation in the Tuninge, which may also be varied in the Psittyrne at pleasure.” Contrary to statements in some modern sources, this treble cittern, the gittern, also known as a bell-guittern, was unambiguously the instrument meant in John Playford’s publication of 1652, A Booke of New Lessons for the Cithern & Gittern, and not a guitar: Playford even used the same picture of a cittern for both instruments.

Confused? Many reference books, musical dictionaries and websites certainly are, even some reputable ones. The Wikipedia entry on the gittern is hopelessly muddled, for example, treating the three distinct gitterns – medieval, guitar, and treble cittern – as if they were the same instrument. They were not. The name of an instrument alone is not a clear guide to its identity or history. Unfortunately, we find this error repeated regularly on the web and in print because these writers go by name alone, without reading primary sources or detailed and accurate secondary sources, in which instrument descriptions would easily prevent confusion.

Two instrument names deserve special mention in connection with this common modern confusion of nomenclature: the often-referenced medieval “Moorish guitar” and “Latin guitar”, terms which never appear in this modern form in medieval literature. Since Crawford Young, with copious data, has done an admirable job of sorting through the confusion, I won’t repeat his evidence but simply give the link here and state his well-argued conclusion: that the 14^th century references to the guiterne moresche, guyterne mouresque, or quitarra sarracenica – what modern writers call the “Moorish guitar” – were names for the medieval gittern; and references to the guiterne latine or guitarra latina – what modern writers call the “Latin guitar” – were names for the Italian cetra or cetera. In other words, what modern writers call the “Moorish guitar” and “Latin guitar” were not guitars, and the distinct instrument we refer to by the singular name, guitar, did not appear until near the end of the 15^th century.

Instrument evolution mythology

Another confused but often-repeated idea about the guitar in particular is the notion of instrument evolution. Guitar videos, websites and magazines repeatedly claim that anything with strings and a neck must be some kind of guitar, stretching back in an evolutionary line. The only evidence offered, often next to a photograph of a vaguely guitar-like ancient Greek or Egyptian instrument, is that it has a neck and body and its strings are plucked. On this basis, ouds, lutes, gitterns, orpharions, bandoras, citterns, citoles, kobzas, pipas, qinqins, mandolins, ukuleles, bouzoukis, dotars, tamburas, sarods, sitars, sazs, etc., are all guitars, so the very idea of a distinct guitar becomes meaningless. Without knowing it, such authors use the term guitar in just the same vague and generalised way as medieval and renaissance writers used cithara.   

The idea of instrument evolution itself needs to be examined. An assertion of evolution in the natural biological world within a genus or from one genus to another has to be backed by evidence, and there is plenty of data to provide it. But the ‘evolution’ of an instrument cannot develop on the same lines as biology. We are not comparing like with like when we use the same word to describe a genetic mutation which, over vast expanses of time, persists and becomes established because it assists the organism’s survival in its particular environment, and a smart new idea an individual luthier has on a Tuesday morning which becomes commercially successful. In luthiery, there is no biological variation over time, only invention, the individual decisions made by instrument-makers and/or requested by players. There is plentiful evidence of such invention. For example, in the 1420s the 4 course lute had a fifth course added and changed its tuning, and in around 1600 many luthiers removed lute necks, adding longer and wider necks to lower the pitch and add diapasons (extra diatonic bass strings). Below, we will see similar invention and development in the history of the guitar.

So when website articles and videos regularly claim that the guitar ‘evolved’ from the lute, this notion is not only flawed – as a product of creativity and engineering, a guitar cannot ‘evolve’ any more than any other human invention, such as a combustion engine, throat swab or tea bag – it is also illogical: how the lute ‘evolved’ into an instrument with a different shape, different size, different tuning, fewer courses and different specific name is never explained. We could just as easily – and just as wrongly – claim the guitar ‘evolved’ from other contemporaneous instruments, such as the gittern, citole or vihuela. The guitar shares some really basic characteristics with each of those other instruments, as we’d expect, as they were part of the musical air musicians and luthiers were breathing, but to say any instrument ‘became’ or ‘evolved into’ the guitar confuses gradual biological evolution, determined by genetics, circumstance and chance, with human ingenuity, which is conscious, deliberate, immediate and inventive.

The 3 and 4 course renaissance guitar

So if, in delineating guitar history, we are to state only what can be asserted with clear evidence, we must start no further back than the renaissance guitar, the first examples of which (as far as I can find or have seen anyone convincingly present) are in the last quarter of the 15^th century in two sources, one German and one Spanish.

