Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 360
•
Trim: 8½ x 11
978-1-4422-3789-6 • Paperback • August 2015 • $74.00 • (£57.00)
978-1-4422-3790-2 • eBook • August 2015 • $70.00 • (£54.00)
John Schneider is the Grammy-winning guitarist, composer, author, and broadcaster whose weekly television and radio programs have brought the guitar into millions of homes. He holds a doctorate in music and physics from the University College Cardiff (Wales) and music degrees from the University of California and the Royal College of Music in London. He is president emeritus of the Guitar Foundation of America and has published dozens of articles on contemporary guitar music.
Preface to the Second Edition
Section I HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Chapter 1Overview: 1800 to the Present
Section II THE INSTRUMENTS
Chapter 2The Acoustic Guitar
Chapter 3The Electric Guitar
Chapter 4New Developments
Section III THE MUSIC
Chapter 5Timbre and Notation
Chapter 6Pitched Sounds
Chapter 7Microtones
Chapter 8Unpitched Sounds
Chapter 9Electronics
Chapter 10Conclusion
Appendix IRepertoire: Select Chronology Since 1900
Appendix IITriadographs
Recorded Examples
Bibliography
Index
The new edition of John Schneider's The Contemporary Guitar celebrates the author's encyclopedic knowledge of the modern guitar landscape with an information-packed journey through the far regions of musical creativity by leading composers and guitarists of the past fifty years. Using dozens of audio examples and hundreds of illustrations, The Contemporary Guitar explores the physics of sound production and the development of a wild array of guitar designs, from the traditional through the radical. Schneider's brilliant book is mandatory reading for anyone who cares about the explosion of music and ideas that has characterized the guitar in our time.
— David Starobin, guitarist and Grammy-winning record producer
I wish that I were a poet so that I could in a few short words say eloquently all the good things
there are to say about John Schneider’s The Contemporary Guitar. This book is a marvel:
encyclopedic in scope, inter-disciplinary in a way far too little of our standard literature is, and
yet always enlivened by his passion for an immense subject he knows more about than any
of the rest of us. I love opening the doors of this cathedral and wandering about in it! His
lifetime labor of love (now in its most welcome second edition) has given us all a sanctuary of
enlightenment and wisdom.
— Eliot Fisk, concert artist, professor of Guitar, New England Conservatory, Boston; and Universität Mozarteum, Salzburg