Readers encounter the guitar through ancient history and musical science

Guitar players, established luthiers, and aspiring guitar-builders now have a foundation-level reference resource for all facets of the guitar. In his new book, Bill Foley describes the historical development of ancient stringed musical instruments like the cithara. He also provides detailed scientific lessons about sound frequencies, harmonics, and guitar engineering. This extraordinarily thorough volume contains over thirty years’ worth of Foley’s research and experience. Foley’s first book, Build Your Own Electric Guitar, sold close to 20,000 copies worldwide.
What motivated you to create this comprehensive book?

I was thinking about writing a second edition of my first book, but something kept bothering me. There are a lot of misconceptions about the workings of guitars. An aspiring new guitar builder will encounter conflicting arguments not only on luthiery technique, but also on the reasons underlying any particular methodology. So—after thirty-four interrupted years of research, testing, writing and rewriting—I finished a physics and history-based work that addresses this issue. 
What would you like teachers and librarians to know about his book? 

I hope teachers and librarians find that my book makes their jobs a little more fun. The math is high school-friendly and presented in an easy-to-follow fashion with calculation examples and a review chapter in the appendix. I personally love reading about great discoveries in the authors’ own words, especially from hundreds of years ago. The teenager who will absolutely love this book is the one who not only wants to learn how to improve a guitar, but possibly make a career out of building and repairing guitars and string instruments. 
You explain that Pythagoras and Euclid wrote about pleasant-sounding, consonant intervals. Were there alternative opinions about what sounded good?

There was much disagreement about what constituted good music among the early Greeks. Ptolemy, Terpander and Pythagoras used math-based intervals that sounded pleasant. Later Pythagoreans emphasized math over perception. Aristoxenus used geometry to calculate intervals and may have hinted at the existence of tiny sonic units in nature. 

Frequency was unknown to the ancient Greeks, and further complicating their calculations was the inhomogeneity of the strings in use then. But they still did an incredible job with the materials available to them. The scales and modes in contemporary music trace their origins to the Greeks.
Does anyone play the phorminx or cithara anymore? What would a barbiton concert be like?

Some people reconstruct and play instruments from antiquity. There’s not much surviving music, but there’s enough to spark some imagination and that’s all it takes to start playing. If there were a barbiton concert, for example, I imagine it would be similar to a mandolin orchestra from the early twentieth century. The instruments would be built from high to low registers, like ukuleles to basses, and performed in groups of twenty to thirty players. I’d want to hear some Rolling Stones arrangements.
Are young people as interested in the guitar as they were thirty years ago?

I think young people are as interested in guitar now as they were thirty years ago. The improved quality of starter guitars coupled with the ease of learning via the internet has made playing more fun and accessible to vastly more people. One thing that is different now, from data gathered by the guitar manufacturing giant, Fender, is the increase in new female guitar players in the 18- to 34-year-old age group.
How would you design a Musical Instrument Science course for college students?

My dream would be to see an accredited college-level program in Music Instrument Science realized. It would be a multidisciplinary study combined with hands-on training, much like a residency. Courses would include physics and advanced wave motion theory, wood science, electronics, and business classes. A working knowledge of the string instrument family and playing ability would also be required. Graduates would be ready to start their own guitar or string instrument repair and building business. Dreams do come true, right?
Which of your custom guitars had the most interesting journey after it left your workshop?

Probably the CatHead model guitar I built for Gary Pihl, the lead guitar player for Boston. An image of a cat face appeared in the wood grain on the cathead-shaped headstock after we applied finish to it. Gary called me after he received the guitar and said, “Bill, this is a shroud of Turin headstock!” He later told me it became his favorite songwriting guitar. It can be heard on his Fire and Grace album with the band, Alliance.

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