HISTORY OF GUITAR

"The classical guitar is a descendant of the lute. It evolved into its modern appearence in Spain in the early 1800's. The man responsible for its modern design was a carpenter namedAntonio de Torres Jurado (1817-1892)". By 1869, when he sold a guitar to Francisco Tarrega, the guitar had been swept out of the drawing room by the piano and had barely established a toehold in the concert hall. In Spain, which had resisted the piano, the guitar was nonetheless associated with peasants, gypsies and those who play for loose change in bars. The most fundamental thing Torres did was to increase the size of the body. Torres' concert guitars, introduced in the early 1850s, have soundboards about 20 per cent larger than those of the concert guitars played by Fernando Sorand Dionisio Aguado a few years earlier - from Guitar101 and Guitar Salon International

As an instrument of classical music, the guitar came to prominence largely through the efforts of the Spanish composer Francisco Tarrega(1852-1909) and the Spanish guitar virtuoso Andres Segovia (1893-1987).