Quote:
Originally Posted by Archtop Guy
...We are in a new age of quality affordable archtops. Yeah, by all means learn those jazz chords, but you know already, don't limit the guitar to that...
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Gorgeous, Ronbo - I've been looking for one of those myself for a while now...
As far as what type of music to play, if you're
really looking for something out of the ordinary - as well as a new technical challenge - you might want to scout out some of the material from when archtops were the last word in the development of the pure acoustic guitar, roughly 1925-1940; many of the players of the day looked upon them as "serious" or "legitimate" instruments (I got into a major brouhaha with one of my college music professors over his pejorative use of the latter term), treating them as full and equal members of the orchestral string family (the term "orchestra guitar" was in fact often used to describe archtop guitars, well into the 1960's) and either adapting material from the classical repertoire (as did Andres Segovia), or composing new works in the classical idiom. Although this style is all but forgotten today except among hardcore archtop aficionados (and anyone who slogged through the first-edition Mel Bay books of the '50s/'60s) it represents a parallel - and unquestionably American - line of artistic development to the Spanish classical school, imposing its own set of equally rigorous technical and interpretative demands on the player; if your chops and reading skills are up to the task Mel Bay's
Masters of the Plectrum Guitar contains many of the better-known works, in addition to which a number of performances are available on YouTube (search "archtop guitar" and/or Harry Volpe for starters). For the listener this long-lost style of music still retains its considerable emotional power and artistic merit, over seventy-five years after its heyday; one can only wonder what might have been, had the classical archtop guitar realized its full potential, progressed and developed to become the predominant style in serious music circles...