{
  "id": "guitarra-espanola",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The Spanish guitar — how an instrument the lexicographers despised acquired a nationality",
  "summary": "In 1611 Covarrubias called the guitar \"no more than a cowbell\", so easy to strum that \"there is no stable boy who is not a guitar player\", and mourned the vihuela it had displaced. In 1674 Gaspar Sanz printed at Zaragoza why Europe called the thing a Spanish guitar, and a method teaching it as literate art. Both pages are read here directly, and together they tell no triumph: the instrument became national because it was popular, and the men who wrote it down disagreed about where it came from.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "culture",
    "music",
    "spain",
    "siglo-de-oro",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "primary-source",
    "organology"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "covarrubias-tesoro-1611"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "siglo-de-oro"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tomas-luis-de-victoria"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "printed-music-in-sixteenth-century-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "villancicos-de-las-catedrales-de-nueva-espana"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Why is it called the Spanish guitar?",
    "What is the difference between a vihuela and a guitar?",
    "Who added the fifth string to the guitar?",
    "What did Covarrubias say about the guitar?",
    "What is Gaspar Sanz's Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The earliest witness read here is hostile. Sebastián de Covarrubias, in the second part of his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), under VIGUELA, records that the instrument \"ha sido hasta nuestros tiempos muy estimado, y ha auido excelentissimos musicos: pero despues que se inuentaron las guitarras, son muy pocos los que se dan al estudio de la viguela. Ha sido vna gran perdida, porque en ella se ponia todo genero de musica puntada, y aora la guitarra no es mas que vn cencerro, tan facil de tañer, especialmente en lo rasgado, que no ay moço de cauallos que no sea musico de guitarra.\" A dictionary is not a treatise, but this is a dated Spanish statement that by 1611 the guitar had displaced the vihuela, that the displacement ran through strummed playing, and that it reached the bottom of the social scale.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The same page complicates the usual reading of that passage. Covarrubias's next entry, VIOLONES, defines them as a consort of bowed fretless vihuelas whose treble is called violín, distinguishes bowed vihuelas with frets, says the music of both \"es propia para los palacios de los Reyes, y para los saraos\" — and then adds \"Tambien parece que se va oluidando en España.\" Two instruments are recorded in decline on one leaf, so the page is evidence of a lexicographer's general complaint about changing taste as much as of the guitar's rise.",
      "sources": [
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The nationality of the instrument is attested from inside Spain in 1674, and as a foreign usage. Gaspar Sanz opens the second leaf of his prologue: \"Los Italianos, Franceses, y demàs Naciones, la graduan de Española a la Guitarra; la razon es, porque antiguamente no tenia mas que quatro cuerdas, y en Madrid el Maestro Espinel, Español, le acrecentó la quinta, y por esso, como de aqui, se originò su perfeccion. Los Franceses, Italianos, y demàs Naciones, a imitacion nuestra, le añadieron tambien a su Guitarra la quinta, y por esso la llaman Guitarra Española.\" What the page establishes is the usage and its Spanish explanation in 1674, not the truth of the explanation.",
      "sources": [
        "sanz-instruccion-musica-guitarra-1674"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The attribution of the fifth course to Vicente Espinel is repeated by both Spanish witnesses read here and is not established by either. Sanz gives no source for it and could not have observed it. Mariano Soriano Fuertes repeats it in the same terms in his nineteenth-century Historia de la música española — \"á este instrumento es sabido que nuestro célebre Vicente Espinel le añadió la quinta cuerda, y muy modernamente se le añadió la sexta\" — which is a second Spanish repetition, not a second witness. Sanz's own page argues against it in passing: three paragraphs later he describes a book already in print in Barcelona by Juan Carlos Amat, a doctor of medicine, \"con titulo de Guitarra Española\", teaching the instrument through two circles of twelve natural and twelve flattened chords — that is, a complete five-course chordal system already published and taught. This object therefore makes no finding on who added the fifth course, and notes that no modern organological study was among the sources opened for it.",
      "sources": [
        "sanz-instruccion-musica-guitarra-1674",
        "soriano-fuertes-historia-musica-espanola-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.5
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Sanz himself refused the question of origins, and did so in the first paragraph of his prologue: \"Vnos linajudos de Instrumentos han querido buscar el solar, y genealogía a la Guitarra, y desenterrando huessos en sus instentinos sonoros, no han averiguado el intento. Solo digo, que en España es muy antiguo este Instrumento.\" A practitioner declining to supply a pedigree is a useful counterweight to the pedigrees later supplied on his behalf.",
      "sources": [
        "sanz-instruccion-musica-guitarra-1674"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The 1674 book is a teaching method, and its title page says what it contains: Instrvccion de mvsica sobre la gvitarra española, y metodo de svs primeros rvdimentos, hasta tañerla con destreza, with two \"laberintos ingeniosos\", a variety of sones and dances \"de rasgueado, y punteado, al estilo Español, Italiano, Francès, y Inglès\", and a brief treatise on accompanying from the bass — \"sobre la parte\" — for guitar, harp and organ, reduced to twelve rules with examples of counterpoint and composition. It was composed by the licenciado Gaspar Sanz, an Aragonese from the villa of Calanda, bachiller in theology of the University of Salamanca, and printed at Zaragoza by the heirs of Diego Dormer in 1674. The instrument Covarrubias had dismissed as strumming was being taught in print as plucked polyphony and figured-bass accompaniment within one lifetime.",
      "sources": [
