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Performer Guides: Guitar

Use this guide to find resources for music performance, including LC call number browsing ranges for repertoire, books, and journals..

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Finding Repertoire for the Guitar:

If you're looking for new repertoire to perform, it is often helpful to browse the Music Library's scores. The following call number ranges are for guitar music; individual works within these numbers are arranged alphabetically by composer or arranger:

  • M276-M277, Guitar and piano
  • M292-M293, Duets, two plectral instruments
  • M294-M295, Duets, with one stringed instrument
  • M296-M297, Duets, with one wind instrument
  • M1037.4, Guitar with orchestra (full score)
  • M1137.4, Guitar with orchestra (piano reduction)

Etudes and instructional materials are classified in the MT range and housed in the same location as books about music (MLs):

  • MT580 - General Works
  • MT582 - Systems and Methods
  • MT585 - Studies and Exercises

Digital Score Apps:

The Wilson Music Library provides Blair students, faculty, and staff with free access to nkoda and Henle through our subscription. Follow the instructions below to start using these popular apps today.

Selected Books on the Guitar and Guitarists:

The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar

From the first mention in courtly poetry of the thirteenth century to enormous global popularity in the twentieth, the guitar and its development comprises multiple histories, each characterised by distinct styles, playing techniques, repertories and socio-cultural roles. These histories simultaneously span popular and classical styles, contemporary and historical practices, written and unwritten traditions and western and non-western cultures. This is the first book to encompass the breadth and depth of guitar performance, featuring thirteen essays covering different traditions, styles, and instruments, written by some of the most influential players, teachers, and guitar historians in the world. The coverage of the book allows the player to understand both the analogies and differences between guitar traditions, and all styles, from baroque, classical, country, blues, and rock to flamenco, African, Celtic, and instrument making will share the same platform. As musical training is increasingly broadened this comprehensive book will become an indispensable resource.

The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson: Blues, Race, Identity

Lonnie Johnson is a blues legend. His virtuosity on the blues guitar is second to none, and his influence on artists from T-Bone Walker and B. B. King to Eric Clapton is well established. Yet Johnson mastered multiple instruments. He recorded with jazz icons such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and he played vaudeville music, ballads, and popular songs. In this book, Julia Simon takes a closer look at Johnson's musical legacy. Considering the full body of his work, Simon presents detailed analyses of Johnson's music--his lyrics, technique, and styles--with particular attention to its sociohistorical context. Born in 1894 in New Orleans, Johnson's early experiences were shaped by French colonial understandings of race that challenge the Black-white binary. His performances call into question not only conventional understandings of race but also fixed notions of identity. Johnson was able to cross generic, stylistic, and other boundaries almost effortlessly, displaying astonishing adaptability across a corpus of music produced over six decades. Simon introduces us to a musical innovator and a performer keenly aware of his audience and the social categories of race, class, and gender that conditioned the music of his time. Lonnie Johnson's music challenges us to think about not only what we recognize and value in "the blues" but also what we leave unexamined, cannot account for, or choose not to hear. The Inconvenient Lonnie Johnson provides a reassessment of Johnson's musical legacy and complicates basic assumptions about the blues, its production, and its reception.

The Guitar: Tracing the Grain Back to the Tree

Guitars inspire cult-like devotion: an aficionado can tell you precisely when and where their favorite instrument was made, the wood it is made from, and that wood's unique effect on the instrument's sound. In The Guitar, Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren follow that fascination around the globe as they trace guitars all the way back to the tree. The authors take us to guitar factories, port cities, log booms, remote sawmills, Indigenous lands, and distant rainforests, on a quest for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into how guitars are made, where the much-cherished guitar timbers ultimately come from, and the people and skills that craft those timbers along the way. Gibson and Warren interview hundreds of people to give us a first-hand account of the ins and outs of production methods, timber milling, and forest custodianship in diverse corners of the world, including the Pacific Northwest, Madagascar, Spain, Brazil, Germany, Japan, China, Hawaii, and Australia. They unlock surprising insights into longer arcs of world history: on the human exploitation of nature, colonialism, industrial capitalism, cultural tensions, and seismic upheavals. But the authors also strike a hopeful note, offering a parable of wider resonance--of the incredible but underappreciated skill and care that goes into growing forests and felling trees, milling timber, and making enchanting musical instruments, set against the human tendency to reform our use (and abuse) of natural resources only when it may be too late. The Guitar promises to resonate with anyone who has ever fallen in love with a guitar. 

The Guitar in Georgian England: A Social and Musical History

A fascinating social history of the guitar, reasserting its long-forgotten importance in Romantic England This book is the first to explore the popularity and novelty of the guitar in Georgian England, noting its impact on the social, cultural, and musical history of the period. The instrument possessed an imagery as rich as its uses were varied; it emerged as a potent symbol of Romanticism and was incorporated into poetry, portraiture, and drama. In addition, British and Irish soldiers returning from war in Spain and Portugal brought with them knowledge of the Spanish guitar and its connotations of stylish masculinity. Christopher Page presents entirely new scholarship in order to place the guitar within a multifaceted context, drawing from recently digitized original source material. The Guitar in Georgian England champions an instrument whose importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often overlooked.

