Published by The Lute Society Website: www.lutesociety.org

The Journal of the Lute Society Volume LVI 2016

The intention of this article is to summarise the information about an important but sadly neglected French teacher and composer for the five-course guitar, Barthélemy Trille Labarre. Hopefully this will inspire further research on him and his work, and on a rather unexplored but fascinating period of guitar history. Trille Labarre was active in the most tumultuous place and time: France in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. !is was a transitional period for the guitar, slowly shifting from a five course to a six single string instrument, alongside developments in its notation. My interest in this rather unknown French guitarist and composer started many years ago during my research on the history of the guitar in Sweden. I found a small advertisement in an old Swedish newspaper, Dagligt Allehanda (Daily Miscellany), which in 1801 announced that the French bookshop, Librairie Françoise [sic], in Stockholm had Trille Labarre’s Nouvelle méthode pour la Guitare, Op. 7 for...