and the baroque guitar CRAIG

Guitar chords with a flurry of strummed strings sonorities we gard as commonplace revolutionized the sound of music at the 1500s and opened up a new universe of musical thought in Western Melody and counterpoint had reigned supreme throughout the as the principal musical aspects of a composition, but around role was challenged by a startling new concept harmony. viously music consisted of horizontal melodic threads interwoven lush polyphonic fabric (in which harmonies arose merely as an byproduct), a new school of thought in the seventeenth century work could be governed from the outset by its harmony. Chords starting point of a composition, not an afterthought. The vertical of sounds, as opposed to the horizontal, became paramount. No better represents this radical transformation than the guitar, which the forefront of this aesthetic revolution from the horizontal to the This shift is born out in the guitar's early notational systems, techniques, musical repertoire, and functional roles in society. Equally importantly, the guitar found itself in the center of turmoil and upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1500s, the guitar was a lowbrow instrument that was overshadowed more sophisticated vihuela and lute. But in the 1600s, the guitar was from the culture of the street to that of the royal courts. No longer to such venues as neighborhood barber shops or gypsy camp fires, now found itself equally at home on the operatic stage or in the kings and queens. In the 1700s, traditional European class turned topsy-turvy by scientific advances, a transformed economy industrial technologies as opposed to agricultural production, a middle class, and world explorations that opened the door for the interactions of continents and cultures. Once again, the mercurial always adapting to new situations found itself at the center of this transformed society with its middle-class values and multifarious identities. Nothing better illustrates the shift from the horizontal the vertical around 1600 than guitar notiltion and guitar treatises. [153 ] 10 Radical iImovations) social revolution, 10 Radical iImovations) social revolution, and the baroque guitar