Musicology Commons^™

Guitar Music In Collections: A New Web-Based Index Is Launched, Ellwood Colahan

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Is there any really good way to locate specific pieces of guitar music within published collections and anthologies? Might there be already a best way? Anyone who has taught or studied classical guitar is familiar with collections like Das Gitarrespiel or the Noad anthologies. But it is hard to remember with accuracy which pieces are in which of these editions or in dozens of others like them. Library and trade catalogs are not of much help. What is needed for this problem is in-depth indexing rather than traditional cataloging. These print indexes of song anthologies and collections have more recently …

Sinfonia Concertante By Luigi Boccherini, Edited By Matanya Ophee, Richard Long

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Sinfonia concertante (G. 523), by Boccherini, Luigi is reviewed.

La Guitare = The Guitar = La Chitarra, Paris, 1650-1950, Addendum, By Daniel Sinier And FrançOise De Ridder, Richard Long

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La Guitare = The Guitar = La Chitarra, Paris, 1650-1950, Addendum, by Sinier, Daniel and Francoise de Ridder is reviewed.

Soundboard Scholar No. 2: Editor's Letter, Thomas Heck

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An introduction to the contents of this issue.

Soundboard Scholar No. 2: Cover

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The painting Home Ranch, by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), executed in 1892, visually captures some of the atmosphere that must have prevailed in Henry Worrall’s frontier world. The singing guitarist has been identified as Franklin Schenck. Might he have been singing Home on the Range, first published in Kansas in 1873? His friend Samuel Murray sits on the right. Now part of the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Home Ranch was donated by the artist’s widow and by Miss Mary Adeline Williams in 1929. This reproduction is in the public domain, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. …

Soundboard Scholar No. 2 (Complete)

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No abstract provided.

Henry Worrall (1825–1902): Anglo-American Guitarist, Robert Ferguson

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Anglo-American guitarist Henry Worrall appeared on the American scene just as the guitar reached a plateau of popularity. As vital as the guitar itself, the prevailing social, philosophical, and aesthetic tenets of Worrall's era also wove a unifying thread through his life, career, and oeuvre. His immersion in both the graphic and musical arts; his straddling of vernacular and high culture; his connection to nature and especially agriculture; his nationalist and regionalist sympathies; and his fondness for folk, popular, and heroic musical themes all drew from and evinced a Romantic worldview. Here, Ferguson discusses Worrall's professional life.

The Life And Times Of Josef Kaspar Mertz: New Biographical Insights, Andreas Stevens

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Stevens examines the biographical information about the German Romantic-era guitarist Josef Kaspar Mertz.The first one, authored in Russian by Nicolai Makaroff, became the best known because it has been available in English. By today's standards, Makaroff's recollections of the guitar's situation in the middle of the nineteenth century seem deeply subjective. Ever on the lookout for active exponents of the art of guitar playing, he met Mertz twice in Vienna and witnessed several private performances by Mertz. For better or for worse, his less-than-enthusiastic assessment of Mertz's playing has been taken at face value for perhaps too long, especially since …

Return With Us Now... Featured Facsimile: Henry Worrall’S Spanish Retreat, Robert Ferguson

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Ferguson examines Henry Worrall's Spanish Retreat. Its origins go back to London, specifically to two guitar prints published there in the mid-1820s. Though the earliest of these (c.1826) states that the piece was "arranged for guitar" by Alexander Sosson, this does not necessarily indicate that it was originally written for a different instrument, such as piano. "Arranged" could mean the piece was already in circulation among guitarists, or another guitarist created or popularized it, and Sosson merely reworked it (and wrote it down). Moreover, imitating other instruments, at which the guitar proved particularly adroit, constituted the essence and charm of …

Giuliani’S Naples: A Walking Tour, Nicoletta Confalone, Grégory Leclair

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With 430,000 inhabitants in 1800, Naples had become the third most populous European city after London and Paris. The excavation of the site of Pompeii in the eighteenth century gave a special prestige to the city. Its newly unearthed antiquities and frescoes led to a vogue of neoclassicism across the arts. Images of ancient Greek and Roman lyres inspired the creation of the lyre-guitar, an instrument on which Mauro Giuliani performed on various occasions in Naples--probably more for its visual effect than for audibility's sake.

The Guitar In Tudor England: A Social And Musical History, By Christopher Page, Richard Long

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Long reviews The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History by Christopher Page.

