The Guitar: A Humble Instrument That Conquered the World

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/12/arts/12PARE.html

November 12, 2000

By JON PARELES

BOSTON -- THE 1964 Fender Stratocaster on this page is as red as the
face of a cartoon devil, with horns to match. It's smooth and solid
as a surfboard, concealing its electronics behind a plastic
pickguard with its own horns, while its metallic socket and tuning
machinery gleam like chrome on a new sportscar. Yet it's not all
speed and aggression. The Strat is also curvy, inviting a player's
touch with a voluptuous free-form shape and beveled edges that
generations of guitarists have found to be balanced and
comfortable. Simultaneously angular and sleek, masculine and
feminine, whimsical and functional, it's just one of the iconic
forms of the instrument that conquered the world.

 That "fiesta red" Strat is part of "Dangerous Curves: The Art of
the Guitar," an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts here through
Feb. 25. Behind the exhibition is a larger question: what makes the
guitar so charismatic?

 The guitar is no longer merely a machine that makes sounds.
Without playing a note, it is already a bundle of meanings and
possibilities. The electric guitar has become a symbol of brash
vitality, of modernization, of barely tamed powers and impulses.
Meanwhile, an acoustic guitar promises intimacy and homespun
sincerity, with the romantic legacy of the troubadour behind it. Of
course, the saxophone, violin, grand piano, kora and kazoo all have
their own extra-musical connotations and emblematic forms. But no
instrument has been as all- conquering as the guitar.

 The guitar is everywhere: electric and acoustic, factory-standard
and endlessly customized. It serves three-chord amateur strummers
and dizzyingly virtuosic pros. Its capabilities shape music from
Honolulu to Reykjavik, Chicago to New Delhi, London to Lagos and
points beyond; the Boston exhibition includes a Martin Backpacker
mini-guitar that went into space in 1994 aboard the Columbia
shuttle. If the Spanish armada had seized half the territory now
held by the descendants of the Spanish guitar, fast food would be
tapas and gazpacho and we'd be reading this newspaper en espaÒol.

 The exhibition provides evidence that the guitar's destiny was
ordained at least 400 years ago. From the beginning, it was a
humble instrument, something that ordinary people could play with
little training. And in both its sound and its physical form, its
essence has been flexibility.

 The guitar remains the most personal of instruments. Like the
violin family, the guitar has a shape that has always been seen as
anthropomorphic, with a body, neck and head. But it gets more
intimate treatment than a bowed string instrument. Cradled in a
player's lap or strapped across the chest, as close as a loved one,
it is caressed or abused with both hands, while its vibrations are
felt next to the player's heart. It becomes a phallic weapon for a
rocker on stage, a partner in harmony for a folkie, a tonal drum
for a funk rhythm guitarist. As a bonus, it doesn't hide a
performer's face, so that every note of a solo can be telegraphed
with an appropriate grimace, to the delight of arena rockers and
jazz guitarists alike.

 Although guitars are mass-produced, their owners don't consider
them interchangeable. Each instrument is carved by use: sweat on
the fingerboard, pick marks and pressure on the front all scar the
instrument along a player's most familiar paths. That's one reason
guitars take on personalities, something that more inert
instruments like drums or keyboards rarely do. Musicians sing about
their guitars: how they sound just like ringing a bell, how they
gently weep, how they learned to talk, how they want to (as Frank
Zappa sneered) kill your mama. Somehow, it seems perfectly sensible
for B. B. King to name his current guitar Lucille   she's now a
matrilineal dynasty   while no one would expect Billy Joel to do
the same for his piano.

 Guitar tone is almost always visceral. Every chord is a chokehold;
every note is a sonic trace of where the string has been gripped,
how it was plucked, all the ways it was bent or scraped or stroked
or snapped. Amplification makes every nuance more vivid, not just
with additional volume but with new interactions between the player
and the technology. For all the effects, wires and speakers along
the way, guitar music retains a physicality that keyboard players
can only envy.

