Christopher Page has started his fourth series of free public lectures at the prestigious Gresham College in London. The new series is entitled ‘For Courtesan, Queen and Gallant: The Guitar in England from Henry VIII to Samuel Pepys’. There are four more lectures to come. These events are free to attend, and will also be live-streamed, so anyone can listen in from anywhere! The lectures are illustrated with fabulous musical intermezzi by Taro Takeuchi and Ulrich Wedemeier, and will be made available afterwards on the Gresham College website and on YouTube.

Several of the members of the Guitar Consortium have been involved in the WoodMusICK COST Action FP1302, a 4-year European initiative that finished this year. WoodMusICK aimed to promote knowledge and interdisciplinary dialogue on the study and preservation of wooden musical instruments, bringing together specialists from diverse fields, such as organologists, musicologists, wood scientists, museum curators, conervators, musical instrument makers, acousticians, etc.

WoodMusICK has published proceedings of their conferences, usually containing extended abstracts of each paper, in Open Access booklets, which are available for free downloading here.

WoodMusICK also published a special issue (Wooden Musical Instruments Special Issue) in the Journal of Cultural Heritage, which includes a couple of articles relating to the guitar or other plucked instruments (this is not in Open Access).

A new book on Schubert and the guitar

Italian researcher Nicoletta Confalone, participant in the 2017 Cambridge Cohort for guitar research, has written a new book on the relationship between Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and the guitar. Schubert played the instrument himself, but only wrote minor works for it. Many of his songs though were published early on with guitar accompaniments (by others) and have been performed by voice-guitar duos ever since.

The new book is available with Ut Orpheus Edizioni.

Consortium founder Christopher Page has published a new book with Cambridge University Press: ‘The Guitar in Stuart England. A Social and Musical History’. It can be ordered here:  www.cambridge.org/9781108419789

The new volume (a companion volume to The Guitar in Tudor England) comprises a history of the guitar during the reign of the Stuarts. The book gathers portraits, archival materials and literary works to investigate the guitar’s importance to key figures including Samuel Pepys and King Charles II.

The second Andrew Britton Fellowship winner is Sarah Clarke.  She is currently working on a PhD at the Open University about English amateur guitar players in the long nineteenth century, and  has a particular interest in guitar players and guitar teachers in Victorian England.

The Consortium is very pleased with Sarah as a winner, as in many ways her research continues and extends the enquiries that Andrew Britton pioneered. Sarah Clarke will present a paper at the 2018 meeting of the Consortium.