The Practical Guitar

Author(s): James Tyler

Source: Early Music, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 506-507
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3126538
Accessed: 30-11-2015 21:11 UTC

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The practical guitar

James Tyler
In his lengthy and thoughtful review of my book, The
Early Guitar: a History and Handbook (EM 8/3, pp. 3878), Ephraim Segerman accuses me of making biased
omissions. He says that I have omitted to mention
that strumming the 4-course guitar was a common
practice. He is wrong. On p. 31 of my book in the
chapter on the 4-course guitar, I write 'it should be
noted here that the 4-course guitar made full use of
the strummed style of playing'. As strumming technique for the 4-course guitar is similar to that of the
5-course guitar, I refer the reader to my chapter on
strumming technique for the latter. If I exhibit any
sort of bias toward lute and vihuela playing technique for the 4-course guitar, it is simply because
composers for this instrument did, 99% of its
surviving repertoire requiring the player to pluck in
the lute and vihuela style.
Segerman also accuses me of 'stating or implying
that in pizzicato playing, right- and left-hand technique on the 5-course guitar was essentially the same
as that on the modern classical guitar'. Given that I
spend an entire section of Chapter 6 showing

specifically that right-hand technique is radically

different from that of the modern guitar, I am really
rather mystified as to how Segerman has managed to
conclude the opposite. I do imply that left-hand technique is fundamentally similar to that of the modern
guitar, and, although I would have liked to have
discussed the exceptions to this generalization-such
as Sanz and de Murcia-this was a luxury I could ill
afford given the imposed space limitations on a book
which was meant, after all, to be a practical introduction to a long overlooked instrument and its vast
and virtually unknown repertoire.
Segerman accuses me of a bias toward Bermudo's
information about the tuning of the 4-course guitar,
which describes the tuning as having an octave string
only on the fourth course, and a bias against the
instructions of Phalese, which indicate an octave
string on the third course as well as the fourth course.
Although I, along with Eph Segerman and Charles
Dobson, originally gave credence to the idea of an
upper octave string on the third course, I long ago
rejected it because the only information it was based
on was Phalese's instructions which were not originally guitar instructions at all, but a hastily thrown
together reworking of cittern instructions taken from

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506

EARLY MUSIC

OCTOBER

1980

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another of Phalise's publications. There are sufficient errors in this garbled and corrupt account to
cast doubt on the reliability of this source. Bermudo
offers positive and unequivocal information about
the tuning of the 4-course guitar, a tuning which
works in practice for all the surviving musical
sources: Spanish, French and Italian. If I have a bias,
it is toward reliable sources! Nor is a book of the size
and scope of this one the place to go into detail about
a highly suspect tuning. I do, in any case, make reference in footnotes to all articles relating to this tuning
for those readers wishing to make up their own
minds.
I 'omitted Bermudo's statement that the 16thcentury bandurria had a round back like a rebec'
because Bermudo makes no such statement. In
Declaracion de instrumentos... (2, xxxii and 4, xviii and
lxix) Bermudo speaks of the bandurriaas having three
strings in the fashion of a rabel. He does not describe
the instrument's shape but, as the bandurria shared
the rabel's stringing, it possibly shared its shape. We
have firm evidences from the 16th century as to what
precisely the rabel was, yet modern organologists
assume from information from a century later that it
was a bowed rebec with a rounded back. My little
glossary was not the place to expand on such speculations; the bandurria was included only because
Bermudo says it may have been related to the guitar.
As for the 17th-century English gittern, I am still
not convinced by Playford and Talbot, but I would
like to assure Segerman that I anxiously await the
new information which is now being uncovered at
Manchester University, but which has not yet been
made generally available to scholars.
Considering the bulk of my book is, first and foremost, concerned with baroque guitar repertoire, it
seems odd that in Segerman's review so much importance is placed on small points of organology. Much
more relevant to the book under consideration
would have been some commentary on my evaluation of baroque guitar composers, or about the
annoying habit I have of championing Italian 17thcentury repertoire over the Spanish or the fashionable French, or my controversial interpretation of the
ornaments.

Early harp attitudes

Tim Hobrough
I would like to comment on the articles by Michael

Morrow ('The renaissance hairp', EM 7/4, pp. 499510) and Robert Hadaway ('The re-creation of an
Italian renaissance harp', EM 8/1, pp. 59-62) on the
double-strung
harp and the instrument commissioned by the BBC for the 1589 Florentine
Intermedi performance.
That harps were musically among the most important instruments of the Renaissance, and spiritually
the most highly regarded, is beyond doubt. It is significant that the BBC should find it necessary
specially to commission what in its day would have
been a perfectly ordinary double harp and devote
half an hour of air time to describing the instrument, and justifying its use, to what is otherwise
one of the world's most knowledgeable listening
audiences.
This curious neglect and ignorance arises from a
situation which Michael Morrow touches upon only
briefly at the end of his article: since the late Middle
Ages the harp has been a specialist's instrument, to
the point that no one harpist would attempt to
master more than one of the various species of harp
that have existed. Harpists need not play the harp
exclusively, but it must be one of their main occupations if they are to give it the dedicated study required
fully to exploit the instrument's potential; otherwise
they (and we) must be content with such light music
as requires no great technical ability. Unfortunately,
in modern performance harping is usually delegated
to either generalists-jacks-of-all-music
who play
everything they can afford-or, worse, to any singer
with nothing else to do.
The result is that early harps are so rarely played
even moderately well that we must expect widespread indifference to these instruments. Their
position is that of lutes and harpsichords 40 or 50
years ago, and the attitude of guitarists and pianists
at that time towards lutes and harpsichords is exactly
that of most pedal-harpists of today towards historical harps.
The problem is exacerbated by a tendency amongst
builders to make compromises on harps which they
would never countenance on any other historical
instrument. Even Robert Hadaway, entrusted with
copying a surviving original instrument, felt it desirable to offset the arm at the shoulder in the modern
fashion, rather than duplicating the central position
of the original harp, all previous harps, and most
subsequent harps up to the 19th century.
He also appears to be amazed that the original
EARLY MUSIC

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OCTOBER

1980

507