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This chapter is focused on an analysis and discussion of the soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix's performance at Woodstock of the “Star Spangled Banner”. This sound recording is used as a more extended demonstration of the ways in which the ideas introduced in the previous chapter can be applied to music. It is argued that the approach can be used to identify a general character of “instability” functioning in the recording in three domains: the domain of sound events; the domain of musical materials; and the domain of cultural practices. All three of these are specified in sound relative to suitably enculturated listeners.

This chapter discusses the acoustical principles underlying the behaviour of plucked and hammered stringed instruments, including the effects of the point of attack and the nature of the plectrum or hammer on the frequency spectrum and timbre of the sound. The significance of the feel of a string and the technique of pitch bending are explained. A survey of the historical development of plucked and hammered stringed instruments includes descriptions of lyre, psaltery, cittern, dulcimer, and cimbalom; and discussions of the evolution of harps, lute, and guitars. The construction and functioning of the modern lute and guitar are described, and current methods of performance on harp, lute, and classical guitar are outlined.

This chapter presents the detailed story of another historic recreation, this time on the stage of Carnegie Hall where in 1912 the Clef Club concert took place. New challenges were met: an unusual mix, the forming of a new Clef Club orchestra that included thirty strummers — ten each of mandolins, guitars and a rare harp guitar, and banjos — all of whom read complicated music very well; a boys' and men's choir; and a concert orchestra including eight pianists and various soloists. Will Marion Cook's dialect song, “Swing Along” for chorus and orchestra stopped the show as it did sixty seven years earlier.

As Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang emerged during the 1920s, and Charlie Christian emerged in 1939, Django Reinhardt was the “jazz” guitar soloist. He learned jazz music initially from phonograph records from the United States. Yet by the mid-1930s, he had performed with the best American jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Carter. And his own records manifested not only how well he had learned from his jazz lessons, but also how magnificent were his guitar solos. Django Reinhardt was a Belgian-born, French-raised musician whose passion was in American jazz.

This chapter discusses the ways the guitar—particularly as employed for “Western” genres such as rock and jazz—is theorized at a local level in India. The text includes extensive quotation from interviews with Indian guitarists carried out between 1998 and 2001, discussed under the following headings: “Origins and Identities” is concerned with the ways in which musicians theorize the origins of the instrument and its associations with regional, religious and other identities; “Networks” outlines the implication of the guitar in national and international systems allowing the mobility of musicians, repertory, and equipment; and finally “Music” discusses ways in which the guitar's repertory is theorized that cut across the Indian/Western division. The chapter argues that more studies of local theory are necessary even—perhaps especially—where mass-mediated global styles such as rock and jazz are involved.

This chapter focuses on two musicians who have used YouTube and their own websites to develop multimedia online curricula for teaching rock guitar and drums. David Taub’s NextLevelGuitar.com and Nate Brown’s OnlineDrummer.com have each attracted thousands of students from around the world. The chapter shows how Taub, Brown, and their students have strategically adapted traditional pedagogical strategies and reshaped teacher-student (and student-student) relationships in a virtual transmission context. This chapter also addresses online teachers’ encounters with copyright law. Aspiring guitarists and drummers often seek out lessons because they want to learn to play songs by their favorite artists. Musicians routinely teach copyrighted material in private lessons, but publishing song lessons online can leave them vulnerable to account deletion or legal action. While bringing lessons into the digital public sphere makes them accessible to many more students, this new context also imposes new constraints on repertoire and teaching style.

This chapter lays out the scope and intended use of The Classical Guitar Companion. It explores how guitarists and teachers can create unique and distinctive curricula of study for themselves or their students to help them acquire and develop fundamental techniques and foundational knowledge. Included are practice guidelines applicable to each chapter of the book. Because all new learning requires a finely honed foundation of prior knowledge and skill, the introduction presents advice that will help guitarists transform their foundational work into advanced technique and a deeper understanding of the instrument. This work will help guitarists meet the artistic and technical demands of advanced guitar literature. The introduction also explores those best served by the book: those studying the classical guitar (whether novice or advanced); guitarists wishing to fill gaps in their background; new guitar teachers looking for guidance with curricula; and guitarists interested in the rich pedagogical heritage of the instrument.

This chapter discusses the Southerners passion for singing, playing, and dancing. The instruments of choice were guitars, banjos, and pianos. The songs range from bouncy pop songs to sentimental songs and “coon” songs which were parodies of black language, styles, and aspirations. The birth of a distinct Southern music and its development is also discussed in this chapter. A form of black music called “patting juba” emerged among the black Southerners developing into “ragged” music which became a national sensation. This chapter also describes the birth of jazz music and blues. Music has long been a part of the Southern lifestyle and its effects can be seen in all aspects of life in the New South.

