GUITAR

A quick history of one of the world’s most popular musical instruments.

Playing to younger audiences and broad enough to include riffs on the Mesopotamian oud, central Asian tanbur, and the nyatiti—though placing the last generically in “Africa” and otherwise sticking to European and American settings—Houran traces the guitar’s development. Starting with prehistory, her account ends, perhaps prematurely, with the boost electric guitars gave to rock and roll in the 1950s, but that accords with her general theme about how solutions were sought and found in recent times for making the instrument loud enough to be heard in ensembles. Quarles opens with a racially diverse group of people (one in a hijab) listening to recorded music but continues with scenes of musicians who vary in terms of race, gender, and historical era actually playing guitars of various design before closing with an equally inclusive if perfunctory gallery of six “Guitar Greats,” from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Nancy Wilson. Young strummers will find a more thorough overview of guitar types as well as how the instruments are made and played in Patricia Lakin’s Guitar (2021), but here nods to inventors from Antonio de Torres Jurado to George Beauchamp as well as a labeled diagram of parts and a cutaway view of an acoustic body offer at least some specifics about how basic guitar design evolved. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A flurry of bright if sketchy lines, tuned more for budding historians than for musicologists or musicians.