The art and times of the guitar

the long version

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.