Guitar songs and the 19th century popular music culture

A research project by Pauline Lebbe & Jan Sanen — Dr. Stijn Saveniers (supervisor)

2026-2028

Painting of a woman in a cream dress with a wide-brimmed hat, reading a book, while a woman sitting at a table with a red dress and a young girl with dark dress and lace collar look on. A man with a guitar stands beside the seated woman, looking up at her. The room has floral arrangements, a bust sculpture, and ornate wood furniture.
A man in a black blazer sitting with an acoustic guitar, against a black background.
A woman with dark brown hair, wearing a white sweater and jewelry, standing outdoors in front of a modern building with glass windows.

Before the piano took its definitive form, art songs were accompanied by various other instruments, such as the harp or lyre, and particularly by guitar. Both the abundant presence of guitar songs in archives and libraries and early nineteenth-century iconography demonstrate that romances with guitar accompaniment were very popular in our country.

These songs were not performed in theaters or at courts but rather circulated as sheet music among amateurs in domestic settings. The success of the genre prompted several Flemish publishers from the 1830s onward, after the example of their French colleagues, to sell subscriptions to guitar song collections. These collections contained both music originally written for guitar and voice, and arrangements for guitar of other songs, opera arias, or short scenes.

The library of the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp contains several volumes of such subscriptions. However, we lack models regarding performance practice and stylistic framework to bring them to life: we cannot imagine the sound of commercial music from 1830, the performing style of amateur singers and guitarists, in the specific acoustic of 19th century houses.

In this research project, by exploring the sheet music, armed with recent studies on the romance, and supported by cutting-edge expertise on romantic guitars, we hope to breathe new life into the guitar song.
 
Image: De Latour, Marie (1750-1834), Allégorie de l’Ouïe, 1807. Cropped and enhanced with Pixella.ai