The Guitar in America offers a history of the instrument from America\'s late Victorian period to the Jazz Age. The narrative traces America\'s BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late nineteenth-century musical and com-mercial movement dedicated to introducing these instru-ments into America\'s elite musical establishments. Using surviving BMG magazines, the author details an almost unknown history of the guitar during the movement\'s heyday, tracing the guitar\'s transformation from a refined parlor instrument to a mainstay in jazz and popular music. In the process, he not only introduces musicians (including numerous women guitarists) who led the movement, but also examines new techniques and instruments. Chapters consider the BMG movement\'s impact on jazz and popular music, the use of the guitar to promote attitudes towards women and minorities, and the challenges foreign guitarists such as Miguel Llobet and Andres Segovia presented to America\'s musicians. This volume opens a new chapter on the guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and documenting how banjoists and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in an effort to raise social and cultural standing. At the same time, the book considers the BMG community within America\'s larger musical scene, examining its efforts as manifestations of this country\'s uneasy coupling of musical art and commerce. Jeffrey J. Noonan, associate professor of music at Southeast Missouri State University, has performed professionally on classical guitar, Renaissance lute, Baroque guitar, and theorbo for over twenty-five years. His articles have appeared in Soundboard and NYlon Review .

Reunion is the awkward, tender meeting between a father and daughter after nearly twenty years separation. Dark Pony is the telling of a mythical story by a father to his young daughter as they drive home in the evening.

In the early years of the twentieth century, O.G. Sonneck, the father of American musicology, decried the state of musical bibliography in this country, encouraging musical scholars to dedicate themselves to preserving, cataloging, and promoting the use of America’s musical ephemera, especially newspapers and magazines. Despite his century-old calls, much work in this area remains undone. This volume responds to Sonneck’s call for action by creating a bibliography of periodicals that document the use and place of the guitar in a little-known segment of America’s musical culture in the final decades of the nineteenth century through the first third of the twentieth century. Between 1880 and the mid-1930s, a unique musical movement grew and flourished in this country. Focused on the promotion of so-called “plectral instruments,” this movement promoted the banjo, the mandolin, and the guitar as cultivated instruments on a par with the classical violin or piano. The Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar (BMG) community consisted of instrument manufacturers, music publishers, professional teachers and composers, and amateur students. While some professional soloists achieved national recognition, the performing focus of the movement was ensemble work, with bands of banjos, mandolins and guitars ranging from quartets and quintets (modeled on the violin-family string ensembles) to festival orchestras of up to 400 players (mimicking the late romantic symphony orchestra). The repertoire of most ensembles included popular dances of the day as well as light classics, but more ambitious ensembles tackled Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and even Wagner. Although this movement straddled both popular and cultivated (classical) music-making, its elitist pretensions contributed to its demise in the wake of the explosive growth of modern American popular music linked to Tin Pan Alley or the blues. While the movement’s heyday spanned the early years of audio recording, only a handful of active BMG performers made recordings. As a result few musical scholars are aware of the BMG movement and its contribution to American musical culture, especially its influence on the physical and technical development of America’s instrument, the guitar The movement did, however, leave extensive traces of itself in periodicals produced by manufacturing and publishing concerns. Beginning in 1882, the leadership of the BMG movement fell to the publishers, editors, and contributors from these promotional journals, which were dedicated to the “interests of Banjoists, Mandolinists and Guitarists” While advertising dominated the pages of most of these periodicals, nearly all offered product and publication reviews, historical surveys, biographical sketches, and technical advice. In addition, the BMG magazines not only documented performances with reviews and program lists but also contained musical scores for solo instruments and plucked-string ensembles. These magazines are the primary sources which document this vibrant expression of America’s musical life. While one or two of the BMG magazines have been known by guitar scholars, most have not seen the light of day in decades. Similarly, a few of the leading guitar figures of the BMG movement—principally William Foden, Vahdah Olcott-Bickford, and George C. Krick—have been acknowledged and documented but many more remain completely anonymous. This bibliography offers access to the periodicals which help document the story of the guitar in America’s progressive era—a story of tradition and transformation—as lived and told by the guitar’s players, teachers, manufacturers, composers, and fans in the BMG movement. The bibliography consists of two large sections. The first contains a chronological list of articles, news items, advertisements, illustrations, and photographs as well as a list of musical works for guitar published in the BMG magazines. The second section of the bibliography is a series of indices which link names and subjects to the lists. With nearly 5500 entries and over 100 pages of indices, this bibliography offers researchers access to a musical world that has been locked away on library shelves for the past century.

