Christopher Mallett – Justin Holland

The history of the guitar in the Americas is arguably a story still to be told. Europe is the birthplace of the guitar and where much of the classical guitar’s repertoire is drawn.

Cambridge Guitar Symposium

In 2019, I traveled to Churchill College in the University of Cambridge to interview three of the world’s leading guitar scholars, Christopher Page, James Westbrook, and Erik Stenstadvold in a three-hour-long symposium covering a wide variety of topics ranging from Francisco Corbetta at the Restoration Court, the ebb and flow of the guitar’s popularity over the last four centuries, and the nineteenth century’s fascinating guitar impresario and diarist, Nicolai Petrovich Makarov. The symposium proved that studying the history of the guitar can be interesting, educational, and all the while entertaining.