German Romantic Guitar Duets (Schneiderman, Yamaya), Richard Long

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Long reviews Darr's German Romantic Guitar Duets by John Schneiderman and Hideki Yamaya.

Soundboard Scholar No. 1: Cover

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The three guitars were reproduced from La chitarra: quattro secoli di capolavori / The Guitar: Four Centuries of Masterpieces (Edizioni il Salabue, 2008), with the kind permission of Giovanni Accornero. The instruments were made (L to R) by Magno Graill (Rome, c.1620), Antonio Vinaccia (Naples, 1787), and Ignacio Fleta (Barcelona, 1961).

—Thomas Heck

Soundboard Scholar No. 1 (Complete)

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No abstract provided.

The Microtonal Guitars Of Harry Partch, John Schneider

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Known as an "American Maverick," Harry Partch (1901–1974) was surely one of the United States's most colorful composers. His dissatisfaction with the scales and instruments of Western music inspired him to design and build an orchestra of over two dozen handcrafted "microtonal" instruments that were tuned to his notorious "monophonic" scale of forty-three tones per octave. Between 1934 and 1952, Partch created four different adapted guitars, using them in fifteen compositions ranging from solo song cycles (Barstow, December 1942, U.S. Highball, Three Intrusions) to chamber music, dances, and four of his five major …

Fernando Sor On The Move In The Early 1820s, Erik Stenstadvold

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This article adds to our knowledge of Sor’s final months in London in 1822 and his subsequent Paris sojourn before he went to Russia in 1823. Central to Sor’s activity during this period was his involvement in the ballet Cendrillon, for which he wrote the music. Hitherto unknown reviews of the premiere at the King’s Theatre on March 26, 1822, show that both the ballet and the music were consistently well received by the London critics. This success led to action being taken to have the ballet staged at the Paris Opéra, and in the fall that same year …

Emil Heerbrugger's Grand Grecian Military March In Facsimile, Robert Ferguson

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Ferguson discusses Emil Heerbrugger's Grand Grecian Military March, composed for one or two guitars and published in the 1830s. It is parlor music for the amateur and displays the traits of so much of that repertoire: foursquare phrasing, strict diatonicism, tonic-dominant harmony, and simple rhythm. The tambour technique was a staple of nineteenth-century martial music on guitar, typically used to evoke drums, and Heerbrugger marks it as such in his score. The composer recommends executing the effect percussively with the right-hand middle finger.

Editorial: Guitar Research Resources—An Update, Thomas Heck

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In early May, 2015, there was a biennial gathering of guitar history enthusiasts and scholars at the town of Hemmenhofen, Germany, on Lake Constance. One of the sessions was a round table with the title, "Old and New Sources and Horizons for Historical Research on the Guitar." It was designed to stimulate audience participation and certainly succeeded. Brief papers were offered by three scholars in attendance. Here, Heck identifies eight points of progress, each of which can be considered good news for those who work in the field of guitar history.

The Guitar As An "Open-Air" Instrument In The Early Romantic Era, Panagiotis Poulopoulos

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In the first decades of the nineteenth century, playing music outdoors became a popular trend in Europe and North America. This largely reflected the Romantic ideal of coming closer to nature, whose allure played a significant role in contemporary education, literature, art, fashion, and music. By investigating a wide variety of written and pictorial sources, as well as surviving instruments in museum collections, this article discusses the development of the guitar as an “open-air” instrument as epitomised by the invention of guitar variants for use “on the go”. Moreover, the article sheds new light on the guitar’s connections to other …

An Uncatalogued Piece By Fernando Sor?, Ricardo Aleixo

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This article discusses a page of music manuscript, shelf no. MD-C-90 (4), preserved in a royal monastery situated in Madrid: the Convent of the Descalzas Reales. It contains three works for guitar, including two attributed to the Catalan composer and guitarist Fernando Sor (1778–1839). The first, entitled Minué de Sors, is known as Sor's Op. 23, No. 6, while the second short composition, Alemanda desors [sic], is not yet officially attributed to Sor. While recent research has revealed that Salvador Castro de Gistau (ca. 1770–?), a publisher originally from Madrid, issued this same piece in his Op. …

Juegos Filarmónicos, Thomas Schmitt, Six-Course Guitar, Ellwood Colahan

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No abstract provided.