There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine).

February is guitar month in New York City. Synchronicity rules at those two giants, the MoMA and the Met. At MoMA, Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 shows his austere guitar paintings, collages and drawings - often using newspaper, wallpaper and sand - as well as constructions of guitars made of cardboard and one of sheet metal and wire. “What is it? Painting or sculpture?” asked snooty visitors to his Paris studio. “It’s nothing, it’s el guitare,” Picasso, who didn’t play an instrument, is said to have replied.

From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great guitarists is no less an attribute of the craftsmen who design and build the instruments they play.

It's quite funny to hear a rock band with a reputation for sounding like the inside of an aeroplane engine making something that's just gorgeous. But, even with its grimly jokey title, and silly offhand track titles like “You're Lionel Richie”, that's exactly what this album is. Mogwai's uncompromising reputation is not entirely undeserved: they've certainly had their moments of creating music which delivered its pleasures only after something of an endurance test, and the Glaswegians remain a spikily independent, politically committed force within the music world.

McCartney and Wonder. Jagger and Bowie. Mullard and Baker. Music history teaches us that the star collaboration doesn't always transmute into artistic gold. The Chairman of the Board himself, with a little help from Vandross, Streisand, Bono et al, had a spectacular misfire with Duets Vol 1. Mercilessly butchering many of Francis Albert's best-known songs, the results, artistically speaking, aren't so much a case of, “Yeah, I once recorded with Sinatra, you know,” as, “Number of copies: entire stock.

It's a season of retrospection for Bruce Springsteen. New light has been thrown on his pivotal 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town with the release of The Promise, a double CD of out-takes and unreleased songs, alongside an expanded box set of CDs and DVDs telling the Darkness story in sound and vision. A version of Thom Zimny's documentary about the making of the album, included in the boxed release, was shown in Imagine on BBC One.

I defy anyone not to be excited at the prospect of a concert featuring such numbers as “Cuckolds All Awry”, “The Queen’s Dumpe”, “The Wooing of the Baker’s Daughter” and “Tickle My Toe”. Add to these tantalising scenarios early music’s favourite rebel Philip Pickett, and a guitarist who made it into Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 20 Greatest Guitarists of All Time chart, and you have yourself quite the unlikeliest of parties.

The sense of occasion around flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía’s return to London was palpable. The Royal Festival Hall was heaving. Queues at the bars before the show and during the interval were three or four deep. Spanish was everywhere. And that was good to hear. Paco de Lucía is a hero in his country as much for interesting political reasons as he is for purely musical ones. London-based compatriot fans were not going to miss this.

Terry Riley is one of the great unsung heroes of contemporary music, the ur-minimalist who shaped the creative paths of John Adams, Peter Townshend, Mike Oldfield and Philip Glass, to name just a sample of the wide range of musicians who have been inspired by his raga-tinged loops and all-enveloping electronic soundscapes. This week Bristol has hosted a series of exciting concerts celebrating the 75-year-old Californian composer, whose groundbreaking genius feels as fresh today as it first sounded in the 1960s.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an amphetamine-fuelled chicken on rollers? No, it’s the one-time guitarist for Dr Feelgood (during the only period that matters) still doing the moves that made him the main reason to see the band in the mid-1970s. Now bald-headed and bushy-browed but still delivering those electrically charged stares (which he learnt to do during a brief stint as a schoolteacher), he had the air of a benevolent dictator last night as he surveyed the Academy’s crowd for would-be assassins to mock-machine-gun with his trusty Stratocaster.