Photo by Rafael Alcaide https://www.facebook.com/RafaelAlcaideFotografia

I am thrilled to have participated in this prestigious festival and its series of Conferences. Each presentation will be written up for publication in a book which will come out next year at the festival. I was first with Javier Riba and an analysis of the guitars which appear in Romero’s paintings and a more detailed description of one of the guitars which is housed in the Julio Romero de Torres Museum in Córdoba. This guitar and its maker were influential in the direction taken by the Córdoba guitar-makers after he (Rafael Casana) came to the city after working with José Ramírez in Madrid.

Javier Suárez-Pajares and Oscar Fernández offered their point of view on Romero’s symbolism especially with respect to the guitar on the following two days.

Córdoba Guitar Festival

A trip to Córdoba this week was an opportunity to fill a few outstanding holes in my education, my collections and even offered a few new experiences. As a friend of mine says, this sort of headline is usually reserved for the likes of Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. It translates as: “Parties, suicide, flamenco venues and restorations: the history of the guitar belonging to Julio Romero de Torres.” The occasion was my participation in the decades-long series of conferences about famous figures in the guitar world. My contribution to this year’s event was a lecture about the guitar used by the spanish painter Julio Romero de Torres in his paintings. Read the sensationalist newspaper article here in spanish.

June 8 was the date for the latest installment of GuitarNcuentrO which is organized by the Conservatory of Music here in Granada and the Association of Guitar Studies. Because of the scheduling we had an excellent turnout to listen to the sound testing of the guitars. I was quite pleased with the quality of the guitars I heard and saw there. I wasn’t able to attend any of the other events but the day was full of seminars and concerts. Next year is apparently going to be bigger and better with conservatories from other countries in attendance. I will do my best to have a guitar available for that.

Arias made some of the most amazing rosettes and also experimented widely with his guitar-making including using double backs, Bouchet-type braces and soundports. However, as this guitar shows he also made guitars in the simplest style which were obviously for more modest clients and he probably made a lot of them. The very plain wood and the simple rosette speak of the type of guitar that the folk players used at the turn of the century. Although this guitar has very old machine heads fitted you can see from the thickness of the head, and from the taper, that it was originally made for wooden pegs. The design of the head slots indicate that the conversion was not done by Arias himself.