Guitar and vihuela: An annotated bibliography

Musicology Australia ISSN: 0814-5857 (Print) 1949-453X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmus20 Guitar and vihuela: An annotated bibliography John Griffiths To cite this article: John Griffiths (1987) Guitar and vihuela: An annotated bibliography, Musicology Australia, 10:1, 78-79, DOI: 10.1080/08145857.1987.10415185 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.1987.10415185 Published online: 09 Dec 2011. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 5 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmus20 Download by: [University of California Santa Barbara] Date: 20 June 2016, At: 15:35 Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 15:35 20 June 2016 modern folk revival. One wonders if an edition of Western art music would have been attempted with as little regard for current thought in the area. Meredith's comments on the origins of songs and tunes are sometimes inaccurate and often less complete than they could be. Integrated into a conversational and anecdotal text, one suspects that they are seen as less important than the portrait of the musician. However, as Meredith wishes to advance general theories of the principle historical origins of this music, then he must avoid such mistakes as calling an American evangelical hymn by the nineteenth-century popular song composer G.F. Root a German carol (p.313); he must note where songs obviously derive from gramophone records (for example the songs on pages 142, 268 and 177 were all released around 1930 in the Australian RegalZonophone series); and he must note the ample evidence of similar versions of these tunes collected from players in England, Ireland and America. In spite of these reservations, this is an important work, and a contribution to the reconstruction of the musical past of some groups of rural Australians. Meredith's work, in conjunction with that of other currently active collectors such as Chris Sullivan, will provide some of the evidence needed to draw a convincing picture of the social setting of music in the past, and its influence upon present day rural and urban musical practices. NUIES 1. John Meredith and Hugh Anderson, Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women who Sang Them, vol. 1, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1967. 2. See especially Ron Edwards, The Big Book of Australian Folk Songs, Rigby, Adelaide, 1976, and Northern Folk (later National Folk) which Edwards edited in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 3. I have discussed this at length in Graerne Smith, 'Making Folk Music', Meanjin 4/44 (1985):477-505. G U I T A R AND V I H U E L A : A N ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY M e r e d i t h Alice M c C u t c h e o n RILM Retrospectives No. 3. Pendragon Press, New York, 1985. xlv, 353pp. Reviewed by John Grij~ths, University of Melbourne Bibliographies are the desk-top companions of any serious researcher: a reliable and clearly laid-out bibliography facilitates the time-consuming tasks that are the scholar's frequent burden. Annotated bibliographies are even more helpful, as they permit rapid discrimination between sources of varying degrees of relevance. Such a 78 Musicology Australia 1987/volume X rationale obviously underlies the formulation of Meredith McCutcheon's new bibliography Guitar and Vihuela, a welcome complement to the bibliographic tools available to students of plucked instruments. The value of the bibliography is not limited to the scholarly community alone; it will also serve performers and that particular brand of enthusiastic devotee that the world of the classical guitar seems to generate. The bibliography draws not only on the customary pool of monographs, dissertations and scholarly journals, but also includes magazines and periodicals of a more popular orientation directed specifically to guitarists. These popular magazines have frequently included studies of considerable value, often written by authors who are not always trained scholars, but whose knowledge and experience have been channelled into worthy enterprise. In many cases, such articles represent the only available literature on various aspects of the guitar, its composers, performers, and its construction. The popular literature deserves to be placed alongside academic publications in a field that only twenty-five or thirty years ago existed largely at the fringe of serious scholarship. McCutcheon's bibliography is systematically divided into chapters dealing with general and national histories, proceeding then by period classifications to the present day, and concluding with chapters on iconography, and the design and construction of instruments. Appendices list periodicals devoted to the guitar and other fretted instruments, and a chronological list of musical sources to 1800 that makes reference to modem editions. Use of the bibliography is made simple by a detailed Table of Contents, some eight pages in length, that gives detailed subdivisions of the contents of each of the book's chapters. Facility is also aided by an accurate alphabetical index that distinguishes clearly between composers, authors, sources, technical terms and musical genres. As in the best bibliographies, presentation is simple and logical: much of the paraphernalia is self-evident, and the book can be used without an extensive preparatory study. The bibliographical listing is preceded by an introductory essay that offers the reader an initial orientation in guitar history and historiography. Similarly, each chapter includes a prefatory essay that provides an overview of the area catalogued, drawing attention to central figures and to key references. The bibliography itself is remarkably comprehensive. More than one thousand entries are included and there is frequent crossreferencing to related and complementary studies. Abstracts are given for the vast majority of entries. These vary from a single sentence to a paragraph in length, and are pertinent and reliable. McCutcheon's is, in fact, the only annotated bibliography of guitar literature. Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 15:35 20 June 2016 It is a pity, however, that a bibliography published in 1985 only covers material up to 1981, particularly as a number of other reference works and bibliographies dealing with related topics appeared close to the terminal date of the listings, and considerable research had been published in the intervening years. Conspicuously absent, for example, is any allusion to David Lyons's Lute, Guitar, Vihuela to 1800: A Bibliography, ~ much of whose data is repeated here with annotations. However, such criticism applies only to the early period of guitar history, for the later era has previously been without any form of monographic bibliographical reference work. Appendix 2 (Music for Guitar and Vihuela Printed before 1800 and Modem Editions) also replicates previously published works, but in more convenient alphabetical rather than chronological order, compared, for example, to the chronological listing in James Tyler's The Early Guitar. z McCutcheon lists modem editions, while giving no equivalent to Tyler's details of notation type. One of the least satisfactory aspects of the bibliography is the method of citation used for modem editions. It draws no distinction between transcriptions and facsimile reprints, nor does it state whether a modem edition is a complete or partial transcription of the source. For example, four modem editions of Fuenllana's Orphenica Lyra (1554) are cited, with publishers' names for all four, and editors' names for only two. Uninitiated readers can neither distinguish between the facsimile edition, the one complete modem transcription, and the two editions that present only a selection of Fuenllana's works. Performers seeking modem editions of individually-published works or other post-1800 editions must refer elsewhere. The most significant of these references are cited by McCutcheon in the Introduction. Dealing only with printed sources of music, the bibliography makes no new inroads into classification of manuscript sources. Such a task presents a formidable challenge in itself. For tablature manuscripts, Wolfgang Boetticher's Lauten- und GitarrenTablaturen, 3 not mentioned by McCutcheon, provides a standard reference, and Tyler also gives a useful select list of guitar manuscripts in his above-mentioned book. In short, Guitar and Vihuela is a bibliography that merits praise qualified by only minor reservations. It is a work that fulfills its promise, and that will facilitate the work of many guitarists and scholars alike. NOTES 1. David Lyons, Lute, Guitar, Vihuela to 1800: A Bibliography, Detroit, Information Coordinators, 1978. 2. James Tyler, The Early Guitar, London, Oxford University Press, 1980. 3. Lauten- und Gitarren- Tablaturen, ed. Wolfgang Boetticher, RISM Ser. B7, Munich, Herde, 1978. THE DANCING CHIMPANZEE: A STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC IN RELATION TO THE VOCALISING AND RHYTHMIC ACTION OF APES Leonard Williams Allison & Busby, London; 1980, 95pp. Reviewed by Jamie C. Kassler, Utiiversity o f New South Wales Music origin theories, by their very nature, must be highly speculative, since they invoke a past for which there is very little, if any, factual record. Yet, one or another music origin theory generally underpins most systematic writings on music and offers clues to the frequently undeclared metaphysics of authors of such writings. The book under review (revised from its 1967 edition) is no exception, for the author's purpose is to refute (in 92 pages) the music origin theory of Charles Darwin in order to establish the 'true' theory. Darwinian theory is a version of Epicureanism which held that music is a natural human creation and not the work of the gods. 1 The Roman Epicurean, Titus Lucretius Carus, wrote: '... even now some arts are being perfected, some also are in growth; today many improvements have been made in ships, yesterday musicians invented their musical tunes', z According to Lucretius, man invented music by imitating nature: To imitate with the mouth the liquid notes of the birds came long before men could delight their ears by warbling smooth carols in song. And the zephyrs whistling through hollow reeds first taught the countrymen to blow into hollow hemlockstalks. Next, step by step, they learnt the plaintive melodies which the reed-pipe gives forth tapped by the players' fingertips u the pipe discovered amid pathless woods and forests and glades, amid the solitary haunts of shepherds and the peace of the open air. [So by degrees time brings up before us every single thing, and reason lifts it into the precincts of light.] 3 This onomatopoetic t h e o r y - that music's origins are to be found in man's imitation of natural sounds - - has recurred in various guises throughout history. What is important to note is that Lucretius attempted both a naturalistic and a proto-evolutionary explanation. As is well known, Darwin provided a full-fledged evolutionary account of objects by means of the principle of natural selection, a principle that explains what happens as an outcome of accidental and orderly events combined by positing that evolution occurs through a series of accidents added one to another, each new accident being preserved by selection if it is advantageous to the sum of former advantageous accidents which the present form of an object Musicology Australia 1987/volumeX 79