(Fr. guisterne, guitarre, guiterne, guiterre, quinterne, quitaire, quitarre; Ger. Quinterne; It. chitarino, chitarra; Sp. guitarra).
A short-necked lute of the Middle Ages outwardly similar to the 16th-century Mandore. Like its relative the lute, it had a rounded back but was much smaller, and it had no clear division between the body and neck. This lute-shaped gittern (or ‘guitar’ – the two words were then synonymous) was displaced in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Renaissance Guitar, which combined the small size of the gittern with the body outline of the much larger vihuela. Thus the medieval gittern bore much the same relationship to the lute as the Renaissance guitar did to the vihuela. It has since become customary to call the medieval instrument ‘gittern’ and the later one ‘guitar’, a useful but artificial distinction.
Confusion over the identity of the gittern has existed since the 19th century. It has been referred to, inaccurately, as the mandore, mandora or mandola (an instrument with a different tuning which became common only around 1570); and the name ‘gittern’ has wrongly been given to the Citole, because the latter’s outline resembled that of the (vihuela-shaped) guitar (see Wright, 1977). Consequently, many modern works refer to representations of gitterns as mandoras, and to those of citoles as gitterns.
All the above names for the gittern derive ultimately from the Greek ‘kithara’ via the Arabic ‘qītārā’. The Arabic form gave ‘chitarra’ in Italian and ‘guitarra’ in Spanish. The French forms include ‘quitarre’ (from Arabic or Italian), ‘gitere’ (perhaps from Catalan), and ‘quitaire’, which became ‘qui(n)terne’ (by confusion with the unrelated Latin word quinterna, meaning ‘fivefold’). By analogy, the form ‘guiterne’ was created, and this was the standard word until the 16th century. ‘Guitar(r)e’ (probably from Spanish) also occurs, but is rare. The English and German names were borrowed from French.
When the lute shape was displaced by that of the vihuela there was no immediate change of name: ‘guiterre’ became popular in French alongside ‘guiterne’ in the 16th century; and both were finally displaced by ‘guitare’ in the 17th century (probably because of Spanish influence), with the English and German names following suit. The Italian and Spanish names have not changed since the Middle Ages.
The back, neck and pegbox are usually made of one piece of wood, as in the 15th-century gittern (hitherto called a mandora) in the Wartburg Collection at Eisenach (see Hellwig, 1974). More rarely, the back was built up from separate ribs (as on the lute); these types occur from the late 15th century onwards. In all gitterns the body and neck blend in a smooth curve or straight line: unlike the lute, there is no sharp corner. The pegbox makes an angle with the neck of 30°–90° and is usually curved, sometimes into a semicircle (the so-called sickle shape) but often into a short, gently curving arc (fig.1). Some pegboxes, especially in English representations, are straight, like those of lutes (fig.2). However, most types of pegbox terminate in a human or animal head, a feature foreign to the lute.
There are three or four strings (or more commonly pairs of strings), sometimes five in the later 15th century (as in the Eisenach instrument). On some instruments (particularly French and English) the strings pass over a movable bridge and are attached to endpins, one for each course, or to a single pin or button; on others (notably in Spain and Italy) they terminate at a fixed frontal stringholder, as on the lute. Italian and Spanish instruments also show a predilection for multiple soundholes and decorative inlays on the belly and fingerboard. Frets are shown in some good depictions of gitterns (notably Italian paintings: fig.3), but they are absent in many good French and English representations. The use of a quill plectrum seems to have been almost universal.
