At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the classical guitar finds itself at a level of quality and popularity that was unimaginable even fifty years earlier. There are scores of degree programs in the United States alone, major and minor record labels keep increasing their catalog of guitar recordings, and a growing number of international competitions are being won by young players of astounding technical facility. The ubiquitous Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez is one of the most popular concertos for any instrument of the twentieth century, new music ensembles commonly include the guitar, and virtually every major composer of our time now attempts to write for the instrument. In fact it can be argued that, for the first time, the current repertoire and performance level of the guitar rival that of any instrument. And such is the embarrassment of riches that many players are seeking out unique corners of the repertoire, becoming specialists in transcription, or nineteenth-century repertoire, or new chamber music. In short, guitarists face the daunting task of finding a voice in this crowded field, which is populated by relatively young players and teachers. But even the youngest players seem to be unfazed, as the number of students entering academic institutions to study the guitar, against all financial reasoning, appears steady.

In this chapter I will connect the major points of the guitar's extraordinary development in the twentieth century, and discuss what are, to me, some of the most promising developments for the future. Since I am foremost a performer, recording artist, and teacher of the guitar – not a musicologist – this essay reveals the thoughts of a player trying to realize his own vision of the instrument. Consequently, this is a personal, rather than an objective view.

APPROACHING LUTHER’S ETHICAL THOUGHT

A proper understanding of Luther's ethical thought is hampered in two ways. First, contemporary ideas of ethics as a discipline in its own right, when projected back on to Luther, are likely to fail, as his ethical thought cannot be separated from doctrinal considerations within the whole scope of his theology. Instead of singling out his “ethics,” then, we must rather explore his “moral theology,” the web of theological thought of which the texture of his moral ideas is composed.

The second complicating factor is that Luther's ethic has elicited a degree of passionate apologetic and repudiation rare among theological ethics, and thereby has been exceptionally exposed to one-sided and distorted interpretations. Consequently, no account of his moral theology can be given without some engagement with those interpretations and their problematic claims.

A look at the history of the reception of Luther’s theology arouses our suspicion of monistic accounts such as Hegel’s Luther of “freedom,” Karl Holl’s Luther of “conscience” ormany a theologian’s Luther of “justification.” These fall short not because they overemphasize one aspect of Luther’s thought to the disadvantage of others, but because they fail, in most cases, to do justice to the very concept focused on. Hegel, for example, was not wrong to present Luther’s theology as a theology of freedom; rather, his account of freedom was flawed because his portrayal of Luther as the founding father of modern individualism by virtue of his superseding traditional authority could not be reconciled with Luther’s strong theological concept of authority.

The pioneers

A century ago, the first strains of blues guitar echoed across the American South. While the style's exact origins are lost in the distant traditions of field hollers and work songs, African influences, spirituals, ragtime, minstrel tunes, folk and pop fare, parlor instrumentals, and other musical forms, one thing is certain: From the beginning, the blues and the guitar have traveled side by side.

The earliest reported sighting of a blues performance occurred in 1903, when bandleader W. C. Handy was awakened in the Tutwiler, Mississippi train station by the strange sounds of a ragged black guitarist. “As he played,” Handy wrote in his autobiographical Father of the Blues, “he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by the Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly: ‘Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.“ The man was singing about Moorehead, Mississippi, where the Southern Railroad crossed the Yazoo–Delta Railroad, “the Yellow Dog.” Once Handy began orchestrating “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” and other popular black folk tunes, his bookings increased. His conclusion? “Negroes react rhythmically to everything. That's how the blues came to be.” Handy also described the fundamental structure of the blues which has remained a constant for almost a hundred years: “The songs consisted of simple declarations expressed usually in three lines and set to a kind of earth-born music that was familiar throughout the Southland.”

Martin Luther is famous as reformer, theologian, professor, translator, prodigious author, and polemicist. He is well known as hymn-writer, musician, friend of students, mentor of pastors, and pastor to countless clergy and laity. Yet he saw himself first of all as a preacher even though his only income came from his professorship at the University of Wittenberg.

