The guitar is a musical instrument strung with gut or nylon strings twanged by the fingers, having a body with a flat back and graceful incurvations in complete contrast to the members of the family of lute, whose back is vaulted. The construction of the instrument is of paramount importance in assigning to the guitar its true position in the history of musical instruments, midway between the cithara and the violin. The medieval stringed instruments with neck fall into two classes, characterized mainly by the construction of the body:

1. Those which, like their archetype the cithara, had a body composed of a flat or delicately arched back and soundboard joined by ribs.
2. Those which, like the lyre, had a body consisting of a vaulted back over which was glued a flat soundboard without the intermediary of ribs; this method of construction among Oriental Instruments and is greatly inferior to the first.

A striking proof of this inferiority is afforded by the fact that instruments with vaulted backs, such as the rebab or rebec, although extensively represented during the middle ages in all parts of Europe by numerous types, have shown but little or no development during the course of some twelve centuries, and have dropped out one by one from the realm of practical music without leaving a single survivor. The guitar must be referred to the first of these classes.

The back and ribs of the guitar are of maple, ash or cherry-wood, frequently inlaid with rosewood, mother-of-pearl, etc., while the soundboard is of pine and has one large ornamental rose sound hole. The bridge, to which the strings are fastened, is of ebony with an ivory nut which determines the one end of the vibrating strings, while the nut at the end of the fingerboard determines the other. The neck and fingerboard are made of hard wood, such as ebony, beech or pear. The head, bent back from the neck at an obtuse angle contains two parallel barrels or long holes through which the pegs or metal screws pass, three on each side of the head. The correct positions for stopping the intervals are marked on the fingerboard by little metal ridges called frets. The modern guitar has six strings, three of nylon and three of silk covered with silver wire, tuned E⁰, A⁰, d⁰, g⁰, b⁰, e¹. The written notation is an octave higher, e⁰, a⁰, d¹, g¹, b¹, e². The modern guitar is always played with fingers. The deepest strings are made to sound by the thumb, the three highest by the first, second and third fingers, the little finger resting upon the soundboard – a modern technique – in the air. It is generally stated that the sixth or lowest string was added in 1790 by Jacob Otto of Jena, who was the first in Germany to take up the construction of guitars after their introduction from Italy in 1788, by duchess Amalie of Weimar. Otto states that it was Capellmeister Naumann of Dresden who requested him to make him a guitar with six strings by adding the low E, a spun wire string. The original guitar brought from Italy by the duchess Amalie had five strings, the lowest a being the only one covered with wire. Otto also covered the D in order to increase the fulness of the tone. In Spain six-stringed guitars and vihuelas were known in the 16^th century; they are described by Juan Bermudo and others. The lowest string was tuned to G. Other Spanish guitars of the same period had four, five or seven strings of courses of strings in pairs of unisons. They were always twanged by the fingers.

The guitar is derived from the cithara both structurally and etymologically. It is usually asserted that the Arabs introduced the guitar into Spain, but this statement is open to the gravest doubts. There is no trace among the instruments of the Arabs known to us of any similar to the guitar in construction or shape, although a guitar with slight incurvations was known to the ancient Egyptians. There is also extant a fine example of the guitar, with ribs and incurvations and a long neck provided with numerous frets, on a Hittite bass-relief on the dromos at Euyuk (c. 1000 B.C.) in Cappadocia, Syria. Unless other monuments of much later date should come to light showing guitars with ribs, we shall be justified in assuming that the instrument, which required skill in construction, died out in Egypt and in Asia before the days of classic Greece, and had to be evolved a new from the cithara by the Greeks of Asia Minor. That the evolution should take place within the Byzantine Empire or in Syria would be quite consistent with the traditions of the Greeks and their veneration for the cithara, which would lead them to adapt the neck and other improvements to it, rather than adopt the rebab, the tanbur or the barbiton from the Persians or Arabians. This is in fact, what seems to have taken place. It is true that in the 14^th century in an enumeration of musical instruments by the Archipreste de Hita, a guitarra morisca is mentioned and unfavorably compared with the guitarra latina; moreover, the Arabs of the present day still use an instrument called kuitra (which in N. Africa would be guithara), but it has a vaulted back, the body being like half a pear with a long neck; the strings are twanged by means of a quill. The Arab instrument therefore belongs to a different class, and to admit the instrument as the ancestor of the Spanish guitar would be tantamount to deriving the guitar from the lute.

