THE GUITAR IN LEXI CA: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GUITAR AS REFLECTED IN GENERAL AND MUSICAL DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS, 1611-1890. A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University by Sean W. Ferguson, B.A., M.L.S. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1992 Master's Examination Committee: Approved by Thomas F. Heck Martha Maas Burdette Green ' fZ4-_ -/)l_L-- Adviser School of Music ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express sincere appreciation to Dr. Thomas Heck for his expertise, encouragement, and insight. His guidance has been invaluable not only during the preparation of this thesis, but throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies at The Ohio State University. Special thanks go also to Drs. Martha Maas and Burdette Green for their helpful comments and assistance. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to express sincere gratitude to my family, especially my parents, William and Cornelia Ferguson, for their unfailing support. ii VITA July 21, 1965 ............................ Born - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1988 . B.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1989 . Library Media Techpical Assistant, Ohio State University Music /Dance Library, Columbus, Ohio 1991 . Master of Library Science, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 1991- 1992 .............................. Assistant to the Coordinator, Kent State University School of Library and Information Science, Columbus Program, Columbus, Ohio Fields of Study Major Field: Music Studies in: Music History and Literature, Music Bibliography iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ii VITA ................................................................ iii LIST OF FIGURES .................................................... v INTRODUCTION ..................................................... 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. Seventeenth Century General Dictionaries: The Four and Five-Course Guitars......................... 9 II. Eighteenth Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias: The Five-Course Guitar and the "English" Guitar........... 16 III. Nineteenth Century Dictionaries and Encyclopedias: The Six-String Guitar ..................................... 42 CONCLUSION . 94 APPENDIXES A. Check.list of Principal Sources . 98 B. Facsimiles of Non-English Language Sources .................. 104 REFERENCES ................................. ; ...................... 139 I iv l LIST OF FIGURES FIGURES PAGE 1. Illustration of the guitar's fingerboard and tablature notation from Diderot and d' Alembert's Encyclopedie. 27 2. Illustrations of plucked string instruments from the Recueil de Planches (vol. 4, Plate III), published as part of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie .................................... 30 3. Illustration of the guitar's fingerboard and tuning from Tans'ur's Elements of Musick................................ 35 4. Illustration of a guitar from the first edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians ............................ 93 v INTRODUCTION The history of the guitar . is intricate and filled with many unresolved questions. Historians of the early decades of the twentieth century made pioneering efforts to investigate a large body of music and eady source material without the benefits of previous research. .. Recent scholarship has contributed notably to the development of a more accurate and well-documented representation of the history of the guitar and the vihuela. Investigations of musical, theoretical, literary, and iconographical sources offer new evidence which has eliminated lacunae and corrected inaccuracies.1 The goal of this thesis is to further expand the body of knowledge concerning the history of the guitar by drawing upon a class of literary sources still largely unexplored by scholars of the instrument: historical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Information provided by these publications can serve to complement and supplement that found in other sources within the spectrum of documentary evidence, be they literary (monographs, periodicals, etc.), theoretical (methods, treatises), pictorial (paintings, etchings, photographs) or musical (scores, manuscripts). It is hoped that this study will enable the guitar's history to be more fully represented, by providing an historical record of contemporary views and perspectives on the technical, physical, and social aspects of its development. The small number of lexicographical sources previously examined in the guitar's literature have almost always been presented 1Meredith Mccutcheon, Guitar and Vihuela: An Annotated Bibliography of the Literature on Their Histozy (New York: Pendragon Press, 1985), xxi. 1 2 incompletely and in isolation, and it is thought that bringing dictionary and encyclopedia entries for the guitar together in the context of a chronological and more comprehensive study will provide a valuable resource. This survey was inspired by and expands work in Thomas F. Beck's dissertation "The Birth of the Classic Guitar and Its Cultivation in Vienna, Reflected in the Career and Compositions of Mauro Giuliani (d. 1829)" (Yale University, 1970). In concluding his opening chapter, Heck presented several entries for the guitar from eighteenth and nineteenth century music dictionaries as "testimonies" which "reaffirm and reinforce the various concepts that serve usefully to articulate the emergence of the classical guitar."2 The present paper builds on Beck's work, surveying entries for the guitar in over thirty dictionaries and encyclopedias, both general and music­ specific, spanning the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Regarding the potential value of these sources for musicological research, Vincent Duckies wrote: Music dictionaries and encyclopedias ... exist in a wide variety of types and are subject to as many different interpretations. A dictionary may emphasize some particular sub-division of the field: church music, theater music, musical instruments, etc. It may be directed toward a particular level of musical interest, projecting a reader image of the research scholar, of the untrained "listener"; or it may attempt to satisfy both. It may be designed to serve as a handbook of musical facts for ready reference, or as a multi-volume repository of musical knowledge. Whatever its intended scope or format may be, every musical dictionary represents some kind of adjustment to the totality of musical information existing within a cultural 2Thomas F. Heck, "The Birth of the Classic Guitar and Its Cultivation in Vienna, Reflected in the Career and Compositions of Mauro Giuliani (d. 1829)" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), 57. - I 3 epoch. This is why music dictionaries furnish prime evidence of the musical mentality of a past era.3 In an article focusing on the musical entries in an early French/English dictionary, Thurston Dart explored the use of general lexicographical sources in studying musical topics. He observed: As sources of information about music and musical instruments, early dictionaries deserve more attention than they have yet to my knowledge received. We must not expect their compilers to have been expert musicians, of course, though it is evident that the more responsible dictionary-makers called upon well-qualified experts for advice. We have to be on our guard, too, against men like Rousseau ... whose built-in prejudices sometimes steered their thoughts well away from the targets they had in mind. But an alert reader can soon catch the special turns of phrase that imply the writer knows what he is writing about; he will also find it worth making a note of what is missed out, as well as of what is included or misunderstood.4 For the researcher examining these sources, Dart's insightful comments frequently ring true. As more than a few of the entries presented in this paper demonstrate, authors of dictionary and encyclopedia entries have not always displayed the standards of expertise, objectivity, and critical thought expected of today's scholars, even if their intentions were of the utmost integrity. Nevertheless, each writer's work represents a part of the historical record which influenced, for better or for worse, the perceptions of their readers and, often, those of the writers who followed them. In a more recent article, which builds on Dart's study by surveying a handful of early French sources, Albert Cohen observes: "What an intriguing 3Vincent Duckles, "Some Observations on Music Lexicography," College Music Symposium 11 (1971) : 115. 4Thurston Dart, "Music and Musical Instruments in Cotgrave's Dictionarie (1611)," Galpin Society Journal 21 (1968) : 70. 4 sourcebook is a dictionary! There, between the covers of a single reference work, one seeks to trace meaning and understanding of the most complex ideas capable of being expressed in language."5 In his conclusion, Cohen notes that "... there is a large literature of untapped source material for the study of music history residing in general dictionaries of language."6 The same could surely be said for historical music dictionaries and encyclopedias as well, as these sources have often been overlooked by modern scholars. Together, the vast trove of general and music-specific lexicographical sources provide a wealth of information on musical styles, theoretical concepts, technical terms, persons, and instruments. Like Dart, Cohen points out that these sources, just like many other historical documents, must be read with a critical eye: "... the student of this material must