The gittern probably entered Europe from Arab countries in the second half of the 13th century, along with other round-backed instruments such as the lute and rebec. Sachs stated that the lute is called ‘qītāra’ in North African countries west of Egypt, and Farmer suggested that the kaitara, used in Muslim Spain from the 10th century, was a type of lute, adding that a diminutive of the same word, ‘kuwaitira’, is still used for a small lute in the Maghrib. Thus it seems likely that the gittern came from the Arabs of the western Mediterranean (for a summary of the evidence see Burzik, 381–5). Tinctoris (De inventione, c1487) called the gittern ‘the instrument invented by the Catalans’. He may have meant that they modified it in some way to create a ‘European’ type distinct from the Arab one. This is one possible explanation of a reference to ‘guitarra morisca’ and ‘guitarra latina’ (‘Moorish’ and ‘Latin’ guitar) by the Arcipreste de Hita (Libro de buen amor, c1330), and of references to similarly named instruments in Machaut’s writings and in records of the French court of 1355–70. Although the differences between these two types are not known, it can reasonably be assumed that the two gitterns illustrated on f.104r of the Cantigas de Santa María (fig.4) are of the ‘Latin’ variety, since the players’ dress implies that they are not Arabs. However, it has been suggested that another instrument in the same manuscript, with oval belly, long neck and circular (ff.133r, 140v) or sickle-shaped pegbox (ff.46v, 147r), is the guitarra morisca (see Citole, fig.3): none of the players is dressed like an Arab, however, and the instrument differs considerably from the gittern in that it has a long neck clearly demarcated from the body and (on ff.46v and 140v) a raised fingerboard extending on to the belly. There is no more reason to call this instrument a guitar than to call it a plucked fiddle (vihuela de peñola).
The earliest datable references to the gittern occur in French literature from around 1270 onwards, but depictions become common only after 1300. Johannes de Grocheo, in his treatise De musica (c1300), called it ‘quitarra sarracenica’ (‘Saracen guitar’), which suggests it was still a foreign novelty in France. This impression is strengthened by the great variety of its French names, which grew fewer as the instrument became common. In England depictions and references do not become frequent until well after 1300: one looks in vain for gitterns among the instruments appearing in the finely illustrated manuscripts such as the Queen Mary Psalter that were written in the first two decades of the 14th century.
During the 14th century the gittern gained increasing popularity. Whereas there was only one gitarer among the 92 musicians named in the accounts for the Feast of Westminster in 1306, the Duke of Brittany is said (in the Grandes chroniques de France) to have had in his company ‘seven guiterne players, and he himself, so they say, began to play the eighth guiterne’ when he left Brest Castle for England in 1348. By then the gittern seems to have ousted its rival, the citole, and to have become enormously popular not only among minstrels but also among the increasing number of amateur musicians of all classes. Small, portable and doubtless easy to play, it seems to have been frequently used in serenading and in visiting taverns, activities that often went hand-in-hand; it is mentioned in this connection in several French and English poems of the period 1350–1410. Machaut (Prise d’Alexandrie, c1367) mentioned ‘guiternes dont on joue par ces tavernes’ (‘gitterns which are played in taverns’), and Chaucer, in three of the Canterbury Tales, referred to the gittern being played by people who frequent taverns. The parish clerk Absalom in The Miller’s Tale is a typical example:
In
twenty manere coude he trippe and daunce
After the scole of Oxenforde tho,
And with his legges casten to and fro,
And pleyen songes on a small rubible;
Ther-to he song som-tyme a loud quinible;
And as wel coude he pleye on his giterne.
In al the toun nas brewhous ne taverne
That he ne visited with his solas,
Ther any gaylard tappestere was.
Accompanying himself on the gittern, he sings a serenade to the carpenter’s wife:
He
singeth in his vois gentil and smal,
‘Now, dere lady, if thy wille be,
I preye yow that ye wol rewe on me’,
Ful wel acordaunt to his giterninge.
This association with taverns and serenading is also reflected in French legal documents of the same period concerning the brawls and murders which sometimes ensued, making it obvious that gitterns were common household objects. They are also found in inventories of noble households, such as one belonging to the French King Charles V dated 1373 which includes four gitterns, one in ivory and another decorated with silver and enamel. Another example of the gittern’s popularity can be seen in the carvings in the nave of Winchester Cathedral (built 1346–1404), where no fewer than seven of the 21 instruments depicted are gitterns.
