Baroque guitar


The Baroque guitar is a string instrument with five courses of gut strings and moveable gut frets. The first course sometimes used only a single string.

History

The Baroque guitar replaced the Renaissance lute as the most common instrument found in the home. The earliest attestation of a five-stringed guitar comes from the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish book Declaracion de Instrumentos Musicales by Juan Bermudo, published in 1555. The first treatise published for the Baroque guitar was Guitarra Española de cinco ordenes, c. 1590, by Juan Carlos Amat.
The baroque guitar in contemporary ensembles took on the role of a basso continuo instrument and players would be expected to improvise a chordal accompaniment. Several scholars have assumed that the guitar was used together with another basso continuo instrument playing the bass line. However, there are good reasons to suppose that the guitar was used as an independent instrument for accompaniment in many situations. Intimately tied to the development of the Baroque guitar is the alfabeto system of notation.

Tuning

Three different ways of tuning the guitar are well documented in seventeenth-century sources as set out in the following table. This includes the names of composers who are associated with each method. Very few sources seem to clearly indicate that one method of stringing rather than another should be used and it is often argued that it may have been up to the player to decide what was appropriate. The issue is highly contentious and different theories have been put forward.
A very brief list of composers and tunings:
ComposersTuningScale
Ferdinando Valdambrini
Gaspar Sanz 		E - B - G - D - A
Antoine Carre
Robert de Visée
Nicolas Derosier 		E - B - G - D - A
Girolamo Montesardo
Benedetto Sanseverino
Giovanni Paolo Foscarini
Francisco Guerau 		E - B - G - D - A

Composers

Matteo Salas.
Antonio Stradivari. Of his five surviving guitars, the 1679 "Sabionari" is the only one in playable condition.
It is the solo instrument on more than a dozen videos at YouTube.com.
Two other Stradivari guitars are in museums.
An instrument of 1688
is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, and
an instrument of 1700 is in the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota.
Nicholas Alexandre Voboam II. French luthier with three guitars bearing his signature. The guitars of Alexandre were held in high esteem during his lifetime and a century later were still considered desirable instruments.
Contemporary makers of baroque guitars can be identified by Internet searches.

Performers