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The Guitar and Its Music: from the Renaissance to the Classical Era.

Article Excerpt
By James Tyler and Paul Sparks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. [xxv, 322 p. ISBN 0-19-816713-X. $98.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, bibliography, index.

In the world of musicology, as in the world of performance, contemporary attitudes about the guitar are conditioned by the preeminence of the modern "classical guitar," an instrument that came into being in the mid-nineteenth century but is still widely used to play music from the last tire hundred years. The history of this particular kind of guitar culminated triumphantly on the solo concert stage, thanks largely to Andres Segovia, whose musicianship and charisma earned him the status of a Rubinstein, Casals, or Heifetz. Yet Segovia's victory was Pyrrhic: his fame benefitted from and enhanced the modesty of his instrument, so that even he could not slow the guitar's gradual abandonment by the art music mainstream, a process begun decades before his birth and continuing to this day.

Segovia did not know, alas, that for centuries the family of instruments designated by the name "guitar" (as distinguished from other plucked string instruments such as the lute and vihuela)...

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