Life in New Mexico
An exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe features a long string of guitars
Like a touring musician who just needs a place to crash, the National Guitar Museum is looking for a home. While embarking on that search, this showcase of beautiful-meets-the-bizarre is traveling across the country, landing in Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art this month.
“From Medieval to Metal” features guitars — the most popular instrument in the world — that range from armadillo shell bodies from Bolivia to Soviet-era knockoffs that often served as firewood. This fusion of art, history and science brings 40 iterations of the instrument to New Mexico. And it’s a hands-on show that allows visitors to try out their own licks.
The exhibition features famous rock ’n’ roll classics like the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul, as well as the 1931 Frying Pan aluminum guitar designed for Hawaiian music. It’s considered the first electric guitar ever produced, said executive director and former Guitar magazine editor H.P Newquist in a telephone interview from Connecticut.
Most guitar fans don’t know the electric
guitar was midwifed for Hawaiian musicians.
“It was to capitalize on the fad for Hawaiian music in the 1930s,” Newquist said.
It was Leo Fender, a radio repairman in the 1940s, who designed the guitar as we know it today.
Those Hawaiian lap steel guitars broke, and Fender, armed with a knack for electronics, repaired them.
“More people were beginning to hold the guitar face out,” Newquist said. “So he decided to make them Spanish style.”
Fender produced the first solid body electric guitar with interchangeable parts in 1949.
“Leo Fender really never learned to play the guitar,” he added. “He never learned how to tune one.”
Today his guitars still reign as the most popular in the world.
Fender designed the Stratocaster in 1954 with a sense of ergonomics. Its shape made it more comfortable to play.
“It had these beautiful curves,” Newquist said. “It looked very cool.”
It also featured three instead of one or two pickups, offering more sounds and tones. Pickups capture the mechanical vibrations of the strings, converting them into electronic signals.
“It’s been 62 years since it was designed and it has not changed at all,” Newquist said. “It arrived fully formed in 1954.”
The exhibition also features ancient models.
The north African oud is the ancestor of the Spanish classical guitar, which became the lute when it landed on the Iberian Peninsula. When the Spanish drove out the Moors during the crusades, the luthiers banded together to create their own version of the instrument.
“Legend has it that they said we will never again build an instrument that reminds us of our Muslim oppressors,” Newquist said. “So they decided to pay tribute to the most beautiful thing Spain has to offer — the Spanish woman.”
After the Spanish conquistadors plundered the Andes and left with their treasure, the native people missed the sounds of their stringed instruments and turned to local materials to duplicate them — armadillo shells.
“They sound a little bit metallic; like a mandolin with more of a metal sound,” Newquist said.
Newquist voted the Russian Tonika the ugliest of the collection. The Soviet government mass-produced the instrument, which consisted mainly of a heavy wooden block, in response to youthful clamoring in the 1960s and ’70s. American instruments were banned at the time.
“It’s sort of the ugly duckling,” Newquist said. “Very few survived because they didn’t play well, so they were used for firewood. Here’s what happens when politics trumps design.”
The most popular instrument in the world deserves its own museum, Newquist insisted. But don’t expect signed showpieces from Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum boasts hundreds of autographed instruments, Newquist acknowledged. But it offers no information on the birth, adolescence and development of the guitar.
The traveling show has stopped in 15 American cities since its 2009 birth. The exhibition is privately funded, and in these times of tight federal, state and local budgets, Newquist hopes to keep it that way. This rolling stone of a museum is searching for a thriving music and arts community.
“In every place we’ve been, we’ve been approached about setting up shop there,” he said.
It’s an unusual model, said Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums. But successful museums need a strong base of both corporate and individual donors, as well as government funding.
“Every idea does not deserve a museum,” he said.