For Rob MacKillop and anyone else interested in the 'Scottish guittar': I just acquired a Victorian reprint of Percy's Reliques after years of looking for one (also got an 1806 3rd edition of Scott's Minstrelsy... printed in Kelso... finally come back home!). Thanks to Neil at Blackfriars Music for spamming about their antiquarian folk music book service. Percy, writing in the mid-1700s, throws in one mention of 'guitar' just as if this was the instrument everyone plays. He's explaining what a veil(le) is, and says it differs from an ordinary guitar by having a wheel turned to sound the strings and keys to play the *chords*. Interesting: so the 1765 reader was assumed to be most familiar with a guitar (not a lute, nor any other instrument) and Percy took it for granted that you play chords to accompany songs. This backs up growing theories that guitars (baroque conventional and 'English' cittern shape) were about as popular in the 1700s as they are today, for much the same purposes. The mention is so casual it's as if no other explanation is needed. He also quotes some great mediaeval sources including a poem which lists musical instruments being used by a group. In this, there are mentioned 'gyternes, fit more for estates, than for tavernes' - making it pretty clear that mediaeval pub duos used gyternes, but these were handmade luthier jobs of a different class! Percy also makes a reference to harps and psalteries in which it is absolutely clear he expects a mediaeval harp to be hair strung (as Welsh harps were). He says the main difference between them is that the psaltery was 'wired' and the harp was 'strung'. David Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
