© ErN 127, entry Dec 2007
The Guitar in Naples
The instrument
The
modern acoustic guitar*
The
origins of the guitar are beyond the scope of this
article, but it is fair to say that by the time the
Spanish opened the first music conservatories in the
mid-1500s in their vice-realm of Naples, the guitar
—recognizable as such even to modern eyes— was already in
existence. Generally, the instrument was "four-course." A
"course" is a tuning; thus, "four-course" might mean four
strings, tuned separately, but it might also mean eight
strings, with each pair of strings doubling a note.
Illustrations from the mid-1500s show guitars to have the
familiar central sound hole encircled by the ornamental
"rose," the lute-type bridge and frets, and a rounded,
ribbed back. The "bouts" —the curves that give the "hour
glass" shape to a modern guitar (illustration, right)—
were, however, much less pronounced.
The four-course guitar
was replaced by the five-course instrument —very
popular for the sophisticated dance and instrumental music
of the Baroque— and then by the modern six-course guitar,
in common use by the year 1800. Single strings came to be
preferred, as well, for various musical reasons such as
clarity of sound, and technical reasons such as ease of
plucking. Also, by the late 1700s older tablature notation* was superseded by modern
staff notation for the guitar. The change to
single-strings as well as the change in notation
facilitated polyphonic part-writing and presaged the
future of the guitar as a solo instrument.
* An acoustical (or acoustic) guitar is a "natural" guitar -- that is, made of wood, and not amplified (except by playing near a microphone, if necessary). The terms "acoustic/acoustical" are also used for other instruments, such as the piano. It is in distinction to an "electric guitar, electric piano," etc. (the latter also called, simply, a "keyboard").
* Tablature notation is essentially a fingering chart, showing players which strings to stop for a certain note or chord; this, as opposed to modern staff notation, in which a note marked on the staff indicates the actual pitch. Tablature notation is still in widespread use among folk and folk/popular guitarists. Jazz guitarists typically read chord symbols --C7, for example-- indicating, in this case, that the chord to be played employs the notes C, E, G, and B-flat, though not indicating any of the many fingering possibilities. This, too, is a tablature notation. We hear the term "tabs" now, as in "send me the tabs for that" -- that is, "I don't read music. Show me where to put my fingers.")
The
change in musical styles from Baroque to Classical
was probably a major reason for the development of the
six-single-string instrument, a louder, clearer instrument
than its predecessor and one more suitable as a solo
instrument. By 1785,
guitar makers in Naples were building instruments
specifically intended for six single strings. In Naples,
the most prominent luthier of the late 1700s was
Giovanni Battista Fabbricatore. A number of his guitars,
including a 6-string/6-course instrument from 1785,
exist in various collections around the world. A
Neapolitan guitarist, Federico Moretti (1760-1838), says
in his method Principios para tocar la guitarra de
seis ordenes (published in Spain in 1799):
...although I use the guitar of seven single strings, it seemed more appropriate to accommodate these principles to six courses, that being what is generally played in Spain: this same reason obliged me to publish them in Italian in 1792, adapted for the guitar with five strings, because at that time the one with six was not known in Italy.
[Note, however, that, in
spite of that passage, the 6-string instrument was being
built in Naples
before 1792.]
Besides the number of
strings, other innovations in guitar construction occurred
between the late 1700s and mid-1800s: the use of brass
frets (instead of tie-gut) on the fingerboard, changes in
the bridge, tuning gears (instead of the violin pegs that
are still used on the Flamenco guitar, for example) and,
finally, wider and more pronounced bouts. All of these
produced, essentially, the modern classical guitar.
[An excellent article on this subject is: "Innovation and the Development of the Modern Six-string Guitar" by Darryl Martin in The Galpin Society Journal
The
Naples Conservatories
Picasso's Pulcinella with Guitar
The music
conservatories in Naples go back to the mid-1500s
when the Spanish rulers set up schools to train young
musicians on the premises of four monasteries in the city:
Santa Maria di Lorento, Pietà
dei Turchini, Sant'Onofrio a Capuana,
and I Poveri di Gesù Cristo. They not
only trained young children in church music, but,
eventually, became a 'feeder system' into the world of
commercial music once that opened up in the early
1600s. Beginning in 1806, a decade
of French rule in Naples drastically changed
monastic life; religious orders, themselves, were closed
and the monastic music schools were merged and moved to
the premises of San Sebastiano, itself a church and
ex-monastery. In 1826, that consolidated
conservatory was moved to the present site, the
ex-monastery of San Pietro a Maiella.