Inventing the American Guitar is the first book to describe the early history of American guitar design in detail. It tells the story of how a European instrument was transformed into one with all of the design and construction features that define the iconic American flat-top guitar. This transformation happened within a mere 20 years, a remarkably brief period. The person who dominates this history is C. F. Martin Sr., America's first major guitar maker and the founder of the Martin Guitar Company, which continues to produce outstanding flat-top guitars today. After emigrating from his native Saxony to New York in 1833, Martin quickly established a guitar making business, producing instruments modeled after those of his mentor, Johann Stauffer of Vienna. By the time he moved his family and business to rural Pennsylvania in 1839, Martin had absorbed and integrated the influence of Spanish guitars he had seen and heard in New York. In Pennsylvania, he evolved further, inventing a uniquely American guitar that was fully developed before the outbreak of the Civil War. Inventing the American Guitar traces Martin's evolution as a craftsman and entrepreneur and explores the influences and experiments that led to his creation of the American guitar that is recognized and played around the world today. To learn more about the history of the Martin guitar, click here to view the video and article from BBC, How Martin Guitars Became an 'American Stratavarius'.

The guitar's entrance into American culture began in the early 1800s, introduced primarily by visiting and immigrant Spanish guitarists. Many of these newly arrived Spaniards exerted great influence on the guitar's development in 19th century America. the works in this book contain the compositions and arrangements of eight noted 19th century Hispanic American guitarist/composers with an emphasis on their works that reflect Latin themes or rhythms. Rounding out this anthology are dance forms such as the Habanera, Jota, Cachucha, Sevillaño, Spanish Mazurka, and other Spanish dance related works along with extended concert pieces such as Theme and Variations, Serenades, Polonaises and a delightful arrangement of the Celebrated Spanish Retreat, a programmatic work with an unusual "C" tuning and novel harmonic effects crafted to imitate the bugles, horns and drums as heard on the battlefield. the book features twenty-one solos and two duets which range in difficulty from easy to advanced. an extensive and well researched text along with photos and a companion recording by acclaimed guitarist/scholar Douglas Back help to make this a landmark book.

This superb collection features 31 solo guitar settings of a colorful spectrum of music from Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. the music is derived largely from 19th and 20th century piano literature. While many anonymously composed selections are included here, most of these tunes were written by professional musicians who happened to be pianists, band directors or arrangers. Typical of the period, some orchestral scores appears as piano reductions, which Professor Barreiro has also used as a source for his guitar transcriptions. All of these selections are presented in standard notation and tablature with historical and performance notes. A companion CD is included featuring 16 selections from the book performed by Barreiro.

A fascinating exploration of the relationship between American culture and music as defined by musicians, scholars, and critics from around the world. Music has been the cornerstone of popular culture in the United States since the beginning of our nation's history. From early immigrants sharing the sounds of their native lands to contemporary artists performing benefit concerts for social causes, our country's musical expressions reflect where we, as a people, have been, as well as our hope for the future. This four-volume encyclopedia examines music's influence on contemporary American life, tracing historical connections over time. Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories That Shaped Our Culture demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between this art form and our society. Entries include singers, composers, lyricists, songs, musical genres, places, instruments, technologies, music in films, music in political realms, and music shows on television.

This is a well written, informative study of the solo and rhythmic guitar styles found in Latin America. Featured is music from Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. Most of the compositions are in E major or E minor and all are scored in notation and tablature.

First published in 2001 and now updated and expanded, History of the American Guitar begins in New York City in the 1830s with the arrival of Christian Martin, from Germany, to set up the Martin company. From that historic moment, the book takes readers on a fascinating and comprehensive visual tour of U.S. guitar history. Over 75 brand names are represented, with more than 300 guitars photographed in stunning detail, including Bigsby, Danelectro, D'Angelico, D'Aquisto, Ditson, Dobro, Dyer, Epiphone, Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, James Trussart, Kay, Maccaferri, Martin, Micro-Frets, Mosrite, Oahu, Ovation, Regal, Rickenbacker, Stella, Stromberg, Suhr, Taylor, Vega, Washburn, Wilkanowski, and many more. The interrelated stories of the guitar, mandolin, and banjo are mixed seamlessly with the history of the diverse American music that grew and prospered with these instruments, from country to blues, from jazz to rock. The bulk of the instruments illustrated were part of the celebrated collection of Scott Chinery, photographed before Chinery's untimely death and the subsequent break-up of his unique collection. The book presents every important episode in the story of the American luthier's art and is an unparalleled resource for every musician, collector, and music fan.