Portuguese guitar

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The Portuguese guitar or Portuguese guitarra (Portuguese: guitarra portuguesa) is a plucked string instrument with twelve steel strings, strung in six courses comprising of two strings each. It is most notably associated with fado.

1 History
2 Models
- 2.1 Notable Artists in Lisboa
- 2.2 Notable Artists in Coimbra
3 Tuning
4 Currently
5 External links

[edit] History

The Portuguese guitar is presumed to be the localization of both a direct descendant of the renaissance cittern and what is commonly referred to as the English guitar (or guittar), a kind of cittern brought by the British to Portugal in the 18th century through the commercial trading shipments that were commonly held between the two countries back then.

It is assumed, through surviving written records and iconography, as no instrument of this kind survives to our days, that the renaissance cittern (or some variation thereof) was indeed built and played in Portugal and was of moderate popularity in the big cities. Evidence points out that some kind of local simple cittern was commonplace already prior to the late introduction of the English guitar. The demand of the English guitar may have prompted the local luthiers to either apply the knowledge that they already had regarding the construction of popular citterns to their copies of the English kind and vice-versa. Eventually both kinds merged into one another by the first decades of the 19th century.

Until the early 20th century, and to simplify the matter considerably, the two biggest instrument making regions of Portugal were Lisbon and Oporto each region producing a different version of the instrument. The guitars from Oporto were closer to the English guitar (partly because of the import craze lived in the 18th century), had a deeper tone and were used for the traditional instrumental fados typical of the city while the southern guitars had a lighter sound and were used for accompaniment singers (it also lacked some of the English cittern's improvements, like the mechanical tuning mechanism). There were therefore, much like today, two different instrument making "schools".

Later on, a sizeable industry also flourished in Coimbra by the start of the 20th century, due to the Portuguese guitar's popularity among the students of the city who played Coimbra fado. Here, also, the guitar developed some particular regional characteristics.

Over the first half of the 20th century the Portuguese guitar underwent considerable standardization, technical modifications and improvements by the hands of the luthiers and at suggestion of highly regarded players - the revision and refinement of the tuning mechanism, body measurements, and so on - retaining, however, its overall appearance and sound.

[edit] Models

There are two distinct kinds of Portuguese guitar models, the Lisboa guitar and the Coimbra guitar. The differences between the two are the scale and body measurements, which in turn are reflected in the instruments timbre - the Lisboa guitar has a more crystalline bell-quality like sound, which the Coimbra guitar lacks. Visually, the Lisboa guitar has a larger waist contour and sports a scroll ornament above the tuning machine while the Coimbra guitar has a teardrop shaped oval; some Lisboa guitars also have a narrower neck. Traditionally, the Coimbra guitar is also tuned 1 tone lower than the Lisboa guitar, which may explain its longer scale, although both can be tuned into the others conventional tuning interchangeably. Both are traditionally played by picking the strings with both the thumb and index fingers only, with the tip of grown nails or fingerpicks (made of plastic, tortoiseshell or metal), with the picking hand usually resting below the strings, in contact with the soundboard.

[edit] Notable Artists in Lisboa

It should be noted that, prior to the second half of the 19th century, the Portuguese guitar was not much more than a barber shop instrument, although it had been once popular among the high-society the century before, much like in the rest of the world, the fad quickly came to an end. Musical education in Portugal was scarce, and so most musicians played by ear. There was no defined playing method and most people learned to play the instrument on their own, not unusually only to accompany themselves with simple chords while singing. Regardless, many talented musicians appeared and gradually elevated the playing standards.

To give a very brief account of some of the modern influential players, Armandinho, born in 1891, became one of the most influential Lisboa-style players. His playing style could be defined by the overuse of tremolo picking, muting and glissandos. What are now considered clichés of Lisboa's classical repertoire did not come with Armandinho himself however (as sometimes is assumed), and can be dated back to earlier players. For most of his life he accompanied Fado singers in Lisboa. In 1928 and 1929 he recorded instrumental pieces for the "His Master's Voice" label. Following his footsteps, and to name but a few, came other guitarists, namely Jaime Santos, Raul Nery, José Nunes and Fontes Rocha.

[edit] Notable Artists in Coimbra

Artur Paredes, born in 1899, not unlike Armandinho, was an equally important player in the city of Coimbra. Much of today's Coimbra guitar features can be traced back to his contact with local luthiers. During the 1920's he accompanied a select number of Coimbra's student singers and left us an important instrumental repertoire, much of which remains lost, at least recorded by himself. His son Carlos Paredes was an equally important player regarding the popularisation of the instrument internationally and remains perhaps the best-known Portuguese guitar player to date - his music being a hard to define cross between portuguese folk motifs and simple classical inspired melodies. Other solid Coimbra instrumentists were António Brojo and António Portugal.

[edit] Tuning

The most commonly used tunings are:

Lisboa fado tuning D3 A3 B3 E4 A4 B4

Coimbra fado tuning C3 G3 A3 D4 G4 A4

Bear in mind that the last 5 courses are tuned in octaves, which means that the last string of a given course is tuned one octave higher than the one notated.

[edit] Currently

Thanks to a new generation of remarkable musicians and luthiers the Portuguese guitar is slowly but steadily attaining reputation as a concert level instrument. It is also foraying into other musical genres outside of those it is usually associated with. This new generation of players includes names such as Pedro Caldeira Cabral [1], Paulo Soares [2] and Ricardo Rocha, among others.