No matter what else he was involved in, Luther preached, usually in Wittenberg's Stadtkirche. Unless he was away from home, he was in the pulpit at least as often as the congregation's pastor. Wherever he traveled, the local clergy insisted that Doktor Martin deliver the sermon.

Luther’s preaching ministry was remarkable, his productivity prodigious – almost miraculous. In the midst of lecturing, protesting against churchly abuses, translating, writing scores of theological treatises, adjusting to marriage and children, carrying on a voluminous correspondence, and attending almost endless meetings and conferences, in 1528 he preached nearly two hundred times in spite of severe headaches and dizzy spells. On forty days that year he preached twice; most years he preached over a hundred times. Among the slower years were 1522 with only forty-six sermons, and 1540 with forty-three. Of the approximately 4,000 sermons he preached in his lifetime, about 2,300 have been preserved in some form.

YEARS AS A STUDENT

From the outside, Luther's life passed by simply and steadily. With few exceptions, his whole life took place within the territories of Thuringia and Saxony, mostly in Wittenberg, the electoral capital at the Elbe river, and its surroundings. Only a few journeys led Luther beyond this small sphere of life: on behalf of his order to Rome (1510/11), to Cologne (1512) and Heidelberg (1518); later on behalf of a Reformation consensus to Marburg (1529), and also on his own behalf to Augsburg (1518) and Worms (1521). Equally, with regard to his profession, Luther's was a remarkable and steady character. From entering the monastery through to his last moment, Luther always remained a man of the word: as a preacher, professor and writer.

During Luther’s life the horizon of world history and humanities was in the process of becoming radically changed. The following names must stand for many others representing this era: the two emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, the popes Leo X, Clemens VII and Paul III (Council of Trent), as well as the names of such artists and scientists as Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer, Copernicus and Paracelsus. However, as far as Luther is concerned these changes could be deceptive because his childhood and youth had not been touched by the spirit of humanism or of the Renaissance. Limited to the provincial surroundings of his hometown, Luther grew up as a typical child of the late Middle Ages – just like thousands of other boys around him.

Accidents will happen

Did rock and roll guitar emerge by accident? Certainly the creation of rock and roll itself was a complex phenomenon indicative of the shifting tides of race, class, and popular music in the mid-twentieth century United States. And yet, amidst the broader historical currents that one might consider in any rock and roll chronicle, there also exist the odd details and apparent accidents that can be seen to have made all the difference in the world. Take, for instance, the 1951 recording of “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston with Ike Turner and his Rhythm Kings. Said by many historians to have been the first bona fide rock and roll recording, “Rocket 88” achieved much of its distinctive sound from an accident that happened on the way to the Memphis recording studio run by Sam Phillips. Guitarist Willie Kizart's amplifier fell from the roof of the band's car, leaving the amp with a burst speaker cone. Lacking the time and the resources to fix it, Phillips and the band began experimenting, and after a while found that the fuzzy tone produced by the broken speaker sounded good, giving Kizart's electric guitar a heavier sound that was almost more like a saxophone than a guitar, but was also thoroughly electric. With this unique electric guitar sound holding down the bottom end of the song, “Rocket 88” took shape as a song with as much drive as the car about which Jackie Brenston sang, and laid some of the groundwork for the reconstruction of rhythm and blues that would subsequently become known as rock and roll.

