This chapter introduces the electric guitar in Southeast Asia through its history, cultural and political significance, and signature within locally popular genres of music. For more than seventy years, the electric guitar has been a technology for aesthetic innovation and cultural exchange, inspiring new genres and intraregional scenes, and new playing techniques, instrumentation, and instrument manufacturing and trade. It has also been an agent of transformation for musicians, audiences, and even nations, attending to colliding epochs of decolonization, nation-building, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. It has inspired youth reverie and dissent, and censorship and oppression—a maligned symbol of Western imperialism and an essential tool of expressive freedom. The electric guitar has much to tell us about what Waksman calls “a deeper shift in the cultural disposition toward sound” and noise, as Southeast Asian guitarists have broadened their tonal and timbral palettes with new possibilities in electronic signaling, amplification, and distortion. But it has an equally important role in helping us understand the residual impacts of colonization, the rise of nations and youth cultures, and Southeast Asia’s past, present, and future.

The secondary status of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music is explored with an emphasis on recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, and reggae as the region’s most widely globalized music. Early guitarists in Jamaican popular music, Ernest Ranglin and Lynn Taitt, are referenced, alongside analyses of the instrument in the reggae recordings of The Wailers, and the works of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh featuring other players such as Donald Kinsey in lead guitar roles. The chapter utilizes first-hand interviews with key figures and also focuses on Eddy Grant as one of the most visible Caribbean guitarists through his international pop star career spanning several decades. The twenty-first-century emergence of the Trinidad-based metal act Orange Sky, fusing rock and reggae influences, is also discussed.

Communities of guitarists have existed and evolved in parallel with the instrument’s long and varied historical development. Technological progress in the twentieth century saw two major milestones for the guitar: the invention of the electric guitar, and the birth of the internet. This chapter explores the shift of guitar-based communities to virtual spaces starting with email groups, internet forums, and chat rooms. These communities serve similar functions as real-world communities by sharing knowledge and resources as well as providing spaces for discussions and performances. Peer-to-peer file sharing regenerated an old form of guitar-specific written notation: tablature. Then along came social media, which changed the entire music industry, including online guitar communities. Many of the world’s largest and most visited websites, Facebook, YouTube, X, and Instagram, are havens for guitar communities no longer defined by geographical boundaries. This has had enormous consequences as cultural and aesthetic expressions, particularly in the form of guitar performance practices, are now freely transmitted globally and instantaneously via virtual networks.

This introduction to the Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar offers a concise synopsis of the dominant narrative surrounding the instrument, and establishes the ways in which the current collection seeks to expand the existing framework for considering the electric guitar’s history and cultural impact. It also discusses the provisional development of “guitar studies” as an academic field, highlighting trends in conferences, journalistic and special interest publications, and discussions surrounding music technology, the electric guitar industry, and socio-demographic issues such as gender, race, and age. While electric guitar scholarship has made significant progress, it has not fully established itself as a distinct field. Currently, there is no dedicated journal or professional organization for researchers in this area. “Guitar studies” may not yet have come to fruition, but its foundation is being laid, to which this Cambridge Companion intends to contribute.

This chapter demystifies orchestration by offering insights into how a good understanding of balance, timbre, and instrumental technique is used to imagine and create interesting sonorities. The chapter begins with an overview of the development of the modern orchestra, before explaining how composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have explored the limits of idiomatic instrumental writing to create dramatic and compelling orchestral textures. It concludes with an explanation of how to approach orchestrating from a ‘short’ piano score.

In April 1960, the conductor Kathleen Merritt (1901–85) led an all-woman programme at London’s Wigmore Hall. Despite the fact that concerts entirely of music by women composers had been performed in Britain since at least the 1920s, by 1960 it was still unusual to find a woman’s name on a UK concert programme. Merritt’s concert, therefore, attracted press coverage focusing on her gender, and that of the composers whose music she was performing. In a promotional interview, the Sunday Times gave an account of the conductor that today reads very much like a description of a feminist, declaring: ‘[She] fights not only for women, but for new music by living composers.’1 Merritt herself, however, was adamant that she was ‘not a feminist’.2 The Sunday Times was quick to reassure readers that ‘Merritt has none of the alarming if admirable trappings of women who fight for women’s causes.’3

This chapter uses music analysis to understand two different strategies for unfolding musical material from initial ideas, one by Debussy and the other by Schoenberg. This approach considers how pieces might be formed from a small fragment of musical ‘DNA’ for a composer to expand, before looking further to understand this process of ‘unfolding’ are shaped by different aesthetic, cultural and historical conditions.

From 31 October to 12 December 2015, Rumpsti Pumsti, a record store in Berlin devoted to experimental music and sound art, hosted an exhibition of early works by the German artist Christina Kubisch (b. 1948), one of the world’s foremost sound artists. The Vibrations exhibition focused on a series of works titled Dirty Electronics that Kubisch created between 1975 and 1980 in which she paired orchestral instruments with vibrators. On the floor were four wooden boxes each holding one flute and one vibrator, creating a jittery, buzzing flute quartet. Mounted on one wall was a photograph of a cello with a vibrator held to its strings. On another were technical diagrams. Kubisch, best known for her works with electronics, had produced intricately detailed diagrams of how to construct and use vibrators in various musical settings.

Here we provide space for three living composers to reflect on their careers, and on their works. Together they form an indicator of the ways in which women composers have gained increasing recognition in contemporary culture. Among other distinctions, Nicola LeFanu was featured as Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 to mark her seventieth birthday, while both Roxanna Panufnik and Shirley J. Thompson were among those commissioned to produce new compositions for the coronation of King Charles III (6 May 2023).