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Articles12 January 2026The Six-Course Guitar in Spain: Some Considerations of Repertoire and Musical Practice
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.
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The Guitar in Nineteenth-Century America: A Lost Social Tradition
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On the Need for a Scholarly Edition of Tárrega’s Complete Works
In this guest editorial, the author provides evidence of the unreliable nature of the majority of Tárrega’s first editions, and the substandard quality of most modern editions. The author argues that in light of the recent availability of formerly inaccessible primary sources, the time is right for a scholarly edition of Tárrega’s complete works with state-of-art editorial methods.Articles
1 January 2017
Andrés Segovia’s Unfinished Guitar Method: Placing His “Scales” in Historical Context
For over sixty years, guitarists of my generation have been familiar with the so-called Segovia Scales—the systematic scale fingerings advocated by the Andalusian maestro. They have been an influential—some might say a definitive—bestseller since their first USA publication in 1953. Countless guitar students have incorporated them into their daily practice routines. For the publisher, Columbia Music, they seem to be the goose that laid the golden egg. Are they everything that Segovia wanted them to be? Two books of recent date on guitar technique attest to their enduring value and relevance. Thomas Offermann wrote in 2015: “The fingerings of the scales used here mostly correspond to those of Andrés Segovia.” A revised edition of the 1953 publication came out in 1967. It was republished in 2011 and has remained in print. The original preface by Segovia was partly removed and replaced with a "Historical Note" by Thea E. Smith, the granddaughter of the publisher, Sophocles Papas. She attested that they were “one of the best-selling guitar publications of all time.”Articles
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