Modern Guitar Research Articles

In his lengthy and thoughtful review of my book, The Early Guitar: a History and Handbook (EM 8/3, pp. 3878), Ephraim Segerman accuses me of making biased omissions. He says that I have omitted to mention that strumming the 4-course guitar was a common practice. He is wrong. On p. 31 of my book in the chapter on the 4-course guitar, I write 'it should be noted here that the 4-course guitar made full use of the strummed style of playing'. As strumming technique for the 4-course guitar is similar to that of the 5-course guitar, I refer the reader to my chapter on strumming technique for the latter. If I exhibit any sort of bias toward lute and vihuela playing technique for the 4-course guitar, it is simply because composers for this instrument did, 99% of its surviving repertoire requiring the player to pluck in the lute and vihuela style. Segerman also accuses me of 'stating or implying that in pizzicato playing, rightand left-hand technique on the 5-course guitar was essentially the same as that on the modern classical guitar'. Given that I spend an entire section of Chapter 6 showing specifically that right-hand technique is radically different from that of the modern guitar, I am really rather mystified as to how Segerman has managed to conclude the opposite. I do imply that left-hand technique is fundamentally similar to that of the modern guitar, and, although I would have liked to have discussed the exceptions to this generalization-such as Sanz and de Murcia-this was a luxury I could ill afford given the imposed space limitations on a book which was meant, after all, to be a practical introduction to a long overlooked instrument and its vast and virtually unknown repertoire. Segerman accuses me of a bias toward Bermudo's information about the tuning of the 4-course guitar, which describes the tuning as having an octave string only on the fourth course, and a bias against the instructions of Phalese, which indicate an octave string on the third course as well as the fourth course. Although I, along with Eph Segerman and Charles Dobson, originally gave credence to the idea of an upper octave string on the third course, I long ago rejected it because the only information it was based on was Phalese's instructions which were not originally guitar instructions at all, but a hastily thrown together reworking of cittern instructions taken from

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