Was guitar taught? Yes. In spite of Sebastian de Corrarubias Oroco's opinion (in 1611) that "the guitar is not worth more than a cowbell; it is so easy to play that there is not a single farm boy who is not a guitarist." [cited in The Word of Guitars, Christian Seguret, Charwell Books, Edison, NJ 1999], the guitar developed as a serious instrument during the Baroque and afterwards.
In Naples, the existence of major music conservatories was the driving force behind the luthiers' craft. the making of stringed instruments, bowed such as the violin, as well as plucked or strummed such as mandolin and guitar. Besides G. Fabbricatore (mentioned above), other well-known luthiers of the 18th and 19th centuries in Naples were Vinaccia, Filano, Calace, and Alessandro Gagliano, an apprentice of Antonio Stradivarius in Cremona and largely responsible for bringing to Naples that part of the luthier's craft dedicated specifically to violin making. The popularity even abroad of such names as Calace for mandolins and guitars continued well into the 20th century. The current state of the luthier's craft in Naples is somewhat nebulous. It was greatly disrupted by the events of WW II and is still recovering; to the extent that it thrives at all, it is driven by the presence of new names as yet untested on the international market.
[Also see: Tradizione, arte e folclore: il caso della liuteria napoletana, by Maria Principia Buonadonna, or search JEL (Journal of Economic Literature) code: L69-018.]
Performers
19th-century caricature of
Giuliani
Moretti
(mentioned above) lived and worked in Spain and was
the most influential of the early-l9th-century
guitarists; he had a great influence on later composers
for the instrument, such as Ferdinand Sor.
Other well-known
guitarists and composers for the instrument from Naples
include Ferdinando Carulli (1770-1841),
regarded as the leading Italian guitarist of his day. He
lived and settled in Paris and enjoyed great success as
a composer, performer and even instrument maker, helping
to build the first 10-stringed instrument (four of which
are "sympathetic"; that is, they vibrate to enrich the
sound but are not plucked or strummed) of the kind made
famous more recently by Narciso Yepes. Carulli was the author of the first
complete classical guitar method and was a prolific
composer for guitar, writing over 400 works for the
instrument.
Another well-known guitarist from southern Italy was Mauro Giuliani (born in 1781 in Bari, died in Naples in 1829). He was originally a cellist, but took up the guitar and emigrated to the north, settling in Vienna, where he was billed as the "world's greatest guitarist." He eventually returned to Naples, where he worked for the patronage of the royal house of Naples. Giuliani was also a prolific composer for the guitar, turning out abut 200 compositions many of which remain standard items in the repertoire for the instrument. Among his most important works are the concertos for guitar and orchestra, opus 30, 36 and 70; a series of fantasies, opus 119-124, called the "Rossinianes," several sonatas for violin and guitar, a quintet, some duets for voice and guitar; he also wrote an instruction method.
Grain of salt sociology
Some recent sources have speculated on why so many musicians left Naples to work elsewhere. For example, in "The Role of Italy in the Early History of the Classic Guitar", Guitar Review, no.34 (1971), 1-6 , the author, T.F. Heck, seems to take at face value a passage he cites from a German newspaper from 1805, the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, which says:
[Another] reason for going north was the political turmoil wreaked by Napoleon in Italy. It so destroyed social order that the conservatories were all but forced to close. This did not augur well for instrumental music, including the guitar: In the past ten years a frightful revolution has upset everything. When you consider that devastating wars and their usual, sad consequences have forcibly torn apart this nation, which in times of peace dreams serenely, and which requires that calm, that serene reverie, not only for its existence, but much more for its cultural and artistic activities, then you can hardly blame the Neapolitans!
The German music writer who
concocted that passage in 1805 was living in a
typically German fantasy world about Italy. (He had
probably just read Goethe's little ditty that
idealizes Italy as the "land where lemons bloom.")
