The Guitar

Tracing the Grain Back to the Tree

Chris Gibson, Andrew Warren

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226764016
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood's unique effect on the instrument's sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way.

Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance—of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchantingmusical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar.

PART 1

Guitar Worlds

1

The Guitar

At the very southern tip of Spain is a city much less famous than it once was, but blessed with an extraordinary geography. Perched on a square mile of land in the Atlantic Ocean, overlooking Africa and connected to Iberia only by the slimmest isthmus, the sentinel city of Cádiz guards the Mediterranean. To the east is Europe and the Levant, and to the west, the wider world.

It is impossible to trace the guitar back to a single source, a solo inventor, or place of invention.1 Still, if there is one place to start, this is it. In music history, the guitar is strongly associated with the Iberian Peninsula. Here, in Andalucía, the modern guitar as we know it settled into being. Between the mid-1700s and the late 1800s, Cádiz and nearby cities, such as Seville and Granada, hosted the largest concentrations of guitar makers anywhere. The modern standard tuning (E-A-D-G-B-E) first became common here in the 1780s, before use on Italian and German guitars.2 At the heart of such innovations, Joséf Pagés and his family made guitars in Cádiz between 1794 and 1819. They were considered “the greatest guitar luthiers of their day”3—the guitar’s equivalent of Stradivari.

Showing us around is Alejandro Ulloa, who works for a local language school. “Welcome to Cádiz,” Alejandro says with a warm handshake. “As you will learn, the world comes through this place.” It seems a grand statement about a city with little more than a hundred thousand residents. But Alejandro is correct. A genuine entrepôt, the city’s geography has always underpinned its strategic significance. On the basis of archaeological remains, Cádiz is considered Europe’s oldest continually occupied city. Phoenician mariners established a fort here as a transit point for minerals; later the Romans developed it as a naval base. Known as Gades to the Romans, its claim to fame “was its situation at the end of the known world.”4 Only Padua and Rome were wealthier. The city’s current name came via the Arabic, Qādis, when it was under Moorish control (between 711 and 1262), though according to residents such as Alejandro, “We are still called gaditanos, from Gades, because of the Roman name.”

Figure 1.1. Guitar, Joséf Pagés (c. 1740–1822), Cádiz, 1809, spruce soundboard; rosewood ribs and bridge. © Royal Academy of Music, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

The city was consequential to the violence of colonial exploration and dispossession. Columbus sailed from Cádiz on his second (1493) and fourth (1502) voyages, and by the 1700s, its port had become the base for the Spanish navy. It was the monopoly command center of la Carrera de Indias—the colonial trade with the Americas. At Cádiz’s bustling slave market, North African Muslims subjugated by the Ottoman Empire were sold to local elites, and British, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants traded sub-Saharan Africans—especially women, who fetched higher prices, destined for domestic labor and sexual exploitation. For more than three centuries, fleets of galleons guarded by armed convoys sailed from here in search of profit and new lands and peoples to conquer.

A translator by trade, Alejandro is proudly Spanish but spent much of his youth living in French-speaking parts of Canada. Charming and charismatic, he now applies his multilingual skills to translating doctoral theses, books, and government contracts between Spanish, French, and English. The most exciting, Alejandro says, is the real-time translation work. One day he will be translating for a business deal between the military and a weapons manufacturer, the next, assisting police to interview suspected drug smugglers. Alejandro is also an adept raconteur—Cádiz’s narrador-general—and a veritable man about town. Every second person stops to say hello and exchange gossip and laughs. Tucking our heads inside doorways, we gawk at Moorish ceramic tiles, one of the many echoes of this port city’s layered, cosmopolitan past. “The cobbles beneath our street,” explains Alejandro, “are paved with stones from American rivers, brought back on eighteenth-century trading vessels as ballast.” Cemented into the cobbles to protect the corners of buildings are upturned cannons, abandoned after the Napoleonic wars. The cathedral’s majestic towers and domes evoke Florence and Constantinople, while Phoenician palms and Roman ruins commingle.

