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A Brief History of The Russian Seven-String Guitar

© Copyright 2011 By Matanya Ophee.1

This instrument2 looks like a guitar. Actually, it is a guitar. But there are some differences between this instrument and the one you all play. There are seven strings, and they are tuned in an open chord of G Major, D, G, b, d, b, g, d'. It is not my intention to claim any advantage or superiority for this tuning, but simply to show the difference in sonority, and in the way Russian seven-string guitarists employ the particular attributes of their instrument.

Now let us look at the history. In December of 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Quiskeya and promptly renamed it La Isla Española. Now divided between Haiti and the Dominican republic. Columbus was welcomed to the New World by a group of natives that called themselves the Taino. To Columbus’ Christian eyes, the Taino people looked strange. They were much smaller than the Spaniards, they were brown skinned and they were naked. They also could not speak any European language and they

1 This is the lecture I gave at the 2011 GFA festival in Columbus, GA, on the occasion of receiving the Hall of Fame Award from the GFA. The lecture included several live musical examples played by myself and by my friends Oleg Timofyeev and John Scheiderman. These performances were not recorded and therefore, all references to them have been deleted here.

2 This is a seven-string guitar made for me by Jean Rompré in 2003.

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never heard of Jesus Christ. History records that in trying to convert the Taino to Christianity, Columbus set up a cultural upheaval that ended up with Taino almost entirely wiped out.

A similar cataclysm occurred again in the expedition of another Spanish explorer almost half a millennium later.

On his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1926, Andrés Segovia found himself surrounded by strange guitarists. They played a guitar which had seven strings and was tuned differently than his guitar. While they have heard the names of Sor and Giuliani, and even played their music on this odd-ball instrument, they hardly ever heard the names of Tárrega and Llobet. That was not acceptable to Segovia and he immediately set to convert the Russians to the six-string Spanish guitar. History will record that he was eminently successful in his proselytizing campaign. But as it happened with Columbus before him, Segovia set in motion a process which resulted in the almost total annihilation of a culture which had survived by that time for nearly two hundred years. The Russian seven-string guitar is now as scarce as the Taino Indians of the Caribbean. Today, there are a few seven-string players here and there in Russia, but for the most part, as we have seen from the participation of Russian guitarists in GFA competitions over the years, they play the same instrument as you do, and with few exceptions, they play the same repertoire. In various publications and lectures I have given over the past 28 years, I concentrated my historical analysis of the Russian seven-string guitar on understanding the organological roots for its emergence. The discussion dealt with the inevitable encounter in Russia during the last decades of the eighteenth century between Italian and French guitarists playing the five string guitar tuned in fourths, and German

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and Czech guitarists playing several variants of the English guitar, a six or seven course instrument tuned in thirds.

On the French-Italian side we see people like Giuseppe Sarti, Carlo Cannobio and Jean-Baptiste Hainglaise quickly establishing themselves in Russia. On the German-English side we have

Ignac von Held (1766-1816?)3, a Bohemian musician who was known as a virtuoso on the English guitar. The Russian themselves began publishing music for the Russian guitar, an instrument mounted with seven strings and tuned in a straight G Major chord. The names of Lvov, Kamensky and eventually Sychra,

quickly come to mind. In this lecture today, the emphasis will be on the relationship, both personal and musical, between players of the six-string guitar which the Russians refer to as shestistruniki, sixers for short, and players

3 This alleged portrait of Ignac von Held was published by Anatolii Shirialin in his Poema O Gitare [Поэма О Гитаре], Moscow, 1994. p. 12. Shirialin did not provide any corroborating details about the origins of this portrait, and any authentication that indeed it is a representation of the guitarist.

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of the seven-string guitar, semistruniki in Russian, and which I refer to as seveners.

It is important to note that the major source of our information about musical activity, in any culture and at any time, is mainly drawn from available printed editions, and when available, from manuscripts. Here is, for example,

the title page of an edition of six guitar duos by Jean-Baptiste Hainglaise, a guitarist-composer of whom we know very little. The name could be of French origin, but there is one song by Hainglaise in which he claimed that he was born in England. This work for two five-string guitars dates from about 1799. Notice that even though it was published in St. Petersbourg, at the time, the Capital of Russia, the language used is not Russian, but French. This was the common language of the upper classes, and particularly the nobility and the vast class of chinovniki, civil-servants. They were the main consumers of printed music. The guitar was not known in Russia as a folk instrument until many generations later.