Guitar: The World's Most Seductive Instrument

Celebrate the significance, the magic, and the mojo of the world's most seductive instrument.   An obsessive, full-color book presented in an irresistible slipcase, Guitar features 200 instruments in stunning detail. Here are icons, like Prince's Yellow Cloud, Willie Nelson's "Trigger," Muddy Water's Thunderbird, and "Rocky," lovingly hand-painted by its owner, George Harrison. Historic instruments--Fender's Broadcaster, Les Paul's "Log," the Gibson Nick Lucas Special, the very first artist model. Hand-carved archtops, pinnacles of the luthier's art, from John D'Angelico to Ken Parker. Stunning acoustics from a new wave of women builders, like Rosie Heydenrych of England, who's known to use 5,000-year-old wood retrieved from a peat bog. And quirky one-of-a-kind guitars, like Linda Manzer's Pikasso II--four necks, 42 strings, and a thousand pounds of pressure.   Marrying pure visual pleasure with layers of information, Guitar is a glorious gift for every guitar-lover

Playing with Ease: A Healthy Approach to Guitar Technique

The music world is full of musicians who sustain injuries of all sorts, triggered by mis-use, technique adjustments, and instrument changes. What's more, the guitar is one of the most difficult musical instruments to play well. In this book, David Leisner, renowned classical guitarist, teacherand composer, offers valuable information, insight and advice on how to make playing easier.Playing with Ease provides a constructive guide to a successful technique, enabling guitarists and other instrumentalists to find the path of least resistance and the ways of playing with the least amount of effort, so that technical security and the most beautiful tone may be accomplished inharmony with the human anatomy. Aspects of Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method and yoga supplement Leisner's own intuitive ideas for a healthy approach to playing the guitar, which can both prevent and cure injury, as well as make practicing and performing a happier experience. There are twochapters devoted to the specifics of right- and left-hand guitar mechanics, with emphasis on anatomical health. The rest of the book, broader in its scope, may be helpful to both guitarists and other instrumentalists alike. Leisner discusses the principles of alignment and movement of the whole bodyas it relates to playing, ways of eliminating specific tension spots, a presentation of some ground-breaking ideas about incorporating the larger muscles for playing an instrument, some tips on effective practicing, and a relaxed approach to concert preparation. Playing with Ease posits ways ofletting go, on every level, and the somewhat radical proposition that freedom of motion is more important than economy of motion.

The Great Jazz Guitarists: The Ultimate Guide

(Book). The prolific Scott Yanow has outdone even himself with this book, the most comprehensive guide to jazz guitarists ever published. With hundreds of dossiers and discographies on every major (and not so major) jazz guitar player of note, arranged in encyclopedia fashion, this is the final stop on anyone's tour of six-string wizards working the swinging side of the street. From Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian to Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin and even Les Paul to Jeff Beck and beyond (not to mention Wes and Barney and everyone in between), The Great Jazz Guitarist hits every note, never sharp or flat, and always with the combination of edge, sensitivity and awe-inspiring depth of knowledge that has made author Yanow one of the most widely read and respected critics and historians in jazz history.

The New Guitarscape in Critical Theory, Cultural Practice and Musical Performance

In The New Guitarscape, Kevin Dawe argues for a re-assessment of guitar studies in the light of more recent musical, social, cultural and technological developments that have taken place around the instrument. The author considers that a detailed study of the guitar in both contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives is now absolutely essential and that such a study must also include discussion of a wide range of theoretical issues, literature, musical cultures and technologies as they come to bear upon the instrument. Dawe presents a synthesis of previous work on the guitar, but also expands the terms by which the guitar might be studied. Moreover, in order to understand the properties and potential of the guitar as an agent of music, culture and society, the author draws from studies in science and technology, design theory, material culture, cognition, sensual culture, gender and sexuality, power and agency, ethnography (real and virtual) and globalization. Dawe presents the guitar as an instrument of scientific investigation and part of the technology of globalization, created and disseminated through corporate culture and cottage industry, held close to the body but taken away from the body in cyberspace, and involved in an enormous variety of cultural interactions and political exchanges in many different contexts around the world. In an effort to understand the significance and meaning of the guitar in the lives of those who may be seen to be closest to it, as well as providing a critically-informed discussion of various approaches to guitar performance, technologies and techniques, the book includes discussion of the work of a wide range of guitarists, including Robert Fripp, Kamala Shankar, Newton Faulkner, Lionel Loueke, Sharon Isbin, Steve Vai, Bob Brozman, Kaki King, Fred Frith, John 5, Jennifer Batten, Guthrie Govan, Dominic Frasca, I Wayan Balawan, Vicki Genfan and Hasan Cihat #65533;rter.