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16 November 2025
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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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- Articles7 January 2022
Guitar Thinking
Playing the guitar develops physical skills but also ways of listening and thinking about music. For example, guitarists often conceptualize chords as two-dimensional shapes—an approach that is foreign to pianists. What does it mean, then, to think like a guitarist? This article approaches “guitar thinking” through music theory and cognitive science. Psychological experiments help to reveal auditory, visual, and tactile aspects of guitar playing and to show how guitarists respond to the instrument’s affordances (i.e., its possibilities for action). Additionally, recent research in music theory models fretboard space and examines patterns of body-instrument interaction. To demonstrate this mode of analysis, the article discusses Leo Brouwer’s Estudios sencillos, nos. 1 and 7. Ultimately, this investigation suggests that the guitar is not only a tool for producing musical sound; it also produces musical knowledge. - Articles1 January 2016
Henry Worrall (1825–1902): Anglo-American Guitarist
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. - From the Archive31 December 2021
The Guitar in Nineteenth-Century America: A Lost Social Tradition
This article is one of a series of five by Peter Danner on the history of the guitar in the United States from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Written between 1977 and 1994, these articles first appeared in early issues of the GFA’s magazine Soundboard. They are reprinted here in tribute to Danner’s pioneering contribution to guitar research and to bring them to the attention of a new generation of scholars. The author has generously provided a newly written introduction to the series. - By Invitation31 December 2021
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. - Articles1 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.” - By Invitation16 October 2025
Round the Tárrega Bend
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.