Here is an interesting aspect of this title page:

This is the address line for the Moscow agent of the St. Petersbourg publisher Dalmas. It says: Chez Monsieur Allart et Compagnie, à la Loubianka. As we know, the Loubianka today is not a music store, but rather the infamous headquarters for the KGB. But I digress.

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Here is another publication, a Sonata for guitar with violin accompaniment by Kamensky, published in Moscow in the same year, 1799. As far as we know, this is the earliest publication of music for the 7-string guitar.

This is the title page of the Six Sonatas for guitar with violin accompaniment by the Italian Carlo Cannobio, published in St. Petersbourg also in 1799.

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On the left side of this image we have a Spanish Fandango, composed by Cannobio, an Italian composer, and published in Russia. On the right side we have the first page of the guitar part of the Kamensky sonata. It is remarkable that neither edition specified the type of guitar for which it was intended. The Cannobio is clearly for the five string guitar, and as I mentioned before, the Kamensky is for the seven-string. On closely examining each of these two works, it appears that both could be easily performed on either instrument, albeit with some minor modifications.

As in France at about the same time frame, guitar music publishing in Russia at the turn of the 19th century was divided between editions that contained a single composition by one composer, and at the same time, a series of musical journals that were made up of small anthologies of simple pieces aimed at the low end of the amateur market. This is the title page of such a journal published in 1812 in St. Petersburg.

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This time, the title-page clearly specifies the six-string guitar as the intended instrument, even though the five-string variety was known to be in circulation well into the end of the same decade. Another interesting aspect of this journal is that it was not published by a commercial publisher, but rather by the Imperial Academy of Science, Akademia Nauk, an official institution supported by the Czarist court. Was this collection intended to be used by members of the court? The Czar is long gone, but the Academy of Sciences still exists today.

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Here is an example of the type of music contained in this journal. This is a theme and variations on Chem Tebya Ya Ogorchila, What Have I done to Upset You, which is one of the tunes used by Fernando Sor in his Souvenir de Roussie. As we can see, there is not a single instance of the use the sixth string on the entire page.

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This is a journal for the seven-string guitar by Andrei Sychra, published in St. Petersburg ca. 1813-14. It contains 10 works, mostly themes and variations on Russian songs,

including this arrangement of a March by Daniil Kashin in honor of General Count Wittgenstein who was the commander of the forces entrusted with the defense of St. Petersburg, during Napoleon’s campaign in 1812. The number of such journals, for both the six- and the seven-string guitar was quite extensive. This tells us that both instruments existed side-by-side for much of the 19th century.

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There are two major written sources about the guitar in Russia, published at about the same time. On the left is the title page of a brochure titled History of the Seven-string Guitar by Mikhail Stakhovich, published in 1864 by the St. Petersburg publisher Stellovsky. It was first published 10 years earlier as an article in the journal Moskovitianin. On the right we have the title page of a book length article by Nikolai Makarov, published in the magazine Sovremenik in 1859 and titled Zadushevnaia Ispoved’, a Heartfelt Confession, a work that became known as the Memoirs of Makarov, and often translated and quoted as a primary source about the Guitar in Russia and in Western Europe in mid-19th century. The difference between these two publications, is that the Stakhovich article was designed as a written history, perhaps the first history of the guitar published as such, while Makarov’s writings were a personal testimony that touched upon the guitar as a means of his own self-aggrandizing. Both documents though, allow us to learn about the relationship between sixers and seveners in Russia in a most direct way. While Stakhovich

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concentrated on the seven-string guitar and its personalities, he does NOT take the opportunity to say anything derogatory about any of the sixers who were active in Russia at the time. Perhaps the only instance in which he made any comparisons between the two trends was in his story about the meeting between one of the leading seveners of the time, Mikhail Vyssotsky, and a certain Frenchman playing the six-string guitar which was assumed by many to have been Fernando Sor. In his judgment, both artists were superb musicians, but possessing different temperaments.

Makarov, on the other hand, had a lot to say about the guitarists he met. His story of his meeting with two seveners, Sychra and Ladyzhensky, are expressed with the utmost respect and friendliness. He liked them and was impressed by their performance on the seven-string guitar, even though he himself was a sixer. In describing his impressions of Western guitarists that he came in contact with, his judment, with few exceptions, was favorable and often laudatory. Except in the case of Polish guitarists such as Bobrowicz, Sokolowski and Szczepanowski,

(sorry, I do not have a portrait of Bobrowicz!) whom he denounced in the strongest possible language, even though, by all accounts, they were among the leading guitarists/performers in the mid-19th century. In other words,

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his judgment was not based on a parochial adherence to a group mentality which is formed by a specific tuning and the number of strings and the repertoire that goes with it, but on a personal valuation of guitarists, regardless of the type of guitar they played. When it came time for this Russian nobleman to organize the well known 1856 competition in Brussels, he chose as his Russian representative the sevener Vladimir Morkov.

