What is your tuning? This question is asked whenever you show up with a baroque guitar. It almost seems as if there are only two major issues with regard to this instrument: what role has it played in basso continuo and the question of appropriate stringing, with or without low bass strings (bourdons). The impatient reader may be tempted to jump to chapter 6 immediately, to find out about my views on the latter. However, as will be argued in chapter 5 (on counterpoint), we should know more about the use of the guitar in different musical genres in order to understand the advantages of having—or not having—the bass register, provided by the bourdons, for the realization of contrapuntal textures. This issue seems particularly relevant for thoroughbass accompaniment.

My activities as a performer on the baroque guitar and my concern for its continued identity confusion have encouraged me to begin practice-based research into the Italian solo repertory and alfabeto song. Probably the most characteristic feature of seventeenth-century Italian guitar music is the mixing of two distinct methods of playing: chord strumming (battuto) and the plucked lute style (pizzicato). I supposed that exploring the background of this dichotomy would provide a key to understanding the development of the repertoire and how it is notated. Moreover, I hoped to learn more about the upward mobility of the popular guitar dances (or dance songs) that became part of the sphere of “high art” music. An obvious example is the chaconne, supposedly imported from the New World. It appeared in Europe around 1600, as a simple four-chord progression on the guitar that can be found in countless Italian guitar books and manuscripts. About a century later, in 1735, the chaconne formed the grand orchestral fi nale of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes—bringing back the dance, symbolically, to its assumed origins. But how, exactly, would the original dance have sounded, in the hands of a guitarist from the popular tradition? And why, for example, is there no music notation at all for the “Gittars Chacony” in the score of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas?

I started writing this book very early in the twenty-first century.