Soundboard Scholar

A review of The Guitar in Victorian England: A Social and Musical History, by Christopher Page (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Following the publication of her new biography of the Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland, K. Dawn Grapes details her research journey in conversation with Katharyn Benessa. They discuss both the history of Dowland research, including the legacy of Diana Poulton, and the gaps that still remain. Grapes offers new context for understanding Dowland’s music and considers how his travels and experiences may have shaped his life and work.

Born in Arequipa, Peru, Pedro Ximénez Abrill y Tirado was a virtuoso cellist and guitarist who composed over forty symphonies, forty masses, dozens of chamber pieces with interesting instrumentations, and over three hundred solo pieces for the guitar. He moved to Lima for a period and later became Maestro di Capilla at the Sucre Cathedral in Bolivia. At the time Sucre was one of the wealthiest cities in South America, if not the wealthiest. Abrill's renown was such that he was published in Paris by Richault and was written about in Hugh Bonelli's published travel diary (London, 1854). His music is well composed, and he employs techniques that would not reappear in the classical guitar canon until the mid-twentieth century. This article presents updated biographical material on Abrill together with a detailed examination of his single-movement First Sonata in D, a remarkable work from both a compositional and technical perspective. A facsimile of the composer's manuscript of the Sonata is included.

A review of Luigi Legnani: Catalogo tematico delle edizioni a stampa per e con chitarra [Thematic Catalogue of Printed Editions for and with Guitar], by Marco Mustardino (Rome: Aracne, 2023).

A review of Guitar Making in Nineteenth-Century London: Louis Panormo and His Contemporaries, by James Westbrook (Halesowen, UK: ASG Music, 2023) classicalguitar.co.uk/shop/guitar-making-in-nineteenth-century-london

The six-course guitar is still a little-known instrument. One need only look at books on the history of music to verify that claim: there is hardly any mention of it, nor are its composers or repertoire often cited. In fact, researchers have given far more attention to other plucked-string instruments than to the six-course guitar—whether for reasons of tradition or ideology—leading to a major gap in the literature. The repertoire of the Spanish Golden Age, to take one example, has been thoroughly explored, in the domains of both vocal and instrumental music (as in the vihuela). Similarly, there is quite a lot of research on the five-course Baroque guitar (as exemplified by Gaspar Sanz and Francisco Guerau): witness the several commercial and critical editions available. And there are plenty of studies of composers such as Fernando Sor and Dionisio Aguado—who are, moreover, already known to people outside our specialized field of the history of the guitar. Perhaps the lack of documents, printed scores, or manuscripts associated with the six-course guitar has hindered research into the instrument. Some documents held in public libraries are available online; others, such as those in the private archive of Navascués, can be accessed only with great difficulty. It is therefore not surprising that today we are familiar with names such as Luis de Narváez or Gaspar Sanz, while composers such as Juan de Arizpacochaga, Isidro Laporta, or José Avellana are completely unknown. The purpose of this text, therefore, is to present the six-course guitar, its particularities, and its function in a society that could be characterized as bourgeois.

A review of Guitar Music from Late Victorian England: Collected Works, by Ernest Shand, edited by Stanley Yates (Classical Guitar Study Editions, 2022), publisher's website.

In the story of music-making, blind musicians have played an intrinsic role, helping to drive the development not only of musical styles but also of instruments, instruction, and aesthetics. Many musical practices were cultivated first within blind communities and adopted only later by sighted musicians, often with a gradual erasure of their original context. The history of the Spanish guitar offers a compelling case study of this progression, demonstrating how the contribution of blind musicians could be both wide-reaching and yet, over time, forgotten. The history of this contribution is challenging to recover, for in Spain as elsewhere, blind musicians left almost no direct historical evidence of their activities; and yet, once reconstructed, it offers a vital new perspective, one that challenges standard approaches to guitar historiography, with its traditional emphasis on repertoire and celebrated individuals. Rather than belonging to the margins of guitar history, the work of blind Spanish guitarists has direct implications for its central narrative. It is essential for understanding the emergence of the Spanish classical guitar in the 19th century and for situating pivotal figures—such as Francisco Tárrega, Antonio de Torres, and even Andrés Segovia and Agustín Barrios—within a broader cultural context in which blind musicians played a vital role. Furthermore, this perspective may offer valuable insights into the study of Spanish musical pedagogy and aesthetics, particularly the concept of duende—as well as into the organological development of the guitar.

Reviews of Interpreting Baroque Music: A Guide for the Modern Classical Guitarist, by Afshin Torabi Ardekani (Bergmann, second corrected edition, 2025) and Performing Baroque Music on the Classical Guitar: A Practical Handbook Based on Historical Sources, by Peter Croton (2015)

In this previously unpublished talk from 2004, delivered two years after his retirement from public performance, Julian Bream traces his own career in relation to the evolution of the modern guitar, recounting his early encounters with nineteenth-century guitars, the introduction of nylon strings to replace gut, innovations in guitar construction, and a transformative meeting with Andrés Segovia. But at the heart of the talk is his approach to sound. Bream discusses the essential elements of his tone production, including his right-hand position with its characteristic “three-quarter Tárrega bend” of the wrist, and his strong preference for the rest stroke. He goes on to explain how guitars in the style of Hauser’s late period actively encourage such a style of playing, from the strutting pattern of the top to the tuning relationship between the top and back plates. In conclusion, he voices skepticism toward certain technologies and concern that they may already be constraining individual artistry and creativity.