This article investigates the organology of the viola and the violão in nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro discussing the difficulties of tracing a history of those instruments and uncertainties in their terminology, morphology and number of strings. It shows how the (cross-cultural) Hornbostel-Sachs (1914) system of classification of musical instruments translated into Portuguese creates problems for the study of plucked chordophones in the Luso-Brazilian context. Yet this work questions canonical histories of the guitar in Europe showing that despite some lines of descent having been traced previously to explain the creation of the modern instrument, the very characteristics of guitar-like instruments make it difficult for historians to categorise those chordophones. The author concludes the paper by proposing that a continuum can be drawn between the viola and the violão which he suggests can encapsulate the various reference points of organological difference among the multitudes of chordophones in Rio de Janeiro.
