1. LITTLE VIRGO

The lute, the guitar’s cousin, is of East Mediterranean origin. Where did the guitar come from? One proposed lineage begins in the twelfth century with the Greek kithara and suggests that this eventually became the early guitar used by troubadours in southern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Another theory has the guitar deriving from the so-called Moorish Guitar and arriving in Europe through Spain. The earliest printed guitar music (for a four-stringed instrument) was published around 1550. Other early guitars became popular in Europe under a variety of names, most notably the Spanish vihuela, for which a great deal of music from the sixteenth century survives. That instrument was referred to as the virguela in ballads of the Sephardic Jews of Turkey and Crete. The cittern, also known as the ‘English Guitar’, was a well-known oval-shaped guitar of the time.