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 middleclass and at the same time a more entrenched poverty. Meanwhile, peasantshad been chafing under the bit of serfdom for more than a century and ahalf. They were in search of justice and desperate for hope. Religiously, peopleboth resented and depended upon the church. They resented the churchbecause 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 littlewonder, then, why Luther’s religious message struck chords on many levels.Many people heard the religious message, but could not miss its social andpolitical 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 GERMANHERCULES – TEACHER AND PASTOR

Historical personages always take on a new life in the traditions that conveytheir personalities and thought to succeeding generations. Twentiethcenturyscholars sometimes complained that the images of Luther and thesummaries of his theology which have helped shape Western culture andChristian thinking do not accurately reflect the “real” reformer, but such isalways true. Intensifying this commonplace in Luther’s case is the fact thatalready during his lifetime his contemporaries experienced him as “largerthan 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 ofparadox later on – into God’s justifying action and the resulting knowledgeof the complete inability of humans to act independently in accord with arequisite obedience to God and love for one’s neighbor. At the same timeLuther stresses over and over again his dignity and position as a Masterof Holy Scripture, which to him embodied the ultimate authority andtherefore also served him as the unquestionable basis for any theologicalargument.

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 mustnot, as has indeed happened, make Luther into the creator of the modernHigh German literary language. Nevertheless, Klopstock wrote that amongno nation has a single person so shaped the language of a whole people asLuther has done. In fact, Luther’s language – above all the language of histranslation of the Bible – became the presupposition of understanding andcommunication 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 thatshaped the character of Luther’s controversial writings and their audience.In the first phase Luther defined a movement. He addressed most of hispolemics to an empire-wide audience of readers and auditors. He pointedout the failings within the papally controlled Catholic Church and advocatedreforms based on his understanding of the gospel. He attacked, but he alsosought to persuade, to educate, and to inform. His main authority wasScripture.

In the second phase Luther was engaged in building and defendingan institution. He addressed most of his polemics to readers and auditorswho were already Evangelicals or more narrowly Lutherans. He continuedto explain and educate but spent proportionately more effort exhorting hisco-religionists. He continued to appeal to Scripture but supplemented theseappeals with claims to personal authority based on his unique role withinan Augustinian view of history.

Wittenberg is Luther's Wittenberg in three distinct ways: The Wittenberg of the late Middle Ages provides the conditions for Luther's work, theWittenberg of the Reformation era is shaped by Luther himself, and the Wittenberg of the post-Reformation period is formed by Luther's followers.

WITTENBERG IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

A fortress of Wittenberg is mentioned for the first time in 1180. Itbelongs to the Ascanians, who call people from the Rhineland and theNetherlands to settle there around 1159/60. Situated next to the fortress,this settlement grows into a town, receiving its charter in 1293. The charteralso includes permission for fortifications. Soon a town wall is erected.

The townspeople continue to gain in strength and about 1280 theybegin the construction of a town church, the so-called St. Mary’s Church.Well before 1300 the Gothic choir with its two aisles is completed.Akeystonein the nave shows Christ giving a blessing. In the middle of the fourteenthcentury a mighty construction is begun on the west side, including twotowers.

There are at least two respects in which this subject can easily conceal more than it elucidates. The more obvious of these is the all-too-tempting impetus to ascribe to Luther everything in contemporary Christianity of which the author approves. This tendency is most obvious in the pictures of Luther that derive from German Protestants and Lutherans in particular. Thus, Luther was depicted in his own time as the one who, by the grace of God, recovered the gospel from centuries of neglect and abuse. In the seventeenth century Lutheran Orthodox theologians valued him as the one who taught the true collection of doctrines with which they associated true Christianity. Later Pietists found in him the Christian man of great interior faith, the Rationalists of the eighteenth century hailed him for freeing the human intellect from medieval superstition, and more Romantic thinkers of the nineteenth century saw him as the stalwart German who freed Germany from papist, that is Italian, cultural tyranny. More recent times have celebrated Lutherthe existentialist, enlisted his support for the National Socialist regime ofAdolf Hitler and its anti-Semitic atrocities, and even singled him out, alongwith Albert Einstein, as one of the great raw intellects in the history ofthe Western world. The other pattern, which goes almost without repeating,is that by contrast both former and latter-day opponents of Luther havefound in him all the characteristics of whatever they have identified as mostloathsome in their own time.

