Ramelli, Marco. “A Lost Culture of Touch and Sound: The Contribution of Visually Impaired Musicians to the Evolution of the Spanish Guitar.” Soundboard Scholar 10 (2025). https://doi.org/10.56902/SBS.2025.10.6.

In the story of music-making, blind musicians have played an intrinsic role, helping to drive the development not only of musical styles but also of instruments, instruction, and aesthetics. Many musical practices were cultivated first within blind communities and adopted only later by sighted musicians, often with a gradual erasure of their original context. The history of the Spanish guitar offers a compelling case study of this progression, demonstrating how the contribution of blind musicians could be both wide-reaching and yet, over time, forgotten. The history of this contribution is challenging to recover, for in Spain as elsewhere, blind musicians left almost no direct historical evidence of their activities; and yet, once reconstructed, it offers a vital new perspective, one that challenges standard approaches to guitar historiography, with its traditional emphasis on repertoire and celebrated...