IELTSwithJurabek

PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

The history of the guitar

An overview of the origins of the modern guitar

The earliest stringed instruments currently known to archaeologists are bowl harps. For millennia, people made bowl harps using, for example, tortoise shells as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such harps from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500-2000 BC more advanced harps, such as the beautifully carved 11-stringed instrument found in the tomb of Queen Shub-Ad in ancient Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq, started to appear.

The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp. It was different from the bowl harp in that its neck was straightened out to allow the strings to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt indicate that harps and tanburs, plus flutes and percussion instruments, were being played together 3,500-4,000 years ago. Archaeologists have also found many similar relics amongst the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation. Many of these instruments have survived into modern times in almost unchanged form, for example folk instruments of the region such as the Turkish saz and Afghan panchtar.

At 3,500 years old, the tanbur which belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose is the earliest known example of this instrument. Har-Mose's tanbur had three strings and a plectrum suspended from the neck by a cord. The soundbox, which increased the volume, was made of beautifully polished cedarwood and covered in rawhide. It can be seen today at the Archaeological Museum in Cairo.

In order to distinguish guitars from other stringed instruments, it is helpful to have a broad definition of the guitar. Music expert Dr Michael Kasha defines a guitar as having a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with sides that curve inwards. The oldest known visual representation of such an instrument is a stone carving at Alaca Huyuk in Turkey, which shows a 3,300-year-old instrument with a long neck and sides that clearly curve inwards.

The name guitar comes from the ancient Sanskrit word for string, tar. Many popular stringed instruments used in central Asia today have existed in an unchanged form for several thousand years, as shown by archaeological finds in the area. Many have names that end in tar, with a prefix indicating the number of strings, such as the dotar, a two-stringed instrument found in Turkestan, and the Persian three-stringed setar and four-stringed chartar. The Indian sitar almost certainly took its name from the setar, but over the centuries it evolved radically, following the Indians' own aesthetic and cultural ideals.

Tanburs and harps spread around the ancient world with travellers, merchants and seamen. The earliest guitar-like instruments to arrive in Europe had, most often, four strings. Many such instruments, and variations with from three to five strings, can be seen in mediaeval illustrated manuscripts. They were also carved in stone in European churches and cathedrals, from the first century AD through until the 13th century.

When the four-stringed Persian chartar arrived in Spain, however, it changed in form and construction, acquiring pairs of strings tuned to the same note instead of single strings. It became known as the chitarra. By the middle of the 14th century, the chitarra had become dominant, at least in most of Europe. The earliest known music for the eight-stringed chitarra was written in 16th-century Spain. The ten-string version first appeared in Italy at the same time, and gradually replaced the eight-stringed instrument. A further two strings first appeared in the 17th century, an innovation which guitar makers all over Europe quickly took up. However, this twelve-string arrangement gradually gave way to six single strings across the continent. The six-stringed guitar can thus be said to be a development of the twelve-string, rather than vice versa, as was thought previously.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the present-day guitar began to take shape, although bodies were still fairly small and narrow-waisted. The modern classical guitar first appeared in its current form in the mid-19th century, when the Spanish guitar maker Antonio Torres increased the size of the body, altered its proportions, and introduced the revolutionary fan-braced top. His design radically increased the volume and improved the tone of the instrument, and very soon became the norm. This design has remained essentially unchanged to this day.

At the time when Torres made his breakthrough, German immigrants to America, among them Christian Fredrich Martin, began making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings, which became widely available several decades later in the early 1900s, offered the promise of a much louder guitar, but the increased tension was too much for the fan-braced top. The stronger X-braced top proved equal to the job, and quickly became the industry standard.

At the end of the 19th century, guitar manufacturer Orville Gibson added steel strings to a body constructed like a cello, a combination which produced more volume. The electric guitar was born when pickups were fitted to Hawaiian and jazz guitars in the late 1920s, but met with little success until 1936, when Gibson introduced its famous ES150 model.