The name of guitar in fact can probably be a modification of the Greek word k i q a r a (cithara). The difference in construction between the guitar and the cithara is less substantial that may at first appear. Both belong to a family of plucked instruments distinguished by a flat resonating cavity. The cithara has its strings supported by a frame, the guitar by a neck. But this difference, though visibly conspicuous, is not acoustically important. It is therefore possible that the guitar is the distant but direct descendent of the cithara in its late Roman form. During the dark ages the classical lyre, which in virtue of its vaulted back possesses affinities with the lute family, tended to decline in favor of the cithara, and the names to become confused. Those early medieval instruments whose descent from the post-classical cithara is most evident, namely the various forms of chrotta or rota, were frequently described by the name of lyra. The outwardly very different instrument known as lyra during the Renaissance is itself remarkably like a medieval lira shorn of its frame and supporting its strings by a neck alone. The hypothesis that a similar course of evolution links the cithara with the guitar is to some extent supported by terminological evidence. A distinction was commonly made between guitarra latina and guitarra moresca or saracena. By the first, instruments of the flat construction common to the guitar and its extremely close relative, the vihuela, are intended; by the second, instruments of the vaulted construction common to the family of lutes. From this it may be argued that the guitar in our sense of the word was regarded as the descendant on European soil of a late Roman instrument, to wit the cithara, whose name it shares; whereas the lute was known to be what it always has been regarded as by common consent, an Oriental instrument transferred to medieval Europe from the Persian-Arabian civilization during the Moorish occupation of Spain.

By piecing together various indications given by Spanish writers, we obtain a clue to the identity of the medieval instruments, which, in the absence of absolute proof, is entitled to serious consideration. From Bermudo’s work, quoted above, we learn that the guitar and the vihuela de mano were practically identical, differing only in accordance and occasionally in the number of strings. Three kinds of vihuelas were known is Spain during the middle ages, distinguished by the qualifying phrases da arco (with bow), da mano, (by hand), da penola (with quill). Spanish scholars who have inquired into this question of identity state that guitarra latina was afterwards known as the vihuela de mano, a statement fully supported by other evidence. As the Arab kuitra was known to be played by means of a quill, we shall not be far wrong in identifying it with the vihuela de pénola. The word vihuela or vigola is connected with the latin word fidicula or fides, a stringed instrument mentioned by Cicero, as being made from wood of the plane-tree and having many strings. The remaining link in the chain of identification is afforded by St Isidore, bishop of Seville in the 7^th century, who states that fidicula was another name from cithara, "Veteres aut citharas fidicula vel fidice nominaverunt". The fidicula therefore was the cithara, either in its original classical form or in one of the transitions which transformed it into the guitar. The existence of a superior guitarra latina side by side with the guitarra morisca is thus explained. It was derived directly from the classical cithara introduced by the Romans into Spain, the archetype of the structural beauty which formed the basis of the perfect proportions and delicate structure of the violin. In an inventory made by Philip van Wilder of the musical instruments which had belonged to Henry VIII is the following item bearing on the question: "foure gitterons with iiii. cases they are called Spanishe Vialles". Vial or viol was the English equivalent of vihuela. The transitions whereby the cithara acquired a neck and became a guitar are shown in the miniatures of a single MS., the celebrated Utrecht Psalter, which gave rise to so many discussions. The Utrecht Psalter was executed in the diocese of Reims in the 9^th century, and the miniatures, drawn by an Anglo-Saxon artist attached to the Reims school, are unique, and illustrate the Psalter, psalm by psalm. It is evident that the Anglo Saxon artist, while endowed with extraordinary talent and vivid imagination, drew has inspiration from an older Greek illustrated Psalter from the Christian East, where the evolution of the guitar took place.

One of the earlier representations of a guitar in Western Europe occurs in a Passionale from Zwifalten A.D. 1180, now in the Royal Library at Stuttgart. St Pelagia seated on an ass holds a rotta, or cithara in transition, while one of the men-servants leading her ass holds her guitar. Both instruments have three strings and the characteristic guitar outline with incurvations, the rotta differing in having no neck. Mersenne writing early in the 17^th century describes and figures two Spanish guitars, one with four, the other with five strings; the former had a cittern head, the latter the straight head bent back at an obtuse angle from the neck, as in the modern instrument; he gives the Italian, French and Spanish tablatures which would seem to show already enjoyed a certain vogue in France and Italy as well as in Spain. Mersenne states that the proportions of the guitar demand that the length of the neck from the shoulder to nut shall be equal to the length of the body from the center of the rose to the tail end.