“The city is still of profound geopolitical importance,” explains Alejandro. “The United States maintains a military base here.” Galleons have given way to cruise ships; sugar and timber have been replaced by consumer goods and refined oil from the Middle East, destined for European markets. A gritty element pervades. The streets smell of motorbike fumes and fried fish, and there are no international chain stores—local shopkeepers instead sell hardware, cigarettes, and cheap leather goods from Morocco. Drifting from its intimate bars and cafés is the soundtrack of a port city: conversations and arguments, energetic music, the busyness of commerce.

Accompanying Alejandro to help us unlock Cádiz’s rich guitar-making heritage is luthier Fernando “Tito” Herrera Díaz, who makes and restores guitars by hand in a traditional manner. We’re struck by his quiet demeanor, diminutive stature, and weathered hands. At a sidewalk table, we share sweets made from Moorish recipes of pine nuts, honey, and cinnamon, and discuss Cádiz, history, and guitars. “Cadiz is very well known for guitar manufacturing,” says Tito, “because this is the nexus point between the Americas, where the wood comes from, and Africa and Europe. Cadiz was the port.” It is a place with significant ethnic diversity and, notwithstanding its historical role in the slave trade, was more tolerant toward social difference than other colonial outposts. As Tito says, “Even the homosexual community is very big in Cadiz because of the merchant ships. It was a safe haven during the Spanish civil war.”

Soft-spoken, Tito describes his philosophy and approach. He earns a modest living making classical and flamenco guitars in the traditional manner, as custom orders—only six to ten each year. “The most common woods I use are Spanish cypress, Canadian cedro, walnut from the north of Spain, ebony from Africa, palo santo from Brazil, and German pine.” Because oak (Quercus spp.) is expensive, Tito buys recycled pieces, “for example, a bar counter, to make the curved sides.”

In Cádiz, the melodrama of flamenco continues to enrapture audiences. On select buildings, blue plaques commemorate performers and guitarristas de prestigio. The city’s most famous street—Callejón del Duende—is named after the emotive “soul” of flamenco music. Thousands of pilgrims visit annually. “Young Japanese women in particular come to Cádiz to learn Spanish and flamenco,” reports Alejandro. Tito’s uncle was a very well-known flamenco guitar player, who encouraged Tito to learn to make guitars when he was little, “I never went to school. Working with wood, restoring old furniture for an antique store, that’s how I started at a very early age. With my uncle’s guidance, I made my first guitar, and he liked how it sounded.” Tito’s uncle then told other guitar players, and his reputation grew from there.

“Flamenco must not be thought of as only a type of music,” Tito adds. “It is a form of expression and identity.” Flamenco can’t merely be listened to or played. “It is something you have to feel to understand.” Every guitar Tito makes is tailored to the player’s style, and is named, as with offspring. “People say I’m crazy, but I talk to the guitar. I put lots of love and sentiment into it, and it’s reflected in the guitar. Sometimes when I call the client to come and pick up the guitar, I’m devastated. I cry because it’s my guitar. Every guitar has its own soul.” Inside their soundholes, each guitar is plainly labeled, signed, and numbered: Fernando Herrera Díaz, “Tito,” Constructor de Guitarra, Cádiz. Maker, craft, and place are forged together—an unbroken link to an earlier time of material circulations and fugitive sounds.

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Pre-industrial artisans first made guitars commercially in small woodworking shops just like Tito’s. In workshop settings, the guitar’s contemporary profile—what sociologist Harvey Molotch called the “type form convention”5 of a product—settled in place around six-stringed, fan-braced construction, and E-A-D-G-B-E tuning.6 Craft-based traditions were tied to the bodily skills of each luthier, their cherished tools, and workshop spaces. Production upheld the exacting quality standards of registered guilds and the reputation of self-employed artisans.

In Cádiz, we took the opportunity to trace the workshop sites of formative luthiers including Joséf Pagés and Josef Sebastián Benedid Díaz. Always on the verge of bankruptcy, they relied on cheap rents, often working in basements and backstreets. While many of the buildings still stand, all signs of their workshop histories are gone. Now apartments and cafés, they are more likely to contain Airbnb tenants than artisans.

