A History of the Classical Guitar: Courses, Torres, Concert Tradition and Nylon Strings

The Metropolitan Museum of Art traces written guitar sources to the fourteenth century. Renaissance guitars often had four courses and Baroque guitars five, with pairing common. A course is one playable unit: it can contain a single string or strings placed together and played as a group. Course count and total string count therefore need separate descriptions. The Met’s guitar dated about 1800 is explicitly catalogued as a six-string, single-course instrument.

Many plucked instruments existed across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and broad origin stories often overstate a direct line from one ancient object to the modern guitar. The reliable history follows documented instruments, music and workshops rather than visual resemblance alone.

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, six single strings were becoming established. Workshops developed fixed frets, saddle bridges, raised fingerboards and changing body proportions. Composers and performers such as Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani worked with early nineteenth-century guitars whose layouts preceded the later Spanish concert format. The change was gradual across workshops, rather than a universal conversion on one date.

The move from paired courses to six single strings simplified tuning, articulation and maintenance while expanding melodic and harmonic control. The familiar E–A–D–G–B–E tuning became a durable standard, though local and historical alternatives remained.

Nineteenth-century players wrote studies, chamber music, songs and solo works that treated the guitar as more than accompaniment. The instrument flourished in domestic and salon settings, but its limited projection remained a challenge in the larger concert culture of the Romantic period.

Makers therefore searched for more responsive soundboards, stable necks, useful scale lengths and bodies capable of filling a room without becoming structurally heavy. These pressures prepared the ground for the Spanish concert guitar.

Antonio de Torres Jurado worked in Spain during the middle and later nineteenth century. The Met places the start of his work in the 1850s and describes his concert guitars as a culmination of earlier changes in body size, soundboard design and construction. Torres refined a larger concert format and used fan bracing to support the top.

It is safer to say that Torres standardized and demonstrated a highly influential system than to claim he invented every feature. Fan bracing existed in related forms, and other makers contributed. His instruments showed how body geometry, light construction and soundboard control could produce a stronger concert voice.

Later Spanish workshops, including the Ramírez tradition and makers such as Santos Hernández, developed the system further. Torres became a benchmark because his design logic proved transferable, not because every later classical guitar copied identical measurements.

Francisco Tárrega helped establish modern technique and repertoire at the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, Andrés Segovia expanded the guitar's international concert presence, encouraged new compositions and worked closely with makers. The Met preserves the 1912 Manuel Ramírez guitar associated with his early career and the 1937 Hermann Hauser guitar he later used extensively.

Design developed through collaboration between performers and workshops. Players communicated requirements for projection, balance, sustain and response; makers interpreted them through body structure, bracing, scale and workmanship. Concerts, recordings and teaching helped spread the resulting instruments and repertoire.

Segovia was influential, but classical-guitar history is larger than one performer. Regional schools, women performers and composers, Latin American traditions, flamenco practice and many workshops also shaped technique and repertoire.

The Met dates the Ramírez / Hernández guitar to 1912 and the Hauser guitar to 1937; those are object dates. Its Hauser record describes Segovia’s use from 1938 to 1962. Making a guitar, first acquiring it and using it in concert are separate events, so the object date should not stand in for all three.

Flamenco makers and players developed instruments optimized for quick attack, rhythmic clarity and physical techniques such as golpe. Traditional examples often use light construction, cypress back and sides and a protective tap plate. Classical concert guitars often prioritize sustain, balance and a broader color range.

The categories overlap. Spruce, cedar, cypress and rosewood do not create guaranteed outcomes by themselves, and modern makers build many hybrids. Construction, top stiffness, action and the player's touch matter more than a single material label.

This history explains why “Spanish guitar,” “classical guitar” and “flamenco guitar” can overlap in conversation but should not be treated as exact synonyms when selecting an instrument.

Earlier classical guitars used gut trebles with wound bass strings. Augustine’s own history describes gut shortages in the 1940s and Albert Augustine’s refinement of DuPont nylon monofilament with feedback from Andrés Segovia. It also describes nylon multifilament bass cores wound with metal. That is the maker’s account of its own development work; the cited page does not establish one first date for all nylon experiments, performances or commercial launches.

Nylon improved consistency and durability, but it did not turn every classical guitar into the same system. String diameter, tension, polymer formulation and winding affect feel, intonation and response. Fluorocarbon and composite materials later expanded the options.

The term “nylon-string guitar” now includes traditional classical, flamenco, crossover, cutaway acoustic-electric and thin-body stage instruments. Their shared string family does not erase differences in neck, body, bracing or intended technique.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century builders have explored lattice bracing, double tops, alternative composites, elevated fingerboards, arm bevels and new neck structures. Some designs seek more projection or balance; others prioritize weight, comfort, climate stability or amplification. None has made the Torres tradition irrelevant, and historical construction remains active.

Crossover guitars use narrower nuts, radiused fingerboards, cutaways or onboard electronics to serve steel-string and electric players. They can be useful tools, but they do not automatically provide the spacing or response expected in formal classical study. The intended repertoire and teacher's requirements matter.

History should therefore guide comparison rather than enforce purity. A traditional instrument, flamenco guitar and stage nylon solve different problems within a related family.

The classical guitar developed through courses, six single strings, nineteenth-century concert design, performer-maker collaboration and synthetic strings. Torres established a central construction reference, while later workshops and performers carried it into international concert practice.

Modern classical, flamenco and crossover guitars are related outcomes of that history. The useful lesson is not that one historic specification is mandatory, but that string system, soundboard, body, neck and technique must work together for the intended musical role.