In the famous Gate of Glory by Master Mateo, to the church of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a cast of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among several musical instruments may be seen one guitar-shaped, which may be assumed to represent the original vihuela, the old Spanish viol or guitar. The sides are curved, but there is no bow held by the player; still, this is no proof that a bow was not used, since the sculptor may have omitted it. The date of this masterpiece is 1188. A hundred years later than this date there were several kinds of vihuela, with some of which the bow was certainly not used.

In the 14^th century the two names referred to above were in use in Spain: guitarra latina and guitarra moresca. They are mentioned several times in the poems of the Archpriest of Hita (? 1283 - 1350) and were known in France in 1349. The guitarra saracena is mentioned as early as 1300. Fuenllana included compositions for a four-course guitar in his book of tablature, published at Seville in 1554. The guitar was called "Spanish" when it regularly began to be made with five courses. The "inventor" of this instrument was for long believed to be Vicente Espinel (1550-1624), author of the picaresque Spanish novel "The Life of Marcus Obregon, Esquire", which Le Sage afterwards rewrote as "The Adventures of Gil Blas". The chief authority for attributing this invention to him is the dramatist Lope de Vega; and his statement is borne out by Doisi de Velasco (1640) and Gaspar Sanz (1684) in their treatises on the Spanish guitar. Against Espinel is the fact that, eleven years before his birth, Bermudo, writing in 1544, speaks of a guitar of five strings. Espinel, however, if not the inventor of the Spanish guitar, may have been the man who made it a popular instrument with the upper as well as the lower classes in Spain.

By the end of the 16^th century, as contrapuntal music declined, the Spanish guitar increased in favour. Not that it was, or is, incapable of contrapuntal effect; a good modern guitar player, by slightly altering the tuning of his instrument, can play the most complicated fantasies of the Spanish vihuelistas. The earliest treatise of the Spanish guitar is that of Juan Carlos Amat, published at Barcelona, (1586 and later editions). The instrument soon became known in Italy. The "Intavolatura di chitarra alla spagnuola" by G. A. Colonna appeared in 1620. In France the method of Luiz de Brizeño was published in 1626 (Paris, Pierre Ballard). Numerous other works appeared in Spain, France and Italy during the 17^th century. By the middle 16^th century the guitar was becoming a popular instrument in this countries (Spain, France and Italy). Indeed, the anonymous author of a French treatise on playing lutes and gitterns, published in 1556, could state that for the past 12 or 15 years "everybody" plays the guiterne and the lute is practically out of use.

The earlier guitar had a far narrower and deeper body than ours has today, with a less pronounced waist and with a long, narrow neck terminating in a flat rectangular pegdisc with rear pegs for 4 courses of strings; 3 pairs and a chanterelle–a slender and elegant instrument. Adrian LeRoy, writing in the mid-16^th century, confirms its having 4 courses of strings tuned to the intervals of a 4^th, a mayor 3^rd, and a 4^th. This is the tuning that Bermudo referred to as the "new" tuning, and that corresponded to that of the 4 inner strings of lute and vihuela. The "old" tuning differed solely in that the fourth (lowest) course was one tone lower. Old and new tunings had been mentioned by Mudarra in his "Tres Libros de Música" of 1546. Most common tuning of the four-course guitar was c⁰ f⁰ a⁰ d¹ (add G⁰ and g¹ and you have the contemporary lute and vihuela tuning). Praetorius in 1618 also gives a tuning of f⁰ b⁰ d¹ g¹. From the time the fifth course was adopted, the instrument became known outside of Spain as the Spanish guitar; it gained a prompt foothold in Italy and from there spread to the rest of Europe. The new course was tuned a 4^th below the c⁰ string, i.e., G⁰. According to Trichet, ca. 1640, who still knew the old term, gittern, the guitar was played a great deal in France and Italy, but even more in Spain; he comments that the depth between flat top and bottom was from 3 to 4 fingers, the neck a mere 3 fingers wide with 8 frets, the soundhole covered by a rose; he also mentions 5 courses of strings, geminated except for the chanterelle, and the fact that guitars could also be built with vaulted backs (guitarra batente). Shortly after he wrote, the chanterelle was also duplicated, and this stringing was maintained until about the middle of the 18^th century, but the pitch was raised by a tone sometime during the 17^th century, to A⁰ d⁰ g⁰ b⁰ e¹. Espinel made use of both high and low tunings, but since Ribayez (in 1677) the higher pitch prevailed. In Spain the guitar had been and instrument of the people, in contrast to the aristocratic vihuela. According to Praetorius, in Italy it was in the hands of charlatans and saltimbanchi, but by the late 17^th century, it had been transformed into an object of fashion, especially in France, where it is said to have been introduced by Italian actors in Paris. Makers such as Stradivarius and Tielke did not hesitate to build such instruments, sometimes lavishly ornamented. By the middle 18^th century, the guitar had become an amateur’s instrument, and the stringing was consequently made simpler: the 5 pairs of strings made way for the 6 single strings, tuned E⁰ A⁰ d⁰ g⁰ b⁰ e¹, as they are today. In the 19^th century wooden tunings pegs were replaced by metal screws, the lower bouts were considerably widened, and the rose disappeared.

