Talk:Vicente Espinel

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I am a student and admirer of Vicente Espinel and of the Espinela and at the same time a student of the evolution of the guitar. Upon reading the Wikipedia entry on Vicente Espinel, I came upon the sentence, He is credited with the addition of the 5th string to the guitar. This is a very old and familiar canard, passed along freely as fact among admirers of Espinel and his work who are not knowledgeable about the evolution of the guitar in Europe. The precise wording of the myth in the entry reflects precisely the common way the myth is worded in Spanish: A Espinel se le atribuye haberle añadido la quinta cuerda a la guitarra.

The myth can easily be disproved, however. First, there was never a five-string guitar in Europe, but rather a 5 course guitar, consisting of between 9 and 10 strings. Second, the Spanish composer and music theorist Juan Bermudo (1510-1565) evidenced the existence of the five course guitar in 1555—in his treatise Declaración de Instrumentos Musicales—5 years before Espinel’s birth in 1550. So clearly, the popular attribution of increasing the guitar’s stringing from 4 courses to 5 to Espinel is false.

^[1] cumpiano (talk) 17:56, 9 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

^ Tom and Mary Anne Evans, Guitars: From the Renaissance to Rock, London: Paddington Press, 1977, p. 24: "The first incontrovertible evidence of five-course instruments can be found in Miguel Fuenllana's Orphenica Lyre of 1554, which contains music for a vihuela de cinco ordenes. In the following year Juan Bermudo wrote in his Declaracion de Instrumentos Musicales: 'We have seen a guitar in Spain with five courses of strings.' Bermudo later mentions in the same book that 'Guitars usually have four strings,' which implies that the five-course guitar was of comparatively recent origin, and still something of an oddity."

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[1] Tom and Mary Anne Evans, Guitars: From the Renaissance to Rock, London: Paddington Press, 1977, p. 24: "The first incontrovertible evidence of five-course instruments can be found in Miguel Fuenllana's Orphenica Lyre of 1554, which contains music for a vihuela de cinco ordenes. In the following year Juan Bermudo wrote in his Declaracion de Instrumentos Musicales: 'We have seen a guitar in Spain with five courses of strings.' Bermudo later mentions in the same book that 'Guitars usually have four strings,' which implies that the five-course guitar was of comparatively recent origin, and still something of an oddity."

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