Baroque guitar

The baroque guitar displaced both the lute and the vihuela through accessibility and versatility. Smaller than its Renaissance predecessors, with five courses of strings instead of six, it could accompany singing, provide percussive strumming for dance music, and perform sophisticated solo repertoire—a range that made it the dominant plucked string instrument from roughly 1600 to 1750.

The instrument's rise coincided with shifting musical aesthetics. Where Renaissance music valued polyphonic complexity, Baroque style emphasized melody with chordal accompaniment—exactly what guitar strumming provided. The rasgueado technique, beating rhythmic patterns across strings, created a driving accompaniment that suited popular and theatrical music.

Guitar tablature books proliferated across Italy, Spain, and France. Gaspar Sanz, Robert de Visée, and Francesco Corbetta wrote for aristocratic patrons and taught techniques that professional performers still study. The guitar became Louis XIV's preferred instrument; it accompanied Italian opera; it traveled to the Americas with colonizers.

The baroque guitar's construction enabled its sound: lighter bracing than modern guitars produced less sustain but more responsiveness to strumming. Double courses (pairs of strings tuned in unison or octaves) created a shimmering quality different from the single-string clarity of modern instruments. The re-entrant tuning—with the fourth course tuned higher than expected—facilitated certain voice-leading patterns.

What displaced the baroque guitar was not competition but evolution. The six-string single-course guitar emerged in the late 18th century, combining the baroque guitar's accessibility with the capacity for more complex textures. Torres's redesign in the 19th century created the modern classical guitar.

The baroque guitar shows how an instrument can dominate by being good enough at many things rather than excellent at one. Its jack-of-all-trades versatility conquered Europe before specialists reclaimed specific niches.