The Guitar Family Tree
A quiz. Fill in the blank: The … Guitar. Right! ‘Spanish’ is the correct answer. This marvelously versatile instrument which has (with the piano) become geographically and stylistically ubiquitous in the contemporary world is indeed from Spain. But its forefathers are from the Middle East. The Arabs brought stringed instruments to the Iberian Peninsula when they arrived in 711CE. Most important among these instruments was the oud (pronounced like ‘dude’ without the first