I attended James Tyler's class on the early guitar at the Lute Society of America summer seminar of 1993 in Rochester, New York, in which he made a point of telling us that the little chitarrino (renaissance four course guitar) was spread to many corners of the world through Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries and, although long extinct in its original form, survives in various "living fossil" types: the ukulele in Hawaii, the charango in South America, and similar forms and sizes in other locations (such as the Canary Islands and in Mexico), often with re-entrant tuning, and sometimes using tablature notations. Can anybody else name these current day types in their respective countries?
Kenneth
