Welcome to “A Guitar
A Day”
This series will last
7 days - so here we go!
The Renaissance Guitar
1450-1600
The time periods that
I have noted for each day differ slightly from historian to historian so please
see them as an approximation.
One of the first things that comes
to mind when I think about the Renaissance guitar is the fact that the earliest
surviving example of this instrument dates back to 1646. However, evidence of
the guitar’s existence dates back to a book of tablature from 1552 and a description
of the Renaissance Guitar by Juan Bermudo from 1555. That’s almost a hundred
years of Renaissance Guitars that went missing – where are they?!
The
Renaissance Guitar is a four-course instrument, meaning that it has four sets
of strings. Three strings are doubled
and the highest string is single. The tuning is G,C,E,A. If you put a capo on
the fifth fret of the modern guitar and play the top 4 strings then you can get
a feel for the tuning. The Renaissance guitar has gut strings, and gut frets which
are tied around the neck. It also has friction pegs – lots of maintenance.
The types of songs that were played
on the Renaissance Guitar included simple strumming to accompany singers as
well as contrapuntal (I’ll explain this term in a future blog) compositions
that approached the difficulty of the lute. This guitar was very popular in
France. It is thought that the guitar was played during the Renaissance period
as frequently as it is today!
Lawrence K.
Brown constructed the Renaissance Guitar that you see in the attached photos. Larry
was living in Asheville, NC at the time.
This first link will take you to a picture of the earliest
Renaissance guitar – 1552.
This link will take you to a YouTube video of Stephen Murphy
performing on a Renaissance Guitar.
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