How it began
Antonio de Torres Jurado was born on June 13, 1817, in La Cañada de San Urbano, in southern Spain. He began building guitars on the side in the 1850s and, working in Seville, started to experiment with new design ideas. The guitarist Julián Arcas encouraged him to build full time. Torres stopped in the early 1870s to run a china shop and returned to guitar making a couple of years later, a period known as his second epoch. He died in 1892.
Before it existed
Before Torres, guitars were a mixed lot. Some were large and some small, some had paired courses of strings, and many were heavily decorated with gold, silver or gems. The six-string instrument of his youth was based on the eighteenth-century Baroque guitar, with single strings in place of pairs and an extra bass string added, but its sound chamber had not been adapted to resonate the lower notes, and its sound was rarely close to that of a modern guitar.
How it works
Torres enlarged the body, especially the lower bout, and used a much thinner soundboard that was slightly domed. Beneath it he glued a fan of light wooden struts, five or seven of them spreading out from the soundhole with two more placed diagonally below. The Musical Instrument Museum describes the result as a powerful sound that set the standard for later classical guitars.
How it spread
The design spread through players and through other makers. Julián Arcas played Torres guitars, followed by Francisco Tárrega, Miguel Llobet and Andrés Segovia,. Later builders including Manuel Ramírez, Santos Hernández, Domingo Esteso, Ignacio Fleta and Hermann Hauser worked from the Torres pattern, as did José Romanillos.
Where it stands today
Classical Guitar magazine describes Torres as the man who gave the world the modern concert guitar and notes that his designs are still closely followed, with builders finding it hard to move far from his foundational work. Surviving Torres guitars sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. An 1864 Torres guitar is held by the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, and he is commonly called the father of the modern classical guitar.