Morkov was also a nobleman, belonging to the same elite class as Makarov. Obviously, they were on good personal terms in spite of the fact that they both played, and both actively promoted, guitars in two different tunings.

The decade of the 1860s saw the emergence of the St. Petersburg Guitar Society run by Iurii Diakov.

Judging from his surviving arrangements of piano sonatas by Beethoven for guitar duo, it is difficult to ascertain which side of the fence Diakov belonged to. The arrangements do not specify a tuning, and they can be played equally well on both. Remarkably, many of the known members of

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the society were sixers, chief among them was one Russian army general named Ivan Andreevich Klinger.

He published a huge amount of music for the six-string guitar, including the obvious arrangements of Russian folk songs, but also his own compositions and transcriptions of major works of the classics, like, for example, a complete transcription of the Serenade Op. 8 by Beethoven for solo guitar. We owe it to Klinger for the survival of the 10 Etudes by Giulio Regondi. There is no reason to believe that the leading seveners of the time would not have also participated in the activities of the society.

We have very little information on guitar activity in Russia in the decade of the 1870s. But in the next decade of the 1880s something unusual happened, not only in Russia, but all over the world. Most major publishers undertook to re-publish, in what we have come to regard as facsimile, all the guitar works of the major composers of the earlier part of the century. In Russia, this was accomplished by the publishing houses of Gutheil and Jurgenson. And they printed music for both instruments. Obviously, there was a demand for music of both variant guitars. Towards the end of the century, one Austrian guitarist named Johann Decker-Schenk

established himself as a teacher in St. Petersburg and enjoyed a great success. His chief disciple was Vasilii Lebedev,

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a six string virtuoso who became the first Russian guitarist to appear in Western Europe, at the 1900 International Fair in Paris. Lebedev must have been acutely aware that much of his Russian audience consisted of players of the seven-string guitar. He even published a guitar method to be used by players of both instruments. Around the turn of century Valerian Rusanov

began publishing a series of biographies of major players, among them were players of both the six- and the seven-string guitars. His major thrust was to inform his readers, without taking any positions for or against either guitar type. And that was exactly the editorial policy he undertook when he began publishing his Gitarist magazine in 1904, where he gave ample exposure of music and information about both guitar types, apparently without any pre-conceived notions about the relative attributes of either. The magazine did include several articles in which the respective qualities of both instruments were discussed, but this was done for the most part in a calm spirit of collegiality. The music published in the magazine was more or less equally divided between works for the 7-string and work for the 6-string.

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Also at the turn of the 20th century, a group of Russian players, mostly seveners, led by one Dr. Zaiaitsky, established a Russian branch of the German I.G.V., an organization obviously made up mostly of German six-string players. An example of cross-cultural international interaction between players of both instruments.

As for music publishing during these pre-revolutionary years, we can see a very active group of publishers putting out a lot of music for both instruments. Then came WWI and the Russian revolution, and the fortunes of guitarists of any persuasion became very precarious.

The war was over, the revolution established the Soviet regime and guitarists tried to get back to normal. In 1925, Vladimir Mashkevich and Miron Papchenko started the publication of a new guitar magazine called Gitara i Gitaristy (Guitar and Guitarists). This was a homemade job, produced on type writers and office duplicators, and was mainly concerned with the seven string guitar. It did not last long. A year later, in 1926, Andrés Segovia came to the Soviet Union

Segovia stayed there for a quite a long time. During his seven-months stay, he met with guitarists, played concerts, gave private and public lessons, and

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in general, was actively pushing the Spanish guitar, while at the same time putting down and often ridiculing the native Russian instrument, the seven-string guitar.

He even published an article in a local trade union publication called Iskusstvo Trudiashchimsia (Art of the Workers), in which, among other subjects, he said the following:

I was asked why do I play a six-string and not a seven-string guitar. You can ask would a virtuoso violinist and cellist play on four and not on five strings. All the possibilities of playing on this instrument are included on six strings: an extra string strengthening the bass breaks the balance of the guitar’s traditional volume and doesn’t add any likeness. Dilettantes were always adding extra strings, being content with finger picking several trivial motives, instead of serious work on the instrument’s technique. I

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would recommend they put one more finger on their hand instead of putting one more string on their guitar.