 The "Dangerous Curves" exhibition follows the guitar through four
centuries of reinvention in Europe and the United States. All
instrument makers strive to balance acoustics, ergonomics and
visual aesthetics, and guitar builders have been more experimental
than most.

 The guitar did not necessarily originate in Spain. Plucked string
instruments, with fretted necks on resonating chambers, arose in
various forms all over the world. According to The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, possible ancestors of the guitar
show up in imagery from ancient Greece (which had an instrument
called the kithara), Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt and Central Asia.
Scholars have yet to agree on whether the particular shape of the
guitar   with a flat back, a waisted silhouette and what
musicologists consider a short neck   developed separately in
Europe or was introduced from the Arab world, where instruments
like the round-backed, oval-shaped oud were already highly
developed by the 10th century.

 Around 1200 A.D., European writers started to mention instruments
with names like gitere, chitarra, guitarra latina, quinterne and
gittern. Instruments called the quittara saracena and guitarra
morisca seem to acknowledge Moorish influences; the Spanish
vihuela, a flat-backed stringed instrument initially played with a
bow and later adapted to plucking, also evolved toward the modern
guitar. (The word survives in Portuguese, which calls a
conventional guitar a viol o to distinguish it from the Portuguese
guitarra that is used in fado music.)

 In Renaissance accounts, Spain is credited as the source of the
guitar. The rest of Europe learned the techniques of Spanish
instrument builders (probably adapted from Arab oud makers) for
bracing and strengthening the guitar's body, the better to stand up
to hard flamenco strumming.

 Through the centuries, designers continually toyed with materials,
shapes, the placement of the soundhole (or soundholes), the number
of strings and the size of the soundbox. Guitars ballooned,
switched from flat fronts to arched ones for richer tone, added
metal resonators or sympathetic strings for volume and depth. Their
makers used all the tricks acoustic knowledge and intuition could
devise.

 Then along came electromagnetic pickups, and the sound of the
guitar broke free of physical restraints. An electric guitar is not
just an amplified version of an acoustic instrument; it's an
electronic signal generator that's controlled by fingers on strings
and settings on pedals and amplifiers. The sound can be loud,
sustained, distorted, fed back; it can be unrecognizable as
something that comes from a guitar. It can scream, hover, chime,
hammer, lunge, shiver or chomp.

 In the same moment that pickups freed the guitar's sound from
natural limitations, they also freed the guitar's physical
incarnation. Tone, as generations of guitarists would discover, was
soon to take every shape imaginable. And so did the guitar itself,
as long as it retained a fingerboard, pickups and a bridge.
Crescents, rectangles, flying V's and metal skeletons were only a
few of the variations to come.

 The guitar was never a particularly elite instrument. Five hundred
years ago, it was considered the lowly cousin of the lute, suitable
for accompanying other instruments or for young ladies who wanted
to play gentle love songs. It has remained a portable, inexpensive
solo orchestra. (Even a few classical composers, including the
master orchestrator Hector Berlioz, composed on the guitar.) Strum
chords, fingerpick some polyphony, wail a lead; it's all possible
and accessible, with an added promise of immediate gratification.
The guitar chords for half the rock songs ever written can be
learned within hours, and reading music is strictly optional.

 Richard Chapman's "Guitar: Music, History, Players" quotes the
Spanish inquisitor Covarrubias, writing in 1611, complaining that
the guitar was so easy to play "that there is not a stable lad who
is not a musician on the guitar." For "stable lad" substitute
farmhand, hillbilly, truckdriver, art- school dropout, hippie, punk
or stoner; the assessment hasn't gone out of date.

 Yet what highbrows saw as an indictment became the guitar's
greatest strength. If anybody can play the guitar, then everybody
can. And the more people who try it out   fumbling through
misremembered songs, tuning incorrectly, using strange hand
positions and generally making mistakes   the more chances there
are for innovation. The guitar is music's equivalent of open-source
software; anyone who wants to can tweak it for purposes that can be
ingenious or merely eccentric, and all that activity can lead to
bigger things.