First, he (the journalist, but I'm not so sure
about Goethe, either) conflates and confuses "Italy"
with the Kingdom of Naples and, second, there were
no times of peace and serene dreams in Naples, even
before Napoleon! The great Naples conservatories
survived the horrible wars and plagues of the 1500s,
1600s and early 1700s, producing entire genres of
music, such as the Comic Opera,
and great musicians such as A. Scarlatti and
Pergolesi, who lived and composed right through the
demise of the Spanish empire (and, thus, the wrenching
change of power in Naples) and the subsequent
cataclysmic Wars of the Spanish Succession. Besides,
the very idea that Italian art and culture flourish
only in times of "serene reverie" would be news to
Michelangelo and Leonardo!
In any event, the "...devastating wars and their usual, sad consequences..." did not really apply to the Kingdom of Naples. In the face of the imminent French invasion, the Bourbon monarchy fled without a fight to Sicily in 1805. Naples, under French rule from 1806-14, was not marked by the Napoleonic turmoil of the rest of Europe; the social order was not destroyed; as a matter of fact, the kingdom was marked by progress in the arts and sciences. The Neapolitan conservatories were consolidated into a single institution—a step forward, not back. It may be, goes more plausible speculation, that the lack of an organized music publishing industry in the late 1700s in Naples drove composers away, or that the delicate acoustics of the guitar did not fare well in the large opera houses springing up all over Italy, or that the instrument could not compete with the overwhelming, all-popular sound of opera; thus, guitarists sought appreciation in the smaller spaces of northern chambers and drawing rooms.
Today
Currently, the San Pietro
a Maiella music conservatory in Naples has two
instructors for the classical guitar and provides a
complete course of study for the instrument. There are
about one-thousand students at the Naples conservatory
(comparable to other conservatories in large Italian
cities). Of that number, a handful study classical
guitar. That's not many, but it's a tough row to hoe. If
you study violin and are not quite Joshua Bell or Itzhak
Perlman, you'll still make a living as second fiddle—or
even first—in some orchestra. But
there ARE no second-guitar chairs in orchestras. There
are not even first guitar
chairs. If you decide to be a classical guitarist, you
have one option: be a soloist; thus, you have to be not
only very talented, but obsessed. Those who graduate
with diplomas in guitar performance at the Naples
conservatory must give a one-hour graduate recital that
includes music by Bach, Giuliani, Paganini,
Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Villa-Lobos, as well as their
own transcriptions of music originally written in
tablature for forerunners of the modern guitar, such as
the lute and vihuela. Other exams include performances
of contemporary music and test the candidate's knowledge
of the history of the instrument.
The
library of the Naples conservatory has an extensive
collection of early manuscripts of guitar music; the
museum has a selection of historical instruments,
including a few guitars, one spectacular 9-course,
18-string mandola (photo, above) and—I have to mention
this, although it has nothing to do with the guitar—the
only surviving harp made by none other than Stradivarius
(image, below).
Hornbostel–Sachs (or Sachs–Hornbostel [hereafter HS] is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, first published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Ethnology Journal) in 1914 and since revised. It is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments by those who study musical instruments). It is to musical instruments what the Dewey Decimal System is to books (i.e. a hierarchical classification system built around ten main classes.) Similarly, the HS's main classes are structured into ten hierarchical divisions, each having ten divisions of increasing specificity. It describes any musical instrument in the world depending on how the sound is produced, i.e. is it blown like a trumpet? struck like a drum? bowed like a violin? etc. One of the instruments shown here is described in words as a "hammered dulcimer sounded by hammers worked by the musician"; the HS classification is 314.122-4. Hornbostel and Sachs based their system on one devised in the late 19th century by Victor-Charles Mahillon, curator of musical instruments at the Brussels Conservatory. Note the similarity in the numbering of the dulcimer and the harp (HS 322–5), described in words as a "Composite chordophone sounded by the bare fingers". The guitars shown here are "Composite chordophones sounded by the bare fingers" and, depending on the number of strings, close to HS 322–5. This system works for all instruments in the world (!), even the "oddball" (for us) ones such as the sitar (not shown), described in words as "a "necked bowl lute composite plucked stringed chordophone sounded with a plectrum)". That is HS 321.321.
Easy, huh?
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