or E to suit the tessitura of the singer being
accompanied. Apart from Geminiani, who printed tablature, the music was written
on one treble staff, sounding an octave lower than written – as with the modern
Spanish guitar.The
most common present-day name of a type of plucked instrument popular in England
from about 1750 to 1810, between the decline of the lute and the arrival of the
six-string Spanish guitar (the five-course guitar was not popular in England in
the 18th century). In common with the Cittern it has metal frets and a
movable bridge over which wire strings pass to pins at the bottom of the ribs,
but its other structural features and triadic tuning are distinct. In its
heyday it was called the ‘guitar’ or ‘guittar’, ‘cetra’ or ‘citra’, the term
‘English guitar’ being applied only from about 1780 when the need arose to
distinguish it from the Spanish guitar. It was called guitare angloise
in France between about 1770 and 1780 to distinguish it from the guitare
allemande (see below) and guitare espagnole. Another developmental
stage between the English guitar and the cittern may be the ‘bell guitterne’
described by Talbot (c1695, GB-Och Mus.1187; see Cithrinchen). The instrument has a flat
or slightly convex back and metal strings. Its six courses are tuned c–e–g–c'–e'–g',
the bottom two being single-strung and the upper four double, a total of ten
strings. The lower three courses are overspun. There are normally 12 brass
frets (spanning one octave) on the fingerboard, and the most common size of the
instrument has a sounding string length of 42 cm. In the 1760s J.N. Preston of
London invented watch-key tuning (fig.1), which was
better suited to the instrument’s short metal strings than the original peg
tuning (fig.2). Dublin-made instruments of the 1760s
often use the worm-gear tuning later adopted by the Spanish guitar. On many
instruments there are holes drilled through the fingerboard between the first
four frets for a ‘moving-bridge’, i.e. capo tasto (normally made of
ivory or ebony), fixed with a wing-nut and a bolt, which facilitates
transposition from the C-tuning upwards to D, E or E to suit the tessitura of the singer being
accompanied. Apart from Geminiani, who printed tablature, the music was written
on one treble staff, sounding an octave lower than written – as with the modern
Spanish guitar.
The English guitar's popularity reflected the desire of the wealthy class to play a simple musical instrument. Burney recounted (in ‘Guitarra’, Rees's Cyclopaedia, 1802–19) how its vogue about 1765 was so great among all ranks of people as nearly to ruin the harpsichord makers; but Jacob Kirkman retrieved the situation by giving cheap guitars to milliner girls and street ballad singers, thereby shaming the richer ladies into returning to the harpsichord.
The repertory of the English guitar consists principally of solo arrangements of theatre songs and dance-tunes. The best music is found in a few trios with violin and cello by Felice Giardini, duos with cello by Francesco Geminiani (both published in 1760), a sonata with violin (c1770), possibly by J.C. Bach, and sonatas and duos, by Rudolf Straube. The principal tutor was by Robert Bremner (Edinburgh, 1758); it says the guitar should be held in the lap, preferably steadied by a ribbon over the left shoulder; finger technique follows that of the lute: the right-hand little finger rests on the bridge close to the first string (though this detail was omitted from later editions), and plucking is done with the fingertips of the other fingers (not with a plectrum); thumb and index-finger technique is extended to include the middle and ring fingers; the tutor also gives instructions for tonal variations (from ponticello to tasto), and ornamentation (the soft and hard ‘shake’ and the ‘beat’).
To help those too lazy to acquire a right-hand technique, during the 1770s a certain Smith patented a key-box housing six keys similar to those of a piano, which when depressed caused leather-covered hammers to strike down onto the strings. In 1783 Christian Claus of London patented a more sophisticated ‘keyed guitar’, whose mechanism was housed inside the sound box instead of being poised above the strings; the hammers struck upwards through holes in the soundhole rose. This type of instrument was called a ‘piano forte guitar’ by Longman & Broderip in 1787. From 1798 Edward Light developed other instruments based on the English guitar (see Harp-lute (ii)).
In
France in the 1770s the seven-course cistre or guitare allemande
was comparable to the English guitar (the name guitare allemande, i.e.
German guitar, may possibly indicate, however, that the instrument was modelled
on German cithrinchens, particularly those made by Joachim Tielke of Hamburg).
Charles Pollet printed a method for it about 1775, which gives the tuning as E–A–d–e–a–c
'–e'. This A major
tuning had been used in England, but only in the 1757 and 1762 publications of
G.B. Marella. Both the English guitar and the guitare allemande (which
was probably the instrument used by the Swedish singer C.M. Bellman to
accompany himself) have a modern descendant in the guitarra portuguesa,
still played in Portugal.
R.B. Armstrong: Musical Instruments, ii (Edinburgh, 1908)
M. de Sampayo Ribeiro: As guitarras de Alcácer e a guitarra portuguesa (Lisbon, 1936)
P. Coggin: ‘“This easy and agreable Instrument”: a History of the English Guittar’, EMc, xv (1987), 204–18
A. Klein: ‘Die English Guitar: vom Hofinstrument zum Klimperkasten’, Das Musikinstrumente, xl/7 (1991), 13–16
ROBERT SPENCER, IAN HARWOOD