The first is dated 1488, the Heidelberger Totentanz. This is a German book of 38 prints from woodcuts, author unknown, printed by Heinrich Knoblochtzer. The striking illustrations depict the dance of death, only the second printed book to have done so (the first being published by Parisian printer Guyot Marchant in 1485), in what was becoming 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 (below left) has a pegbox we’d associate with the vielle (the medieval fiddle), a flat, round pegbox with the pegheads on top, if we assume that the artist has flattened the pegs so we can see them, so they appear to be protruding from the side. There is no reason in principle why this pegbox was not depicted accurately, with tuning pegs on the side, but if so it would be unique, and surviving instruments with which to cross-reference are absent. The flattening of perspective – assuming these are front pegs flattened to the side – was a typical feature of art in the medieval and early renaissance periods, as we see on the other guitar (below right), with the obtuse-angled pegbox likewise flattened sideways so we can see it. This second guitar has a pegbox more commonly associated with the lute, but certainly not unknown on guitars.

The number of strings and courses on the Heidelberger Totentanz guitars is notable. The guitar on the left above shows 3 strings and 5 pegs, and on the right there are 3 strings and 3 pegs. It is possible to interpret this as a guitar with 3 courses (left), a single top course and 2 doubles, and another 3 course guitar (right) with 3 single strings. This would be in keeping with known practice on other instruments: the medieval gittern, for example, could be strung with single or double courses. If the representations above are accurate and this interpretation is correct, this means the 4 course renaissance guitar we are used to seeing started life as a 3 course instrument. However, illustrations of stringed instruments up to this period sometimes show a disparity between number of strings and tuning pegs, as we see with the Heidelberger Totentanz lutes (below), one drawn with 6 strings and only 5 pegs, the other with 3 strings and no pegs. So, with the complication of clearly inaccurate depictions of other instruments in this source, we need corroborating evidence.

Corroboration for the early 3 course guitar is on the right, from a Spanish Book of Hours, possibly originating in Toledo, decorated by the artist Juan de Carrión. The book is dated to the last quarter of the 15^th century, contemporaneous with the Heidelberger Totentanz, and is now classified as British Library Additional MS 50004. This detail from folio 70v clearly shows a guitar with 3 single strings, if we take it literally, like one of the Heidelberger Totentanz guitars, or with 3 courses, like both of the Heidelberger Totentanz guitars. It is noteworthy that the outline of each of these three earliest guitars is different. There is no uniformity or strict standardisation of shape, and that goes for all instruments of this period, or indeed of any period.

The strings of the guitar were made of gut – that’s the small intestines of sheep – as were the frets, which were tied on. The tuning of the renaissance guitar in all the prints and manuscripts was 4 courses tuned single a’, double e’, double c, then the fourth course was a split octave with a lower g and an upper g’, the lower g positioned so it is played first on the downstroke. In other words, it was tuned in the same way as a modern guitar if you only play the top 4 strings and 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. So the 4 course guitar was essentially a smallish treble instrument with a short pitch range. The French print from 1570 at the top of this article gives an idea of its small size.

Most of the surviving music for the 4 course renaissance guitar comes from Spain and France, where it therefore seems to have been most popular. The first known music for guitar is in the Spanish 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 lute in a country where the lute wasn’t so popular. Among the vihuela pieces in the first book are a few compositions for 4 course “guitarra” (an obvious linguistic variant of cithara, as discussed above). In France, the most important writer for the instrument was Adrian le Roy, who we have to thank for the much of the extant renaissance guitar music. In 1551-1555 he published nine books of guitar tablature, five of which have survived (one of the guitar pieces he published begins the video above). Another important French name was Guillaume de Morlaye, who published four books of guitar intabulations in 1552–53, three of which have survived. There are contemporaneous references to the instrument in the British Isles, but there is only a little surviving 16^th century guitar music scattered in English and Scottish manuscripts, some of which may not have been for the gittern that was a guitar, but for the identically-tuned gittern that was a small cittern (as discussed in Modern confusion over instrument names above).

As stated above, the 4 course guitar was tuned a’ e’/e’ c/c g’/g. Mudarra has 1 piece and le Roy and Morlaye 6 more marked old tuning, which has the 4^th course tuned down a tone, a’ e’/e’ c/c f’/f, making an unusual interval of a major 7^th between the 2^nd and 4^th courses. In Adrian le Roy’s Second livre de guiterre, 1555, a book of songs with guitar accompaniment, there are 2 pieces in “Acorde auallée” or old tuning. One of them is shown below, Maintenant c’est un cas estrange, the guitar part for which is marked Branle Gay, a dance type meaning happy or merry branle. (A branle was a rural French dance which became popular in court and city, which you can read more about here.) This seems to signify that the song was set to an existing Branle Gay melody, which can also be played independently, as indicated by the arrangement of tune followed by divisions (renaissance variations).  

