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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
For Paul Sparks
For the most part, the history of the Spanish guitar in eighteenth-century England seems to be no history at all. There appears to be little to place between Samuel Pepys and the beginning of the nineteenth century when the six-string guitar emerged as a favoured instrument of the parlour musician. Thus it is widely supposed that the gut-strung guitar was little used in England until Fernando Sor and other foreign players made it fashionable in the decades after Waterloo (1815). This article proposes to correct that deeply entrenched view with a chronological checklist of material, much of it presented in this connection for the first time, that illuminates the fortunes of the guitar in eighteenth-century England, principally London.
1 I follow the common usage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English writers and use the term ‘Spanish guitar’ to mean the instrument with an octoform body, frets (generally passing from tied gut to fixed in the later eighteenth century) and strung with gut, or by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, with gut and over-spun silk. The earliest use of the term in English that I know appears in Choice Novels, and Amorous Tales (1652), 79
2 Insofar as Sor came to London in 1815 with an unprecedented ability to play the guitar as a solo instrument with melody and accompaniment, that view is justified. See C. Page, ‘New Light on the London Years of Fernando Sor, 1815–1822’, Early Music, forthcoming.
3 J. Tyler and P. Sparks, The Guitar and its Music: From the Renaissance to the Classical Era (Oxford, 2002), viii.
4 They are: (1) three of the Gale (Cengage Learning) databases namely (a) 19th Century Newspapers, (b) 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection and (c) Eighteenth Century Collections Online; (2) The British Newspaper Archive, under the auspices of the British Library; (3) Bath Chronicle Georgian Newspaper Project; (4) Google Books, chronologically filtered searches; (5) English Poetry 600–1900 (Chadwyck Healey); (6) Eighteenth-Century Journals. Andrew Britton's thesis ‘The Guitar in the Romantic Period: its Musical and Social Development with Special Reference to Bristol and Bath’ (PhD diss., U. of London, 2010) and Brian Robins' opulent edition of the John Marsh journals (The John Marsh Journals: the Life and Times of a Gentleman Composer (1752–1828) (Stuyvesant, 1998) which disclosed some important material. Tony Bingham's unrivalled collection of trade cards and advertisements provided valuable iconographical material.
5 I retain the convention of using the spelling ‘guittar’ for this instrument. See P. Poulopoulos, ‘The Guittar in the British Isles, 1750–1810’, thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The University of Edinburgh (2011); Francesco Geminiani: The Art of Playing on the Guitar or Cittra (1760), ed. P. Holman, forthcoming; Jürgen Kloss, ‘The Guittar In Britain 1753–1800’, available at www.justanothertune.com/html/guittarinbritain.html (Accessed 5 September 2012).
6 The term ‘Spanish guitar’ first appears here in 17471, but there seems to be substance in the common view that the expression (virtually unknown in English sources before the 1740s) was introduced to draw a distinction between the gut-strung variety and the ‘English’ or wire-strung guittar after approximately 1755 when the latter was introduced. The evidence suggests that the ‘Spanish’ guitar was identified as such in England by foreign and principally Italian teachers, such as Giacomo Merchi, who taught both types of guitar and distinguished them by harking back to the seventeenth-century Italian terminology of chitarra Spagn(u)ola. The process happens before our eyes, as a second wave, in 17801.
7 For explicit arguments for the abandonment of tablature, see Giacomo Merchi, La Guide des ecoliers de guitarre (Paris, 1761), iv. Note, however, that Merchi here advocates the use of a double-course instrument with bourdons on the fourth and fifth courses (ibid., ii).
8 [?Giacomo] Merchi, Traité des Agrémens de la Musique exécutés sur la guitarre (Paris, 1777), 2.
9 See for example Le Moine, Nouvelle Methode de guitarre (first Le Moine edition, Paris, 1799), 11. Le Moine also raises some of the same concerns as Merchi. See n. 9.
10 C. Page, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (London, 1987), 216, 238 and 240–1. I am much indebted to Yang Yuanzheng, of the Department of Music, The University of Hong Kong, for information about Chinese string practices.
11 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London, England), Tuesday, 19 May 1778.
12 Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music, 206.
13 P. Holman, Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolemetsch (Woodbridge, 2010), 143–8; L. Graf Williamson, ‘John Frederick Hintz, Eighteenth-Century Moravian Instrument Maker, and the Use of the Cittern in Moravian Worship’, Journal of Moravian History, 5 (2008), 7–39, and P. Poulopoulos, ‘The Influence of Germans in the Development of “this favourite Instrument the Guittar” in England’, Soundboard, 38 (2012), forthcoming.
14 Tyler and Sparks, The Guitar and its Music, 204.