The Guitar in Tudor England
The Guitar in Tudor England

Author: Christopher Page

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1316368955

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Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.

The Guitar in Stuart England
The Guitar in Stuart England

Author: Christopher Page

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-16

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 110841978X

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The guitar is the most played instrument in the West. This is the first account of its rise in Stuart England.

The Guitar and its Music
The Guitar and its Music

Author: James Tyler

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2002-08-29

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0191518514

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Following on from James Tyler's The Early Guitar: A History and Handbook(OUP 1980) tthis collaboration with Paul Sparks (their previous book for OUP, The Early Mandolin, appeared in 1989), presents new ideas and research on the history and development of the guitar and its music from the Renaissance to the dawn of the Classical era. Tyler's systematic study of the two main guitar types found between about 1550 and 1750 focuses principally on what the sources of the music (published and manuscript) and the writings of contemporary theorists reveal about the nature of the instruments and their roles in the music making of the period. The annotated lists of primary sources, previously published in The Early Guitar but now revised and expanded, constitute the most comprehensive bibliography of Baroque guitar music to date. His appendices of performance practice information should also prove indispensable to performers and scholars alike. Paul Sparks also breaks new ground, offering an extensive study of a period in the guitar's history—notably c.1759-c.1800—which the standard histories usually dismiss in a few short paragraphs. Far from being a dormant instrument at this time, the guitar is shown to have been central to music-making in France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and South America. Sparks provides a wealth of information about players, composers, instruments, and surviving compositions from this neglected but important period, and he examines how the five-course guitar gradually gave way to the six-string instrument, a process that occurred in very different ways (and at different times) in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Britain.

The Guitar in Georgian England
The Guitar in Georgian England

Author: Christopher Page

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-10-02

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 030021247X

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A fascinating social history of the guitar, reasserting its long-forgotten importance in Romantic England This book is the first to explore the popularity and novelty of the guitar in Georgian England, noting its impact on the social, cultural, and musical history of the period. The instrument possessed an imagery as rich as its uses were varied; it emerged as a potent symbol of Romanticism and was incorporated into poetry, portraiture, and drama. In addition, British and Irish soldiers returning from war in Spain and Portugal brought with them knowledge of the Spanish guitar and its connotations of stylish masculinity. Christopher Page presents entirely new scholarship in order to place the guitar within a multifaceted context, drawing from recently digitized original source material. The Guitar in Georgian England champions an instrument whose importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often overlooked.

The Art and Times of the Guitar
The Art and Times of the Guitar

Author: Frederic V. Grunfeld

Publisher: [New York] : Macmillan

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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In a lively narrative, filled with historical anecdote and the texts of songs and ballads, Frederic Grunfeld traces the guitar's evolution through the ages, in the hands of the people who played it: stone-age hunters who twanged the forerunner of all stringed instruments, the mouth bow; Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; the Moorish minstrels of Spain and the medieval troubadours; sixteenth-century Spanish court composers; rococo French voluptuaries; Romantic virtuosos like Sor and Giuliani (as well as Berlioz and Paganini): and the many important modern exponents of the guitar, ranging from Andrés Segovia and Julian Bream to Leadbelly, Charlie Christian, and George Harrison. Woven through the pages of this social history are details of the instruments technical development--the continuing changes in its physical form and the various styles of playing and notation that have produced drastically different sounds and moods from the sixteenth century to the electronic twentieth.

The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe
The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe

Author: Christopher Page

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1837650330

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The first book devoted to the composers, instrument makers and amateur players who advanced the great guitar vouge throughout Western Europe during the early decades of the nineteenth century.Contemporary critics viewed the fashion for the guitar with sheer hostility, seeing in it a rejection of true musical value. After all, such trends advanced against the grain of mainstream musical developments of ground-breaking (often Austro-German) repertoire for standard instruments. Yet amateur musicians throughout Europe persisted; many instruments were built to meet the demand, a substantial volume of music was published for amateurs to play, and soloist-composers moved freely between European cities. This book follows these lines of travel venturing as far as Moscow, and visiting all the great musical cities of the period, from London to Vienna, Madrid to Naples. The first section of the book looks at eighteenth-century precedents, the instrument - its makers and owners, amateur and professional musicians, printing and publishing, pedagogy, as well as aspects of repertoire. The second section explores the extensive repertoire for accompanied song and chamber music. A final substantive section assembles chapters on a wide array of the most significant soloist-composers of the time. The chapters evoke the guitar milieu in the various cities where each composer-player worked and offer a discussion of some representative works. This book, bringing together an international tally of contributors and never before examined sources, will be of interest to devotees of the guitar, as well as music historians of the Romantic period.