In 1517, Martin Luther did not intend to start a revolution, but start one he most certainly did. By the time of his death, the religious, social, and political map of Europe was unalterably changed. Luther erupted on to the scene at a decisive moment. The Holy Roman Empire in the early sixteenth century was a society in flux; old orders were giving way to a yet-to-be determined new order. Economically, northern Europe was recovering from the decimation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its recovery, however, was dramatically different from what had preceded it. It was now more urban than rural, more based in manufacturing than agriculture. Politically, the greater nobles and the Free Imperial cities tried to stave off attempts at centralization by the emperor, while lesser nobles and rural towns tried to maintain their status as the economic world changed around them and thus marginalized them. Socially, the urbanization brought both a new middle class and at the same time a more entrenched poverty. Meanwhile, peasants had been chafing under the bit of serfdom for more than a century and a half. They were in search of justice and desperate for hope. Religiously, people both resented and depended upon the church. They resented the church because it controlled so much of the land and took too much in tax. They, however, depended on the church as the only avenue to salvation. It is little wonder, then, why Luther’s religious message struck chords on many levels. Many people heard the religious message, but could not miss its social and political import.

Like a storm wind, the words and images of Martin Luther swept across early sixteenth-century central Europe, decisively altering public life in German, Scandinavian, and Baltic lands, and even among peoples in Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, where the Counter-Reformation later diminished his influence considerably. Luther's enemies viewed the currents aroused by his writings and his popularity among common folk and intellectuals as demonically destructive; his supporters experienced them as divine intervention for a beleaguered society and a tyrannized church.

THE ANGEL OF THE APOCALYPSE, THE GERMAN HERCULES – TEACHER AND PASTOR

Historical personages always take on a new life in the traditions that convey their personalities and thought to succeeding generations. Twentiethcentury scholars sometimes complained that the images of Luther and the summaries of his theology which have helped shape Western culture and Christian thinking do not accurately reflect the “real” reformer, but such is always true. Intensifying this commonplace in Luther’s case is the fact that already during his lifetime his contemporaries experienced him as “larger than life.”

INTRODUCTION

With Martin Luther a parting of the ways is inevitable. To some he was a religious genius or German hero, others saw in him the destroyer of the Western church and with it the associated inseparable unity of empire and nation. Curiously enough there is no firm historical verification of Luther's self-understanding that could possibly be condensed into one characteristic keyword - despite a multitude of self-statements and a deep reflection on his own thoughts and actions going far beyond the usual measure. Luther pictures himself in various positions and taking on many different tasks. Thus the programmatic change of his name already reveals a fundamental insight behind it: Luder - in late medieval High German bearing the connotation of such words as “dirt” and “garbage” - is changed into eleutherius or Luther - “the liberated and at the same time Christ's servant and prisoner.” This gives us a hint of his future insight – extensively formulated in a style of paradox later on – into God’s justifying action and the resulting knowledge of the complete inability of humans to act independently in accord with a requisite obedience to God and love for one’s neighbor. At the same time Luther stresses over and over again his dignity and position as a Master of Holy Scripture, which to him embodied the ultimate authority and therefore also served him as the unquestionable basis for any theological argument.

Three chords

In late 1976, one of the first punk rock fanzines laid out a veritable philosophy of rock aesthetics in a graphic message. Three roughly drawn chord diagrams laid across the page, showing the readers how to finger the A, E, and G chords on the fretboard of a guitar. Accompanying the chords was a simple message: “This is a chord … This is another … This is a third … Now form a band.” The message was clear: rock music, and rock guitar playing in particular, did not have to be predicated upon the foregrounding of virtuosity. After all, despite the claims of such purveyors of “art rock” as Yes and Genesis, or such heroic guitar idols as Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore, rock was not made to be “art” in any conventional sense of the term; not without cause did Chuck Berry tell Beethoven to roll over so many years earlier. Rock was meant to be basic, simple, unschooled, or else it risked losing touch with the elemental core of emotion that sparked the best rock and roll. Forming a punk band, then, should only require the most elementary skills. Three-chord song structures were at the heart of the rock and roll form, so three chords were all that any guitarist should need to put songs together and play in a band.

The renunciation of virtuosity among punk guitarists was not as all-encompassing as has often been portrayed. Depending on how broadly or narrowly one defines punk (or indeed, how one defines virtuosity), the moment of punk’s formation in the mid- to late 1970s included such formidable guitar talents as Robert Quine, of Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television. Nevertheless, declarations of the power of simplicity such as the above pronouncement were a powerful ideological tool in the efforts among punk bands, fans, and critics to break away from the dominant currents of 1970s rock music. Even if all punk guitarists did not shun the acquisition of musical technique, most questioned the uses to which that technique had been put in recent years, when musical ability had played into the hierarchical separation between rock audiences and musicians.