        "sanz-instruccion-musica-guitarra-1674"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Sanz's own page also shows that the guitar was already an international printed literature before he wrote, and that his edge over it was pedagogical rather than national. He names his predecessors and ranks them — Foscarini, \"que en sus Obras se intitula el Academico Caliginoso\", Caspergier, Pelegrin, Granada, Lorenço Fardino, \"y vltimamente Francisco Corbeta, el mejor de todos\" — and complains that none of them \"trae bastantes reglas\", that at most they teach the player to perform their own pieces, that none gives a rule for composing without the master at hand, and that being foreigners they teach beginners in the tunes of their own country when a learner needs \"los mismos sones, y canciones que de ordinario oyen\". His verdict on Amat's Barcelona book is of the same kind: \"es muy bueno, pero corto\".",
      "sources": [
        "sanz-instruccion-musica-guitarra-1674"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The identification of the vihuela with the guitar, common in later writing, was already being contested in Spain in the nineteenth century. Soriano Fuertes argues at pages 206-207 that the two were never the same: violas and vihuelas are classified as bowed and hand-played and guitars are not, which he takes as reason to think the guitar a different instrument; vihuelas de mano were played punteadas and guitars rasgueadas \"hasta últimos del siglo pasado\"; the vihuela, on Sebastián Castellanos's account, carried metal strings struck with a quill or metal plectrum while the guitar carried gut; and he concludes \"que de la vihuela no salió la guitarra... porque al mismo tiempo y en el siglo XIV teníamos ya guitarras árabes y latinas, y vihuelas de arco y de mano\". The confidence here is low and deliberately so: this is a patriotic national history written before modern organology, arguing partly from dictionary definitions, and it is registered at the lowest reliability of the three sources cited in this object. It is included because a contested point should be shown being contested, not because the argument is settled.",
      "sources": [
        "soriano-fuertes-historia-musica-espanola-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.6
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "Soriano Fuertes is also the witness that the Covarrubias passage was already a stock quotation by the middle of the nineteenth century: he reproduces it almost verbatim — the great loss, the cowbell, the stable boy — and reads it as evidence for his own thesis that the guitars Covarrubias meant were different instruments from the older Arabic and Latin guitars. The reuse is worth recording because it shows how a lexicographer's sneer became the standard citation for the guitar's rise.",
      "sources": [
        "soriano-fuertes-historia-musica-espanola-t1",
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "What this object does not claim. Neither source opened for it says anything about the instrument in the Americas, and no claim is made here about the guitar's passage across the Atlantic or about the American instruments descended from it. Nor is any claim made about the physical construction of surviving instruments, about tuning, or about the six-string guitar of the later eighteenth century, none of which is documented by the pages read.",
      "sources": [
        "sanz-instruccion-musica-guitarra-1674",
        "covarrubias-tesoro-1611-print"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "The question \"why is it called the Spanish guitar\" is normally answered from tertiary summaries that assert the Espinel story as fact and quote Covarrubias second-hand. This object answers it from two printed pages opened and read: Covarrubias's VIGUELA entry of 1611, transcribed with the sentence about the cowbell and the stable boy that everyone paraphrases and few cite, and the second leaf of Gaspar Sanz's prologue of 1674, where the naming is explained from inside Spain as a foreign usage. It then does what the summaries do not: it prints the Espinel attribution at confidence 0.5, shows that Sanz's own page names an earlier Barcelona book already teaching a five-course chordal system, notes that its second witness for Espinel is a nineteenth-century national history rather than an independent source, and adds the entry on the neighbouring page where the same lexicographer complains that the bowed vihuelas were being forgotten too — which turns a story about one instrument's triumph into a record of changing taste.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-18",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/guitarra-espanola",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/guitarra-espanola.json",
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    "name": "The Spanish guitar — how an instrument the lexicographers despised acquired a nationality",
    "description": "In 1611 Covarrubias called the guitar \"no more than a cowbell\", so easy to strum that \"there is no stable boy who is not a guitar player\", and mourned the vihuela it had displaced. In 1674 Gaspar Sanz printed at Zaragoza why Europe called the thing a Spanish guitar, and a method teaching it as literate art. Both pages are read here directly, and together they tell no triumph: the instrument became national because it was popular, and the men who wrote it down disagreed about where it came from.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/guitarra-espanola",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-18",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española, compuesto por el Licenciado Don Sebastian de Cobarruuias Orozco, Capellan de su Magestad, Mastrescuela y Canonigo de la santa Yglesia de Cuenca, y Consultor del santo Oficio de la Inquisicion",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=YsRKAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP5"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Instrvccion de mvsica sobre la gvitarra española; y metodo de svs primeros rvdimentos, hasta tañerla con destreza. Con dos laberintos ingeniosos, variedad de sones, y dances de rasgueado, y punteado, al estilo Español, Italiano, Francès, y Inglès",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=AE0ud0fIgiwC&pg=PP7"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia de la música española desde la venida de los fenicios hasta el año de 1850, tomo I",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=xFKnDSr5JXwC&pg=PA206"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The Spanish guitar — how an instrument the lexicographers despised acquired a nationality"
  }
}