enaissance (4-course) and baroque (5-course) guitars typically had two gut or wire strings per course, as we have seen. Classic guitars, on the other hand, had from the beginning and still have just one string per "course or per note - indeed, this is virtually part of the definition of the classic guitar. It is even more axiomatic than the sacred number six, which typically, but not invariably, describes the number of strings on the classic guitar.

17th and 18th century guitars originally built with 10-peg tuning heads were often truncated as shown here, pegs 4-7 being looped off, to produce what migth appear to be an unaltered six-string guitar. This has lead to much confusion in the dating of early guitars.

Our previous article dealt with the transition from double to single stringing, offering a representative date, 1774, for what may be the earliest single-string guitar of any kind deliberately made that way. That Gagliano guitar could not have been altered by truncating the tuning head as pictured below (Fig. 1) or by other forms of adaptation, although lopping four pegs off the top of a ten-peg tuning head was a very common and easy method of modifying 17th and 18th-century baroque guitars so that they would appear as genuine classic guitars for six single strings.

Previous writers have often failed to take into consideration this operation when discussing the history of the classic guitar, and have been misled into assuming a much earlier date for the origin of the instrument than corroborating evidence (music, method books, iconography) could possibly substantiate.

Let us consider some of these corroborating documents. In April 1972, Editions Minkoff reprinted in one volume two relevant French guitar methods in facsimile:

[Bailleux, Antoine.I] Methode de Guitare par Musique et Tablature avec differens Exercices . . par Mr. B.D.C. . . Mis au jour par Mr. Bailleux. Paris: Bailleux, s.d. [Datable1766-92 by Hopkinson, dated 1773 by Minkoff.] Lemoine, A. M. Nouvelle Methode courte et facile pour la guitarre a l'usage des cornmencans corn posee par Mr. le Moine Paris: Imbault, s.d. [Datable c. 1808 by Hopkinson.].

The Bailleux method pictures a conventional baroque 10-peg guitar on which only 9 strings are used. The high e (chanterelle), so the author implies, works better as a single string (Fig. 2). Re-entrant tuning is still apparent in his tuning scheme, the fourth and fifth strings being doubled at the octave. Bailleux has now begun to incorporate staff notation ("musique") into his method as well as "tablature," the traditional kind of guitar notation. He uses both in parallel staves throughout his method.

Lemoine, on the other hand, writing perhaps two decades later, has completely forsaken double strings. lie recommends using just five strings on the still normative ten-string instrument (Fig. 3). The lack of a sixth (E) string is further evidenced by his music. Lemoine's "Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman" (Twinkle, twinkle, little star) variations (Fig. 4) only use the upper five strings. And they are notated in what historians of the guitar usually call "violinistic" or "primitive" guitar notation. Its features are the following:

(a) No effort is made to distinguish a melody line from an accompaniment by means of note stem direction. (b) There is no rhythmic independence of parts. A fuller discussion of the development of primitive staff notation for guitar concurrent with the emergence of the classic instrument can be found in my article "The Role of Italy in the Early History of the Classic Guitar . ." in Guitar Review no. 34 (1971): 1-6.