The classical guitar is a member of the guitar family used in classical music and other styles. An acoustic wooden string instrument with strings made of gut or nylon, it is a precursor of the modern steel-string acoustic and electric guitars, both of which use metal strings. Classical guitars derive from the Spanish vihuela and gittern of the 15th and 16th century. Those instruments evolved into the 17th and 18th-century baroque guitar—and by the mid-19th century, early forms of the modern classical guitar. Today's modern classical guitar was established by the late designs of the 19th-century Spanish luthier, Antonio Torres Jurado.
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A plectrum or individual finger picks may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant chamber on the instrument, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier.
A guitarist is a person who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of guitar family instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar by singing or playing the harmonica, or both.
Fernando Sor was a Spanish classical guitarist and composer of the early Romantic era. Best known for writing solo classical guitar music, he also composed an opera, three symphonies, guitar duos, piano music, songs, a Mass, and at least two successful ballets: Cinderella, which received over one hundred performances, and Hercule et Omphale.
A guitar solo is a melodic passage, instrumental section, or entire piece of music, pre-written to be played on a classical, electric, or acoustic guitar. In 20th and 21st century traditional music and popular music such as blues, swing, jazz, jazz fusion, rock and heavy metal, guitar solos often contain virtuoso techniques and varying degrees of improvisation. Guitar solos on classical guitar, which are typically written in musical notation, are also used in classical music forms such as chamber music and concertos.
Dionisio Aguado y García was a Spanish classical guitarist and composer of the late Classical and early Romantic periods.
Ferdinando Maria Meinrado Francesco Pascale Rosario Carulli was an Italian composer for classical guitar and the author of the influential Méthode complète pour guitare ou lyre, op. 27 (1810), which contains music still used by student guitarists today. He wrote a variety of works for classical guitar, including numerous solo and chamber works and several concertos. He was an extremely prolific writer, composing over 400 works for the instrument.
Roland Dyens was a French classical guitarist, composer, and arranger.
In music, a barre chord is a type of chord on a guitar or other stringed instrument played by using one finger to press down multiple strings across a single fret of the fingerboard.
The harp guitar is a guitar-based stringed instrument generally defined as a "guitar, in any of its accepted forms, with any number of additional unstopped strings that can accommodate individual plucking." The word "harp" is used in reference to its harp-like unstopped open strings. A harp guitar must have at least one unfretted string lying off the main fretboard, typically played as an open string.
In classical guitar, the right hand is developed in such a way that it can sustain two, three, and four voice harmonies while also paying special attention to tone production. The index (i), middle (m), and ring (a) fingers are generally used to play the melody, while the thumb (p) accompanies in the bass register adding harmony and produces a comparable texture and effect to that of the piano. The classical guitar is a solo polyphonic instrument, and it is difficult to master.
A person who is specialized in the making of stringed instruments such as guitars, lutes and violins is called a luthier.
Lucio Matarazzo is an Italian classical guitarist. Along with successful guitarists Julian Bream, Alirio Diaz and Alexandre Lagoya, he is a recipient of the prestigious Chitarra d'Oro in the category of Una Vita per la Chitarra awarded by the International Guitar Convention of Alessandria.
Antoine de Lhoyer [L'Hoyer] was a French virtuoso classical guitarist and an eminent early romantic composer of mainly chamber music featuring the classical guitar. Lhoyer also had a notable military career; he was an elite member of the Gardes du Corps du Roi, a Knight of the Order of St John and a Knight of the Order of St Louis. His music fell into obscurity even before his impoverished death at the age of 83 in Paris.
Pierre-Jean Porro was an influential French classical guitarist, composer and music publisher.
A musical instrument of the chordophone family, the lyre-guitar was a type of guitar shaped to look like a lyre, popular as a fad-instrument in the late 1800s. It had six single courses, with a fretboard located between two curved arms recalling the shape of the ancient Greek kithara. It was tuned and played like the conventional guitar.
To a greater extent than most other instruments and ensembles, it is difficult to compose music for the guitar without either proficiency in the instrument or close collaboration with a guitarist. As a result, a large part of the guitar repertoire consists of works by guitarists who did not compose extensively for other instruments. Music prior to the classical era was often composed for performance on various combinations of instruments, and could be adapted by the performer to keyboard instruments, the lute, or the guitar. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, a significant amount of music has been written for the guitar by non-guitarist composers.
Antoine Marcel Lemoine was the founder of the music publishing establishment in Paris and a guitar virtuoso and skilful performer on the violin and viola. He was also the father of Henry Lemoine, who took over his publishing business.
Carl Oscar (Oskar) Boije af Gennäs, was a Swedish collector of guitar sheet music.
René François Lacôte (1785–1871) was a Romantic guitar luthier from Paris, France. His guitars were played by guitarists such as Fernando Sor, Ferdinando Carulli, Dionisio Aguado, Napoléon Coste, and Marco Aurelio Zani de Ferranti. Musicologist René Vannes referred to Lacôte as the "Stradivarius of the guitar" in his book Universal Dictionary of Luthiers. Lacôte apprenticed to the luthier Joseph Pons. Ferndando Sor mentioned in his book Méthode pour la Guitare that "M. Lacote, a French maker, the only person who, besides his talents, has proved to me that he possesses the quality of not being inflexible to reasoning".
