History
In the Renaissance period, the guitar was generally strung with four pairs of strings, termed courses. Each string in a course was tuned to the same pitch. By the baroque period it had five courses and used a variety of tunings, some of the tunings re-entrant. During the eighteenth century six courses became common and the modern practice of using six single strings became the standard practice after 1800. These developments illustrate an ongoing desire on behalf of players to increase the range of the instrument. Seven-string guitars arose from such a desire and have been in use for over 150 years. French guitarist Napoleon Coste (1805–1883) composed works with a seven-string guitar specifically in mind. The Italian guitarist Mario Maccaferri (b 1899) was a celebrated advocate of bass strings (diapasons or bourdons). In Mexico a guitarra séptima or guitarra sétima with fourteen strings, strung in seven double courses has been used for an even longer time and descriptions of it date back to 1776 (Antonio Vargas). This makes the history of the seven-string guitar more than 230 years old.
Read more about this topic: Seven-string Guitar
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)