This chapter provides an analysis of flamenco guitar and song: The Musical Elements of Flamenco; Flamenco Guitar; Soleares; A quién le contaré yo, sung by Juan Talega; and Is There an Indigenous Flamenco “Theory”?

This chapter argues that the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games have inspired new modes of engagement with popular music. It addresses gameplay as a developing genre of collaborative, participatory rock music performance that is generating debate about the nature of musical and performative authenticity. The chapter analyzes the games’ implicit models of rock ideology, their sometimes-sincere/sometimes-ironic constructions of rock heroism, and heated reception debates about whether the games foster genuine musicianship. It explores players’ ideas about musicality and creativity, focusing on players who have significant experience playing traditional instruments. Playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band isn’t just like playing a real instrument, but it’s nothing at all like just listening to music. The affective experience of making music is bound up with embodied performance, and these games compel bodily engagement.

This chapter addresses public gameplay performance contexts for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. What does it mean to be a live performer of a pre-recorded song? These games inspire physically virtuosic, visually engaging performances, staged in a variety of social contexts: players compete in game tournaments, post performances on YouTube, and form instant bands with friends at Rock Band bar nights. They also engage with the gender and sexuality norms of rock performance, sometimes turning their gameplay into over-the-top rock drag. As players and their audiences create these performances, they collaborate with game designers and recorded musicians in stitching recorded musical sound and performing bodies back together.

This chapter focuses upon the interwar years, when musicians and dancers formed a strong Pacific Islander community in Southern California, one that fostered a sense of camaraderie and belonging, and enabled them to work in the motion picture studios and nightclubs that increasingly sought their labor. It also traces this community’s role in influencing guitar design innovations exhibited by Weissenborn, National, and Rickenbacker guitars, which led to the first mass produced electric guitar. Hawaiian musicians such as Sol Ho‘opi‘i, Eddie Bush, and Dick, Al, and Lani McIntire thrived in Hollywood and later in New York City at the Hotel Lexington during this period, although they continued to face significant challenges. While they expanded the American public’s interest in the steel guitar, particularly through the new mediums of radio, “Polynesian” clubs, and motion pictures, they continued to face an industry unwilling to acknowledge their talent and strong work ethic and uninterested in distinguishing their music from the offensive, pseudo-Hawaiian songs peddled by non-Hawaiian songwriters.

This chapter examines the role of the guitar in the banjo, mandolin, and guitar (BMG) movement in America during the period from 1880 to 1900, and explains that the BMG movement, instigated by S. S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal, only served the magazine’s unstinting devotion to the banjo and an unrelenting desire to make money. It also discusses the evolution of BMG clubs into mandolin orchestras, the distrust of the traditional guitar, and the emergence of American guitar soloists.

This chapter present a preliminary study of the emergence of the guitar in the music, culture and society of Turkey, a transcontinental Republic founded in 1923, noting also the instrument’s presence within Ottoman music culture. It argues that the rise of the guitar in Turkey constitutes a transformative moment in the history of the instrument, if not Turkish music, with the emergence and development of local playing styles and physical modifications made to suit local musical practices, aspirations and sensibilities. Crucially, in reaching back to the near past, the study employs both ethnographic and oral historical techniques of research, including in-depth interviews with key musicians, whilst also drawing attention to the importance of the past—its interpretation, negotiation, contestation and fabrication—in the present.

Most of the music in The Classical Guitar Companion makes use of the same technique or musical texture throughout. High-level virtuoso playing requires that guitarists become adept at navigating ever-changing musical textures and the techniques required to produce them. Florid or virtuoso études present the challenges of combining and switching between various technical elements, such as arpeggios, scales, slurs, and shifts, at rapid tempi. Of special interest is the brief discussion of “latency” at high speeds, which is applicable to these studies, and how virtuoso players transcend the limits of the central nervous system when initiating a movement or series of movements that must occur in less time than it takes for the signal to move to get from the brain to the hands (100 milliseconds).

The electric steel guitar has been the dominant musical instrument for more than fifty years in a number of African American Pentecostal churches, notably the House of God, whose steel guitarists are known for their distinctive playing styles and repertoire. In 1995, the Florida Folklife Program produced a cassette album titled Sacred Steel: Traditional Sacred African-American Steel Guitar Music in Florida. The album, licensed by Arhoolie Records, was distributed internationally and received critical acclaim. Today steel guitar music is more popularly known as Sacred Steel. It was in Philadelphia that the steel guitar was probably first used in a religious service, but Florida, home to fifty-three House of God churches, has produced many of the denomination’s most influential steel guitarists. This chapter, which focuses on Sacred Steel as a musical tradition in Florida, looks at the career of steel guitarist Willie Eason and two other musicians who influenced many younger Florida steel guitarists: Aubrey Ghent and Glenn Lee.