Tito’s workshop is an hour outside Cádiz. These days Andalusian guitar makers work from lower-rent spaces in small villages and towns. Tito shares with us details of his workshop, tools, and craft process. The workshop layout mirrors that for furniture making and woodworking, having changed little since eighteenth-century luthiers made lutes, violins, mandolins, cellos, and guitars in kindred spaces, similarly under commission. In its center is the workbench—the hub, the operating table where sawdust and shavings fly. Specialized jigs on the workbench hold the instrument under development, placed to best utilize natural light. On surrounding whitewashed walls hang fine woodworking tools—calipers, clamps, squares, saws, and chisels—alongside guitar-shaped templates and jigs for side bending and positioning internal braces. Shelves hold tins of lacquers and papers detailing custom orders. Up high, where warm dry air collects, neatly stacked tops, neck blocks, and back and side pieces await future use.

Appreciating Tito’s workshop and his fine guitars, it is easy to see why even the busiest luthiers produce barely a handful of guitars per month. “The varnishing alone takes one month,” he says, “once the assembly is finished. The varnish soaks into the pores. It takes ages. I have to repeat the process thirty times.” Utmost care is taken. When Tito finishes the guitar, “I will sand the inside too with a special grain of sand which is 800, more expensive than 400-grit.” Guitars “are like people, you have to look inside to see if it’s good, regardless of the appearance. Guitar makers say to me, look, ‘Don’t be an idiot, don’t sand inside because people don’t see it.’ I say, ‘Well, it could be a stupid thing for you, but it’s not for me.’”

Tito insists on steaming the guitar’s sides traditionally, cajoling them skillfully into the familiar curve shape using a baño maria, a boiling water bath. “Modern companies make them with fire, in one process, using a metal mold. The traditional way takes much longer; you have to caress the wood into the curve, wait for it to dry, curve it gradually.” With no website, marketing, or physical retail store, Tito relies entirely on word of mouth. The guitar is tailored for each customer. Woods are selected for the player and their light or heavy touch. German spruce (Picea abies) or Canadian cedar (Thuja plicata) are used generally for the soundboard, but combinations depend on the climate of the guitar’s destination. Canadian cedar is “used for cold places.” And palo santo (Bursera graveolens), a sacred Central American indigenous tree also known globally for its gorgeous incense smell, is for guitars “excellent in the rains.” Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) covers a range of conditions. “The wood has a soul and it reacts in one way or another.” Every customer receives a finished guitar with a unique rosette design surrounding the soundhole. “When you manufacture the guitar, if you think of it just as profit, it’s never going to sound well. It’s a business that is not very profitable.”

In many places, lutherie still survives with artisanal values of craft, community and care.7 Nowadays, though, enterprises such as Tito’s are dwarfed by a commercial market for musical instruments dominated by global firms and mass-production technology. As with other handicrafts, from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, wider forces transformed the process and scale of guitar making. We set out to discover how, and where.

Route Notes

Half-empty trams rattle past the Museum für Musikinstrumente at the University of Leipzig in former East Germany. Last night, the winter markets opened in the old quarter, serving Schmalzkuchen (fried donut balls) and hot Glühwein (mulled wine) turbocharged with vodka shots. The next morning is bitterly cold, but the sky is clear and the air calm. Inside the stately Art Deco museum, climate-controlled rooms are organized into historical and aesthetic periods—Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, twentieth century. Each hosts a cornucopia of historic instruments: harpsichords and fortepianos, violins and lutes. Pineapple-shaped theorbos have fourteen strings and additional, giraffe-like necks. Nineteenth-century lyre-guitars evoke the ancient Greek figure of Apollo, the god of music, with long, curved horns that would put BC-Rich heavy-metal guitars to shame.

Much of the collection is dedicated to Leipzig’s own musical history. Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert Schumann all worked in Leipzig, and Richard Wagner was born here. Also present are instruments from across the globe. With more than five thousand in its collection, it’s one of the world’s largest musical instrument museums. And throughout is a trail of stringed instruments made from wood—the guitar’s family tree.

While much has been written about early guitars, the key sources of historical evidence are Renaissance- and Baroque-period instructional manuals for teachers and students, as well as paintings of musicians and printed tablatures.8 Such sources help present-day musicologists de...