In the 15th century the gittern was gradually eclipsed by the lute, which appears with increasing frequency in iconography. There is often confusion between them, both in iconography (it is not always possible to distinguish lutes from gitterns in the less accurate representations) and in documentary references to lute players as gitterners (for example, the celebrated Pietrobono, whose lute-playing was praised by Tinctoris, was usually known by the epithet dal chitarin(o)).
By around 1487 Tinctoris could remark: ‘The ghiterra is used most rarely, because of the thinness of its sound. When I heard it in Catalonia, it was being used much more often by women, to accompany love songs, than by men’. He also gave the only information that survives on the gittern’s tuning, namely that it was strung like a (four-course) lute, that is, with the intervals 4th–3rd–4th. By this time the vihuela-shaped guitar had begun to appear. It must be this instrument, rather than the vihuela itself, which Tinctoris described in the following quote, since it is much smaller than the lute:
that [instrument], for example, invented by the Spanish, which both they and the Italians call the viola, but the French the demi-luth. This viola differs from the lute in that the lute is much larger and tortoise-shaped, while the viola is flat, and in most cases curved inwards on each side.
It is interesting that Tinctoris did not use the name ‘guitar’ for this new Spanish instrument, but that soon became the practice as the lute-shaped gittern was abandoned in the 16th century.
The gittern and the guitar must have existed side by side for a considerable time, the older instrument steadily losing ground to the newer one. The instruments described as ‘quintern’ and illustrated in the treatises of Sebastian Virdung (Musica getutscht, 1511) and Martin Agricola (Ein kurtz deudsche Musica, 1528; Musica instrumentalis deudsch, 1529, enlarged 5/1545) are of the old variety. But already in 1530 there was a ‘gyterneur suivant le mode espagnole’ (‘guitarist in the Spanish fashion’) in the retinue of Emperor Charles V. Around 1550 a spate of guitar music was published, almost certainly for the new instrument. However, references to the guitar or gittern as a round-backed instrument or small lute are found in the later 16th century, the 17th and even the 18th, suggesting that the lute-shaped guitar was still occasionally used.
SachsH
K. Geiringer: ‘Der Instrumentenname “Quinterne” und die mittelalterlichen Bezeichnungen der Gitarre, Mandola und des Colascione’, AMw, vi (1924), 103–10
V. Denis: De muziekinstrumenten in de Nederlanden en in Italië naar hun afbeelding in de 15e-eeuwsche kunst (Antwerp, 1944), 112
A. Baines: ‘Fifteenth-Century Instruments in Tinctoris’s De inventione et usu musicae’, GSJ, iii (1950), 19–26
F. Lesure: ‘La facture instrumentale à Paris au XVIe siècle’, GSJ, vii (1954), 11–52
H.G. Farmer: ‘The Music of Islam’, NOHM, i (1957), 421–78
F.V. Grunfeld: The Art and Times of the Guitar (New York, 1969/R)
F. Hellwig: ‘Lute-Making in the Late 15th and 16th Century’, LSJ, xvi (1974), 24–38
H. Turnbull: The Guitar from the Renaissance to the Present Day (New York and London, 1974)
L. Lockwood: ‘Pietrobono and the Instrumental Tradition at Ferrara in the Fifteenth Century’, RIM, x (1975), 115–33
L. Wright: ‘The Medieval Gittern and Citole: a Case of Mistaken Identity’, GSJ, xxx (1977), 8–42
J.M. Ward: ‘Sprightly & Cheerful Musick: Notes on the Cittern, Gittern and Guitar in 16th- and 17th-Century England’, LSJ, xxi (1979–81) [whole issue]
M. Burzik: Quellenstudien zu europäischen Zupfinstrumentenformen (Kassel, 1994)
LAURENCE WRIGHT