Guitar
The guitar is a musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles. It typically has six strings, but four, seven, eight, ten, twelve and eighteen string guitars also exist.
Guitars are recognized as one of the primary instruments in blues, country, flamenco, rock music, and many forms of pop. They can also be a solo classical instrument. Guitars may be played acoustically, where the tone is produced by vibration of the strings and modulated by the hollow body, or they may rely on an amplifier that can electronically manipulate tone. Such electric guitars were introduced in the 20th century and continue to have a profound influence on popular culture.
Traditionally guitars have usually been constructed of combinations of various woods and strung with animal gut, or more recently, with either nylon or steel strings. Guitars are made and repaired by luthiers.
History
Before the development of the electric
guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as
being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden
soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved
sides".Instruments similar to the guitar have been popular for
at least 5,000 years. The six string classical guitar first appeared
in Spain but was itself the product of a long and complex history of
diverse influences. Like virtually all other stringed European
instruments, the guitar ultimately traces back thousands of years,
via the Near East, to a common ancient origin from instruments then
known in central Asia and India. It is distantly related with
contemporary instruments such as the tanbur, setar, and the Indian
sitar. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument
displaying all the essential features of a guitar being played is a
3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.The modern word,
guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra (German
Gitarre, French Guitare),loaned from the Andalusian Arabic
qitara and Latin cithara, which in turn was derived from the
earlier Greek word kithara, which is related to Old Persian
sihtar.
Illustration from a Carolingian Psalter from the 9th
century, showing a guitar-like plucked instrument. The modern guitar
is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to
Hispania around 40 AD, and further adapted and developed with the
arrival of the four-string oud, brought by the Moors after their
conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century.[7] Elsewhere
in Europe, the indigenous six-string Scandinavian lut (lute), had
gained in popularity in areas of Viking incursions across the
continent. Often depicted in carvings c. 800 AD, the Norse hero
Gunther (also known as Gunnar), played a lute with his toes as he
lay dying in a snake-pit, in the legend of Siegfried.[8] By 1200 AD,
the four string "guitar" had evolved into two types: the guitarra
morisca (Moorish guitar) which had a rounded back, wide fingerboard
and several soundholes, and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar) which
resembled the modern guitar with one soundhole and a narrower
neck.
The Spanish vihuela or "viola da mano", a guitar-like
instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries is, due to its many
similarities, usually considered the immediate ancestor of the
modern guitar. It had lute-style tuning and a guitar-like body. Its
construction had as much in common with the modern guitar as with
its contemporary four-course renaissance guitar. The vihuela enjoyed
only a short period of popularity as it was superseded by the
guitar; the last surviving publication of music for the instrument
appeared in 1576. It is not clear whether it represented a
transitional form or was simply a design that combined features of
the Arabic oud and the European lute. In favor of the latter view,
the reshaping of the vihuela into a guitar-like form can be seen as
a strategy of differentiating the European lute visually from the
Moorish oud.
The Vinaccia family of luthiers is known for developing
the mandolin, and may have built the oldest surviving six string
guitar. Gaetano Vinaccia (1759 – after 1831 has his signature
on the label of a guitar built in Naples, Italy for six strings with
the date of 1779. This guitar has been examined and does not
show tell-tale signs of modifications from a double-course guitar
although fakes are known to exist of guitars and identifying labels
from that period.
The dimensions of the modern classical guitar
(also known as the Spanish guitar) were established by Antonio
Torres Jurado (1817-1892), working in Seville in the 1850s. Torres
and Louis Panormo of London (active 1820s-1840s) were both
responsible for demonstrating the superiority of fan strutting over
transverse table bracing.
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