At close of the 18^th century and beginning of the 19^th the Spanish guitar became a fashionable instrument on the Continent. Fernando Sor, a Spaniard, after the Peninsular War, brought it into great notice in England, and composing for it with success banished the English guitar or citra (Fr. cistre, Ger. Zither, It. Cetera). This was an instrument of different shape, a wire-strung cittern, with six open notes, two being single spun strings and four of iron wire in pairs tuned in unison. The scale of the English thus strung was written in real pitch an octave lower: c⁰ e⁰ g⁰ c¹ e¹ g¹. The technique of the instrument was of the simplest, the thumb and first finger only being employed, if not a plectrum; while the technical difficulties of the Spanish guitar, in the hands of a serious performer, rival those of the lute.

Sor’s most distinguished rival was an Italian, Mauro Giuliani, who composed a concerto with band accompaniment for the terz chitarra or third-guitar, an instrument with a shorter neck, tuned a minor third higher. This concerto, published by Diabelli in Vienna, was transcribed by Hummel for the pianoforte. He also composed for guitar an flute. Other popular composers were Legnani, Kreutzer, Nüske, Regondi and that wayward genius Leonhard Schulz. Berlioz and Paganini were both guitarists; indeed the influence of the guitar in Berlioz can be seen in his spacing of chords. Paganini’s quartets for guitar and strings show that he realized the possibilities of colour obtained from combining the guitar with the viola.

The guitar still survives in Spain, where it is not only the possession of blind beggars, but a thoroughly serious instrument, with an advanced technique and great possibilities for modern music. To those who have heard the performance of a fine player like Miguel Llobet or Andrés Segovia it will always remain a mystery why lute music of the 16^th century is not now habitually played on the modern guitar. But the tone of the lute and of the guitar is markedly different, the former being more colorful if well produced. Like the viol and the violin, the lute and the guitar are complementary rather than antagonistic. Good progress in the recovery of lute technique is of very recent date. The guitar, also, has had great influence on the harmonic and rhythmical feeling of the best Spanish composers, and Falla wrote for it one of his most serious and deeply felt works, his elegy "Pour le tombeau de Claude Debussy".

The history of the modern guitar is bound up with the great figure of Francisco Tarrega (b. Villareal, 1852; d. Barcelona, 1909), a masterly player on that instrument and creator of the modern guitarist school. His innovations did not depend, as has been stated, on playing either with the nails or the fingertips, but more on the position of the hands, the placing of the fingers and the manner of plucking the strings. Particular emphasis was laid by Tarrega and his pupils on the use of the right hand, which may be considered, in their playing, as fulfilling the function of the soft pedal on the pianoforte. Before Tarrega the guitar was thought by musicians to be an instrument intended only for accompaniment, used by the people as an adjunct to their popular songs and serenades. This error arose from the fact that the popular guitar was confused with the instrumental guitar, intended for the solo playing. Tarrega’s transcriptions of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and of the Spanish composers Albéniz and Malats showed the great resources of the guitar. Albéniz himself, hearing his compositions played by Tarrega in transcriptions for guitar, said that they were superior to his own versions for the pianoforte. Tarrega’s transcriptions, played by guitarists at numerous concerts, aroused the interest of other musicians, including Falla Turina, Ponce, Villa-Lobos, Broqua, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Manén, who have not thought it beneath them to write original compositions for the instrument. Although a harmonic instrument, the guitar is obviously narrow in range compared with the pianoforte, consequently works of elaborate polyphonic texture cannot be adapted for it; but those that can acquire a new value, in the opinion of many guitarists, all of whom gladly acknowledge the debt of gratitude which they and the guitar owe to Tarrega, founder of the modern guitar school.

The greatest recent exponent of the guitar was Andrés Segovia (b. 1890), who was influenced by Falla and did much to introduce new technical devices, such as the use of the little finger. His transcriptions, such as those of harpsichord and clavichord music of various schools, are masterly, and many modern composers have studied the guitar technique in order to write music especially for Segovia, not excluding even a Concerto (by Castelnuovo-Tedesco).