THE BIBLE AS A MIRROR OF THE WORLD

The philologist Friedrich Nietzsche maintained that Luther's translation of the Bible was “the best German book.” In connection to Luther's work, Goethe designated the Bible a “mirror of the world” and thereby saw the world of this one book and the “book of the world” enfolded within each other.

Researchers of the German language are to a great extent agreed that Luther, not only with his translation of the Bible but also with his prefaces to the Bible, sermons, Small Catechism, and his songs, pamphlets, and tracts, is an event in the history of German literature to which no other can be compared. The event is of speech that comes out of hearing. Luther is linguistically creative by means of hearing and translating.

To recognize Luther’s significance for the German language, one must not, as has indeed happened, make Luther into the creator of the modern High German literary language. Nevertheless, Klopstock wrote that among no nation has a single person so shaped the language of a whole people as Luther has done. In fact, Luther’s language – above all the language of his translation of the Bible – became the presupposition of understanding and communication throughout the whole of the German language.

Guitar chords with a flurry of strummed strings – sonorities we now regard as commonplace – revolutionized the sound of music at the end of the 1500s and opened up a new universe of musical thought in Western culture. Melody and counterpoint had reigned supreme throughout the Renaissance as the principal musical aspects of a composition, but around 1600 their role was challenged by a startling new concept – harmony. Whereas previously music consisted of horizontal melodic threads interwoven into a lush polyphonic fabric (in which harmonies arose merely as an incidental byproduct), a new school of thought in the seventeenth century held that a work could be governed from the outset by its harmony. Chords were the starting point of a composition, not an afterthought. The vertical alignment of sounds, as opposed to the horizontal, became paramount. No instrument better represents this radical transformation than the guitar, which was at the forefront of this aesthetic revolution from the horizontal to the vertical. This shift is born out in the guitar's early notational systems, performance techniques, musical repertoire, and functional roles in society.

Equally importantly, the guitar found itself in the center of the social turmoil and upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the 1500s, the guitar was a lowbrow instrument that was overshadowed by the more sophisticated vihuela and lute. But in the 1600s, the guitar was elevated from the culture of the street to that of the royal courts. No longer confined to such venues as neighborhood barber shops or gypsy camp fires, the guitar now found itself equally at home on the operatic stage or in the hands of kings and queens. In the 1700s, traditional European class systems were turned topsy-turvy by scientific advances, a transformed economy based on industrial technologies as opposed to agricultural production, a burgeoning middle class, and world explorations that opened the door for the ensuing interactions of continents and cultures.

Martin Luther was a theologian of remarkable rhetorical gifts who developed and displayed his theology in the give-and-take of ferocious, published debate; he was one of Christianity's great polemicists. In this chapter, we explore the role of printing, the world view that grounded Luther's polemical approach, the developments in the larger Reformation movement that shaped the approach and style of polemical contests, and the interpretive challenges posed by the polemics of the older Luther.

During Luther’s lifetime the Reformation went through two phases that shaped the character of Luther’s controversial writings and their audience. In the first phase Luther defined a movement. He addressed most of his polemics to an empire-wide audience of readers and auditors. He pointed out the failings within the papally controlled Catholic Church and advocated reforms based on his understanding of the gospel. He attacked, but he also sought to persuade, to educate, and to inform. His main authority was Scripture.

In the second phase Luther was engaged in building and defending an institution. He addressed most of his polemics to readers and auditors who were already Evangelicals or more narrowly Lutherans. He continued to explain and educate but spent proportionately more effort exhorting his co-religionists. He continued to appeal to Scripture but supplemented these appeals with claims to personal authority based on his unique role within an Augustinian view of history.