In Tudor and Elizabethan history the lute usually gets all the attention. But the guitar was played everywhere from the court to the tavern. New book tells the story of the social and musical world of this beloved instrument.
The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History
Series: Musical Performance and Reception
by Christopher Page
Cambridge University Press 2015
ISBN-10: 1107108365
ISBN-13: 978-1107108363
Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
1. Imagery
2. Who owned a gittern?
3. The gittern trade
4. ‘An instruction to the Gitterne’
5. Sounding strings
6. The gittern and Tudor song
7. Thomas Whythorne: the autobiography of a Tudor guitarist
Conclusion
Appendices: Appendix A. The terms ‘gittern’ and ‘cittern’
Appendix B. References to gitterns from 1542–1605
Appendix C. The probate inventory of Dennys Bucke (1584)
Appendix D. Octave strings on the fourth and third course
Appendix E. The fiddle tunings of Jerome of Moravia, swept strings and the guitar
Appendix F. The mandore and the wire-strung gittern
Appendix G. The ethos of the guitar in sixteenth-century France
Appendix H. Raphe Bowle.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christopher Page, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
Christopher Page is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor of Medieval Music and Literature at the University of Cambridge, and from October 2014 Gresham Professor of Music at Gresham College, London for three years. He holds the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association awarded for outstanding services to musicology. In 1981 he founded the professional vocal ensemble Gothic voices, which now has twenty-five CDs in the catalogue, three of which won the coveted Gramophone Early Music Record of the Year award. In 2012, he was a founder member of the Consortium for Guitar Research at Sidney Sussex College, an affiliate of the Royal Musical Association. He has published many books and articles on early music, most recently a major study, The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (2010).