 With the electric guitar, which is umbilically connected to
amplifier technology, the possibilities for creative blundering
increase exponentially. Rock history is full of anecdotes about how
misused equipment responded with great sounds: the speaker cones
Link Wray punctured with a pencil for the distortion in "Rumble,"
the guitar idly leaned up against a speaker that introduced
countless rockers to the wonders of feedback. When a gadget is
added to the instrument   like the whammy bar on the Stratocaster
that allows a player to bend all the strings at once   it's soon
making sounds that nobody foresaw.

 The exhibition here honors an important thread of guitar
mythology: the cheap guitar. Despite the efforts that craftspeople
have lavished on handmade models for connoisseurs, the guitar's
musical legacy is built on unglamorous instruments with all the
workmanship of cigar boxes. Adequate mass-produced instruments made
their way into the hands of bluesmen, rural harmonizers and garage
rockers who couldn't care less about mother-of-pearl inlays or
rosewood fingerboards as long as they could strum a few chords.
Particularly in the unpredictable realm of electric guitars,
players sometimes found that tacky, off-the- rack instruments, like
the Supro Ozark guitar in the exhibition lent by Joe Perry of
Aerosmith, had a special bite that fancier instruments could never
match.

 THE Boston exhibition includes the homely but paradigm-shifting
instrument nicknamed the Frying Pan, an aluminum lap-steel guitar
made by Rickenbacker in 1934 with the first commercially available
electromagnetic pickups. The guitarist and tinkerer supreme Les
Paul understood the possibilities; in the early 1940's, he put
pickups, frets and a bridge on a simple plank. Then he realized
that the Log, as he called it, looked too alien, so he glued on the
sawed-apart halves of a guitar, just for show.

 Mr. Paul was neither the first nor last to see the guitar as an
opportunity for flashy design. Centuries earlier, the guitar had
already become a showcase for woodworking and inlays, as well as
outlandish experiments justified as acoustic innovations. Looking
for a triple-necked monster all ready to be plugged into its own
amplifier? The Boston exhibition has a "harpo-lyre," patented in
1829, with six-, seven- and eight- stringed necks; in its time, it
also included metal arms for connecting to an acoustic amplifier, a
resonating box with various effects pedals. And that was back
before electricity made the guitar the great assimilator.

 The ease and availability of the guitar has helped it dominate
other stringed instruments through the years. It would lurk in the
background of a group, companionably strumming accompaniment, then
make its move into the foreground as a solo instrument, as it did
in bluegrass. When amplification took hold, the guitar started
swallowing whole genres. Once lead lines could be heard, jazz
guitarists joined horns in the front lines of groups. Then
musicians realized that the blare of big band horns could be
approximated by a guitar: so long, swing, and hello, jump-blues and
rock 'n' roll.

 Since then, whole genres have been summoned by the guitar's ever
expanding vocabulary. Fuzz-tone was essential to 1960's garage
rock; power chords begat heavy metal; the wah-wah pedal pumped life
into funk. Cranked-up electric guitars reminded classical
Minimalists of how much lies within a one-chord drone.

 Around the world, the roles and sounds of local instruments have
been annexed by guitarists. In Zimbabwe, traditional Shona music
uses patterns plinked on thumb pianos; guitarists started picking
them and plugged them in to create Zimbabwean rock, chimurenga,
that maintains the complex pointillism of the old songs. In Brazil,
the whispered, syncopated chords of an acoustic guitar in a bossa
nova are like the massed drums of a samba school heard from afar.
Even in the United States, the guitar continues to mimic and adapt;
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine uses his guitar to imitate
hip-hop turntable scratching.
 

 The guitar doesn't act too pushy when it moves in on another
territory. Although its fretboard encourages a diatonic scale,
notes can always be bent, as bluesmen understood from the
beginning; strings can also be retuned. Memories of ancestral
sounds survive the transcription, until, through technology or
technique, those sounds start to re-emerge from the guitar.

 In reaching the entire world, the guitar has kept its humility.
It's convivial, stylish, malleable and unpretentious. To repay a
little hospitality, it will change its old habits or study a new
language. It's got panache, but it's also the perfect guest. No
wonder it has been the life of the party for so long.ÝÝ
 
 
 

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