From Luther's own day to the present, critics have raised questions about the distinctively personal stamp given by the reformer to his theology. Despite its claims to biblical fidelity and universal validity, they suspected that Luther's legacy was the projection of one man's neurosis on to the whole of human history and at the expense of the relative tolerance and unity of the Western church. There is no denying that Luther was himself a prime example of the desperately bound sinner whose terrified conscience, hungry for the assurance of God's grace and the experience of its transforming power, became the test case for Lutheran proclamation.

Without lionizing Luther as some spiritual “Everyman” for all generations,one can conclude that in the course of his spiritual journey he spokepersuasively to and for many of his contemporaries. Luther boldly articulatedand responded to the acute anxieties of the age through his campaignfor the liberation of the church from its latter-day Babylonian captivity, hisdemand for the freedom of the individual believer’s conscience and the freerei¨gn of the Scriptures among the people, and his rejection of the ecclesiasticalhierarchy in his appeal to the judgment of the common believer, that is,the baptized person who emerged from the waters of baptism the spiritualequal of priest, bishop, and pope.

Africa has nurtured a surprising array of modern and neo-traditional guitar styles. Portable, rugged, versatile, and relatively easy to construct, the guitar has thrived in African settings to the point where today it is among the most pervasive instruments continent-wide, second only to the drum. In places like Mali and Madagascar, ancient instrumental traditions have inspired distinctive acoustic guitar finger-picking techniques. Elsewhere – in Zimbabwe, Guinea, and Cameroon, for example – pre-guitar traditions have evolved into guitar-based, electric “afropop,” once again engendering techniques and sounds unique in world music. In Congo in the 1950s, bands trying to play Cuban dance music substituted the handy guitar for the more rare piano, and within a few years, they developed a highly influential method of layering multiple electric guitar lines. Looking at the range and diversity of guitar innovations in Africa, one could argue that only rock and roll has so revolutionized the instrument over the course of the twentieth century. African guitarists are now beginning to earn widespread recognition, and their work is sure to have further impact around the world in years to come.

Consider these recent developments. Paul Simon drew upon guitarists Ray Phiri of South Africa and Vincent Nguini of Cameroon while creating the music for his Grammy Award-winning Graceland project. Ry Cooder also won a Grammy Award in 1994 for his collaboration with northern Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré,TalkingTimbuktu (WorldCircuit/Rykodisc 1994). That release focused attention on the connections between blues and Malian music and opened the door for other “Malian bluesmen,” such as guitarist and singer Lobi Traoré.

Flamenco guitar constitutes an instrumental idiom of remarkable richness and contemporary vitality. As a musical tradition, its status is unique in that while its origins lie in folk music and its practitioners articulate little in the way of a standardized theory, it embodies a degree of technical virtuosity and sophistication comparable to that of a classical art form. Flamenco can be seen as comprising song (cante), dance (baile), and guitar playing (toque). The status of guitar music within this framework is ambiguous and contradictory. Flamenco, in its origins, basic structure, and traditional aesthetic orientation, is primarily vocal music, to which guitar accompaniment is a secondary (and occasionally even dispensable) addition. Nevertheless, the guitar has come to play an increasingly prominent role in accompaniment, and flamenco solo guitar has emerged as an independent idiom that has achieved greater international renown than vocal flamenco. This essay provides a brief historical and stylistic overview of flamenco guitar, outlining its distinctive features and its unique status within flamenco and world music as a whole.

The evolution of flamenco

The early history of flamenco, like the origin of the word “flamenco” itself, is ultimately obscure. In the past, various Spanish flamencólogos (“flamencologists”) argued that flamenco derived from an ancient and private tradition which the Gypsies brought with them when they migrated from India some six or more centuries ago. Nevertheless, it now seems clear that the genre emerged in the late eighteenth century, primarily from the corpus of Andalusian folk music, especially as stylized and refined by Gypsy professional musicians. Andalusian musical culture was itself an eclectic entity, syncretizing the legacy of the region's diverse ethnic groups (see Plate 3).