Construction Methods of Early Spanish Guitarreros

by James Westbrook

Originally published in American Lutherie #118, 2014



Imagine London in the early-to-mid 19th century, a vibrant creative center, especially for the manufacture of fine musical instruments. Makers from France and further afield settled here and flourished. I’ve spent much of the last twenty-two years studying many of the relics of this time, some of them playable, and piecing together their history, and hopefully contributing insights that others will find useful and will build upon as they conduct and publish their own research or construct their own guitars. Many of these makers, like the Panormo family, were émigrés, and some chose to continue in the traditions they were taught. Others, such as the brothers Dominique and Arnould Roudhloff from Mirecourt, France, were less conservative and popularized the recently invented melophonic guitar, with its larger-than-average body size and the newly applied X bracing. (More on that subject in a future article in American Lutherie.)

Louis Panormo is especially fascinating and prolific. It is thought that his father Vincenzo Panormo, originally from Palermo, Sicily, moved to London from Paris with his four sons, including five- or six -year-old Louis, in 1789, almost certainly to escape the troubles in revolutionary Paris. (“Panormus” is the standard classical and medieval Latin name for Palermo, a name which scholars believe the ancestral “Trusiano” family acquired when they were living in Naples.) Many of Vincenzo’s family became involved in the music business as performers, teachers, and makers of stringed instruments. Louis flourished in London from about 1816 to 1854 and developed his own “Spanish-style” model, although it is not clear how much he really understood about the Spanish school of guitar making. I set out to assess the legitimacy of his claim. For example, he built his guitars face-down around the soundboard, that is, with the back fitted last. Although this is now the most usual and accepted method for making modern Spanish-style guitars, Louis Panormo may have been the first to do it, as this was not the norm for the early Spanish school of guitar making.