re: My Merrily Mirthful Melodic Melange -- Myriad Musical Miscellania

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NAZARETH, Pa. — For guitar aficionados, a visit to the C. F. Martin & Company factory is akin to a religious experience. They talk in reverential tones about the handcrafted instruments that have been coming off the production floor here for more than 150 years, even referring to certain models in online discussion forums as “the Holy Grail” of the acoustic guitar.
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A new book due out on Tuesday, to be followed by a yearlong exhibition of Martin guitars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will surely add to that aura. The book, “Inventing the American Guitar,” argues that Christian Friedrich Martin, who founded the company in 1833, was not only a sublime craftsman and canny entrepreneur, but also a design and technology innovator of the first order, responsible for many features accepted today as standard on stringed instruments.

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Up to now, collectors and researchers have tended to regard the period between World Wars I and II as the company’s golden era of innovation, not its first decades. Chris Martin, a great-great-great-grandson of the founder and the company’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview here that the new book “has forced me to rethink our own history, and made me want to know more about those earliest years.”

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The most important of those new influences, “Inventing the American Guitar” demonstrates, was Spanish. Most notably, Martin abandoned the Austro-German system of lateral bracing to reinforce and support the guitar soundboard in favor of Spanish-style fan bracing, which he then adapted into the X-bracing style that is the hallmark of Martin and other modern guitars.

“The most fundamental features, things that we take for granted in Martins, he wasn’t doing before he discovered Spanish guitars,” said Mr. Szego, an architect and collector. Adopting those techniques made Martin’s guitars “bigger, louder and more resonant than before that time,” in keeping with what an emerging American market wanted.

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