The Guitar in Seventeenth-Century Italy

The heyday of the five-course guitar in Italy was halfway through the seventeenth century. In a brief span of time, composers such as Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, Francesco Corbetta, Giovanni Battista Granata, and Angelo Michele Bartolotti created a repertoire of considerable size that would be completely forgotten in the next century. Since then, most sources have lain unused in libraries and museums, which is why few people in our time have been in the position to form an opinion on the quality of this music.

The greatest success came in the era in which the lute, once the queen of instrumental polyphony, lost favor. Lute tablatures were no longer printed in Italy after about 1650, and only the new chitarrone, the bass instrument soon to be known by its nickname tiorba, could keep up with the fashion for grand operatic spectacle and the stile rappresentativo of celebrated singers. In the shadow of the heights of the seconda pratica flourished another, more modest vocal genre that gave expression to less distinguished emotions. The guitar, as an exponent of oral traditions, seemed exactly the right instrument to support songs about amorous shepherds, satyrs, and nymphs; and within a short time, singing to guitar accompaniment became immensely popular.

The rise of the battuto, or strummed style, was decisive in the guitar's success. It enabled anyone to master the instrument in a perfectly functional way. Long before the turn of the century, a notational system had been developed, called cifras in Spain and alfabeto in Italy (literally the ABC, representing the most elementary principles of guitar playing), in which the chords to be played are indicated in shorthand (see ex. I.1). Once alfabeto notation had taken its definitive form, it was used virtually unaltered for more than a century. According to James Tyler there are more than 250 extant Italian sources with alfabeto, which justifi es the supposition that there must have been many hundreds— if not thousands—of guitar players. The very fi rst instruction book for the fi ve-course guitar, Guitarra Española by Joan Carles Amat from 1596, was reprinted (with some supplements) until the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the popular collections of simple dances of Pietro Millioni were also reissued time after time.