The Guitar Before 1900: What the Dictionaries Reveal

Ferguson shines a whole new light on the history of the guitar by delving into historical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Between the earliest of these to mention the guitar (1606) and the last one surveyed, Baker’s Dictionary of Musical Terms (1895), nearly fifty dated sources—early descriptions of the guitar—are put into context and discussed. They run the gamut from the anecdotal to the objective, from ignorance and prejudice to clarity and insight. Sprinkled through these definitions ar...