No manuscripts or prints of music entirely for the 4 course guitar in the old tuning have either survived or are known to have existed. If we take the Spanish Book of Hours and the German Heidelberger Totentanz literally and believe there was originally a 3 course guitar, there is no evidence of any written music for this instrument in prints or manuscripts. The circumstantial evidence suggests 3 course tuning would have been three quarters of the old tuning – either a’ e’/e’ c/c or e’ c/c f’/f – the additional 4^th course being added on the bottom or the top.

Surviving music for the 4 course guitar 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 16^th 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 16^th century and into the first decade of the 17^th century, by now the beginning of the baroque period, when many (but not all) guitars also radically increased in size and therefore lowered their overall pitch. Through the 17^th 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. 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 upper octave), 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, extra course and new tuning marked a fundamental shift in the way the guitar was played. A new simplified style of playing was created – 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 5 course 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.

Part of Folias by Gaspar Sanz, 1675, played on 5 course baroque guitar by Ian Pittaway.

Not everyone was a fan of this new guitar style. The entry for the vihuela in Sebastián de Covarrubias Oroszco’s Spanish dictionary, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in Madrid in 1611, ended thus: “Until our time, this instrument [the vihuela] has been highly esteemed, and it has had most excellent musicians. However, since guitars were invented, very few have devoted themselves to studying the vihuela. It has been a great loss, for on it all types of plucked music was played. But now the guitar is no more than a cowbell, so easy to play, especially in rasgueado, that there is not a stable boy who is not a musician of the guitar.”

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 20^th 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. For this reason the guitar had a terrible reputation among many 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.

Childgrove and Nonesuch, both from John Playford’s series of dance manuals, The Dancing Master, published from 1651 to 1728. Both pieces are arranged and played by Ian Pittaway, illustrating a more restrained use of the ‘mixed’ style or battute e pizzicate.

The new tuning 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 linear 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, as demonstrated by Stephen Gordon in the video on the right.

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 double 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 18^th century, were copied in Vienna and other European cities in the early 19^th century.

In the 1850s, Spanish luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado started building guitars with an enlarged overall size and thinner soundboard, arched and supported by fan bracing, thus changing the way the soundboard vibrates and projects sound. Torres’ new design innovation for the 6 string, fixed-fret guitar became the prototype on which all subsequent classical or Spanish guitars were and are made, strung today with synthetic nylon rather than gut strings.

The steel string guitar

The steel strings of the modern folk guitar are also a 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, with the localised exception of the chitarra battente of southern Italy which, in the 15^th to 17^th centuries, had strings of brass. 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 20^th 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 16^th and into the 17^th 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.

Steel string guitar in open c tuning (CGcgc’e’) playing Fold In Three, composed and played by Ian Pittaway.

The electric guitar

Even before the invention of steel guitar strings, the technology that would lead to the electric guitar was discovered: electrical induction. This was in 1830, but it was to be another century before it was applied to the guitar, using up to three pickups – coiled copper wire around a magnet – to produce an electromagnetic signal when steel strings vibrate near to them, the signal then fed through a cable to an amplifier. The first move towards thus electrifying the guitar was seen by the public on 20^th October 1928 in an article in The Music Trades. The Stromberg Electro was “an electronically operated device that produces an increased volume of tone for any stringed instrument.” In 1929 this was developed into the first specific electric guitar. The Chicago Musical Instrument Catalog featured an advertisement for an electric guitar with its amplifier: “Every tone is brought out distinctly and evenly, with a volume that will fill even a large hall.”

Stromberg, however, did not reap the financial benefits of this technological advance, as their products disappeared without trace. Other companies developed pickups and electric guitars in the following months and years, and the advantage of their volume for ensemble playing was immediately recognised by such jazz and blues players as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, T-Bone Walker, and Lonnie Johnson. In the 1940s, guitarist, luthier and inventor Les Paul designed a ground-breaking solid-body electric guitar – which took his name – and experimented with recording techniques such as multi-tracking (over-dubbing) and sound effects such as phasing, revolutionising both the electric guitar and record-making.

In the mid 1940s, guitarist Lester “Junior” Barnard discovered that a simple pickup combined with a small amplifier in overdrive gave a distorted sound he liked and utilised, and it was soon emulated by other players of blues, rock and pop music. In the next decade, the electric guitar became the instrument of popular music par excellence, leading to a new designation among rockers: the guitar god, axe man or guitar hero. Though fashions and styles have changed many times since, the steel string acoustic guitar and electric guitar remain integral to popular music and are its pre-eminent visual icon.

 

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.