Browsing master luthier Greg Pacetti’s "shop blog" inspired melancholy and joy: melancholy, remembering my long-lost dreams of becoming a rock guitar god (and in sympathy for all who had to see the unfortunate perm I acquired at the time), and joy—bordering on lust— taking in the pictures of the ravishing instruments he creates.
While I was never musically worthy of—or in an income bracket to afford—an instrument like those Pacetti crafts, I was inspired to go on a little meander of musical words, starting with guitar itself.
There is no question that the modern word guitar, which comes to us from the Spanish guitarre, ultimately derives from the Greek kithara (Kih-THAY-ruh), an ancient Greek musical instrument (you would be forgiven for guessing that other similarly named instruments such as sitar and zither share this origin, but in fact the commonality there is the tar suffix, an Arabic word for string). At any rate, the seven-stringed kithara, which looks like a small harp, was a virtuoso’s version of the lyre, a similarly shaped two-stringed folk instrument. The kithara, though, was mostly employed by professional performers called kitharodes. Mastery of the kithara, forerunner to the guitar, was considered so challenging that the Greek deity Apollo, god of music, truth, prophecy and healing—is often depicted playing one in much the same way I picture Robert Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix jamming in the ballroom of the six-string version of Mt. Olympus.
But someone has to build the instruments these modern gods make their music with, and makers of guitars are a kind of luthier, a term whose roots were murky but which I suspected was unrelated to Martin Luther and Lutheranism, the only words that came to mind of similar construction.
The title of luthier, a maker of stringed instruments, particularly of the violin and guitar families (aka the craft of lutherie), is derived from the word lute, the pear-shaped, guitar-like instrument that was particularly popular from the 14th-17th centuries and at Renaissance fairs and on television shows like Black Adder today. The original luthier was, literally, a crafter of lutes.
And lute has an interesting history as well, being an adaptation of earlier French and Provençal terms leüt and laüt, all of which go back to the Arabic al-´ūd (literally "the wood," or a piece of wood). Thanks to a process called re-bracketing—the same thing we see in the English word apron, which is basically a mis-division of the phrase "a napron"—the Western pronunciation of the Arabic al-´ūd became "a l´ūd and finally lute. While in Arab countries, no rebracketing occurred and the oud (O-U-D), a kind of cross between a lute and a mandolin, remains a popular instrument there today.
Many more common words with musical roots—or that serve purposes both musical and not—have become part of our lexicon. Psalm, for instance, comes from the Greek psallein (P-S-A-L-L-E-I-N), to pluck a musical instrument, and chord, originally a shortening of accord, as in agreement, now refers not just to notes in musical harmony, but has uses that span the gamut from geometry, construction and aeronautics to astronomy, computer networking and even keyboarding methods.
Some musical roots, though, are significantly more obscured than others. The gamut (G-A-M-U-T)—or the broad range or scope—that those usages of the word chord span? That’s originally a musical term too! Gamut first referred to the "low G, [the] lowest note in the medieval musical scale" and is a contraction of the Greek letter gamma, used at the time to refer to the note below the A at the beginning of the scale, and ut, the low note on a six-note singing scale based on the initial syllables (ut-re-mi-fa-so-la) of the words of "Ut Queant Laxis" a hymn sung for St. John the Baptist’s Day that happened to feature the notes in ascending order at the beginning of each phrase.
► Ut Queant Laxis](http://ktxc.to/yt-ut-queant-laxis)
Ut queant laxis
resonare fibris,
Mira gestorum
famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes
This loosely translates as: "So that your servants may, with loosened voices, resound the wonders of your deeds, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John."
These syllabic, singable scales for Western music, such as "do re mi etc" are called solfa, named after two of the syllables (sol-fa) in the scale, and to sing them—as Julie Andrews does so memorably in The Sound of Music—is likewise to solfa. The process of creating systems like this—and they naturally exist in many languages around the globe—is called solmization, also derived from two of the common scale syllables, this time sol and mi.
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