This was a dumb comment that ignored the historical precedence of the seven string guitar in Spain in the eighteenth century, disregarding the fact that the difference between the Spanish guitar and the Russian one is not in the number of strings but mainly in the tuning, and completely ignoring the vast and ancient repertoire of the Russian guitar. Segovia knew nothing of it.

But those Russian guitarists who became Segovia's disciples and followers, particularly one Piotr Spiridonovich Agafoshin, knew very well.

Agafoshin himself was a well known sevener who changed over to the six after hearing Segovia. And here we have an interesting phenomenon that simply did not occur anywhere else but in Russia. After Segovia’s appearance on the Russian scene, a line was drawn in the sand and one could be either a sevener or a sixer, but not both. It never occurred to the Russians that it was possible for any guitarist to play both instruments, and thus make use of the repertoires that existed for both variants. The process of conversion itself, abandoning the seven-string guitar completely and forever dedicating oneself to playing the six-string guitar exclusively as Segovia recommended, acquired its own terminology.

Accepting Segovia’s advice, many did change over and the amicable relationship between the two groups that lasted for a century and a half, came to a screeching halt. A real division in the Russian guitar world was

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thus created, where the two opposing groups vied for a position of dominance, using whatever under-the-belt propaganda techniques to vilify and belittle the other. There were even instances when some leading seveners ended up in concentration camps on trumped-up charges, where they languished for many years before being rehabilitated.

In 1928, Agafoshin published a scandalous brochure called Novoe O Gitare, What’s New About the Guitar

in which he saved no breath in denouncing the seven string guitar and its practitioners as bumbling fools and idiots. There were a lot of critical comments made after this publication but they were never published officially, and only circulated in Samizdat form among seveners.

A couple of decades later, in 1948, Mikhail Ivanov published his short history of the seven-string guitar, in which he attacked Agafoshin’s followers in exactly the same under-the-belt demagoguery, going as far as claiming that the seven-string guitar is superior to the six because you can play more chords on it. The political winds must have changed.

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They have changed once again in the years after WWII, when the leading guitarist in the Soviet Union was one of Agafoshin’s main students, Alexander Ivanov-Kramskoi. Life was difficult in those years, and besides earning a meager income as a guitar teacher, with a few concerts here and there, Ivanov-Kramskoi became the director of a small amateur orchestra, that of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

Thus the six string guitar became the de facto ruler of the Soviet guitar scene, a situation which remained in force well into the period of perestroika, and to our days.

Strangely enough, the tradition of the Russian seven string guitar was kept alive by Russian and Gypsy guitarists who were working in the popular music field. Only in the last few years scholars have began to investigate the contributions of Gypsy musicians to the Russian guitar scene. At the early decades of the 19th century, Going to the Gypsies was a common expression about despondent members of the upper classes who spent their nights in Gypsy taverns, listening to lusty Gypsy singers crooning heart-rending romances, and burying their sorrow in champagne. Descriptions of this field of entertainment were given at the time by some of the leading writers, poets (Alexander Pushkin is one) and other artists. Almost without exception, these undulating female singer-dancers were accompanied by a chorus of male players playing the seven-string guitar.

The music they played was most often based on contemporaneous improvisations on well known melodies and harmonic progressions, and most of all, on a tempo formula in which the song began in very slow tempo, gradually accelerating to dizzy virtuosic passages.

This music was never taken seriously by the music establishment, and particularly by the sixers, the followers of Segovia and Agafoshin, for whom it represented something bordering on the gross and despicable. One must note that in many instances, the dislike of Gypsy music was not motivated by an objective evaluation of the music and its melodic and harmonic content, but by a racist attitude that regarded anything that had to do with Gypsies as shabby low-life. Often enough we hear statements by some of the leading Russian guitarists today, illustrated by colorful Russian expletives, to the notion that We all know what a bunch of thieving fortune-tellers these dark-skinned nomads are!

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Unfortunately, such prejudices obscure the true musical excellence and value of some compositions by Gypsy guitarists, those with a solid formal musical education, and those who are unable to read a note of music, yet produce some magnificent master-pieces.

Sergei Dmitrievich Orekhov was an important guitarist/composer of the genre.