S1 Ep 5: Julian Bream: a (re)introduction

THEMEToday’s dispatch comes from Los Angeles. Well, sort of. Today’s dispatch actually comes from parts of California, Brazil, and Spain, where the current and past members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet reside. It took them 46 years to get to where they are, and there were a number of detours along the way, so this is the first of two non-consecutive episodes devoted to the ensemble’s storied career. Today’s show covers the quartet’s first 20 years, from their formation at USC in 1980 through their recorded output for the Orpharion, GHA, Delos, and Sony Classical labels.Like a number of guitarists in my generation, I co-founded a guitar quartet in grad school, back when the dominant creative voice in the field was LAGQ. It still is. The quartet lineup I became familiar with had a 16-year run. In masterclasses, performance series, guitar studios, and guitar societies, these guys were so ubiquitous that we just referred to them by their first names. So I might as well let them introduce themselves:Bill: “Well, I’m Bill Kanengiser, and I’m one of the two remaining founding members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. We’re celebrating just about our 46th year in existence.”John: “My name is John Dearman, and I’m a founding member of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.”Scott: “Hi, this is Scott Tennant. I was in the LA Guitar Quartet from its inception in 1980 all the way through, let’s see, what’s this, 2026? I would guess about 2022 or 2023.”Andrew: “Hi, this is Andrew York. I’m a prior LAGQ member from 1990 until 2006, but I really started playing with them in ‘86, but that’s another story.”And we will get to that story. Bill, John, Scott, and Andy had clearly defined onstage roles. Bill was the fleet-fingered emcee, the ringleader. Scott had the monster chops, and literally wrote the book on guitar technique with his manual, Pumping Nylon. John was the laid-back, quiet one, the George Harrison of the group. And Andy was the composer, the one guy in the classical guitar world with the curious ability to knock out hits. Because those roles were so clearly defined, I have to admit I went into these conversations thinking I knew the LAGQ story.I didn’t.I also went into these conversations with just a pinch of trepidation. I mean, I look up to these guys. They were in guitar magazines. Not just the classical guitar magazines, the Jimi Hendrix guitar magazines. And they won a Grammy, for Christ’s sake. And unlike Julian Bream, the subject of the last Dispatch, they’re all still above ground, so to tell the LAGQ story, I reached out to all the members, past and present, and asked for an interview. And yes, they have a reputation for being almost cartoonishly West Coast, cool, and approachable. But since I harbor an equally cartoonish East Coast, don’t-meet-your-heroes skepticism, I worried that the whole exercise might knock them off the pedestal that I placed them on.It didn’t.Let’s get started.VARIATION 1: Moving Forward to the Fallback PositionLos Angeles Guitar Quartet’s original lineup consisted of Bill, Scott, John, and Anisa Angarola. Anisa couldn’t record an interview for the show because of a family obligation, but she sent some comments that I’ll share throughout the episode.The idea for the quartet emerged around 1979, when John, Bill, and Anisa were studying at the University of Southern California. At the time, Jim Smith chaired the classical guitar department at USC, and Pepe Romero taught as a visiting adjunct. John recalls those early days with Bill:John: “Bill and I immediately became kind of best buds, or frenemies, actually, because we were competitive with each other. I said frenemies just to be cute, but we were actually really good friends. We would practice, make dinner together, hang out, and play duos together over the next two years. That was the 78-79 school year and the 79-80 school year.”Bill picks up the story from here:Bill: “This would have been in the summer of 1980, and it was at this famous masterclass centered around the Guitar Gallery of Houston. That was a real community of Romero devotees. It was at that masterclass that I met this young kid who had already been accepted to come in as a freshman, and I was gonna be a junior.I was like, ‘Who is this kid, this Scott Tennant,’ who had already gotten the moniker by Pepe of “super kid” because Scott was this incredible prodigy. Five minutes into our meeting, we had grabbed guitars off the wall. We opened up the Rodrigo Concerto Madrigal, and we tried to sight-read through the “Girardilla” movement, the hardest movement, which of course we couldn’t play at all. I like to say that I had met Scott, and five minutes into meeting him, we were playing together.”Bill and Anisa met the “super kid,” who had just finished high school in Detroit:Scott: “I’d been going to Pepe’s classes in Houston for four years prior to that, so since 1976, when I was 14. I was getting ready to pack my Chevette and move out to California, and Pepe told me he had a few people he wanted me to form a quartet with. Here are two of the people I’d love to have in a quartet that I can coach in class.John Dearman - they told me about him, but he wasn’t there. I met him when I got to LA. In fact, he was the first person I met in LA, so that’s how I ended up knowing about it and thinking, yeah, that sounds great. It’s going to be fun.”Back on campus in the Fall of 1980, everybody was getting acquainted and starting to think about repertoire.Scott: “I got a call from John Dearman, and he said, ‘Hey man,’ very cool and laid back and chill (as he is). He said, ‘I’m going to bring some music over.’ He handed me some arrangements by Pepe, which is kind of what we had to go on at that time.”Bill: “Pepe was like, ‘Let’s put this quartet together, and you can try out some of my arrangements!’”John: “And then we would play in the master classes. We’d always get a slot in Pepe’s classes when he was up at USC, and that’s the origin story.”I’ll add a quote from Anisa, who wrote about this developmental period:“Bill, Scott, John, and I practiced hard as an ensemble for precision and homogeneous sound, which was facilitated by the fact that we were all Romero students, so we had compatible techniques.”That compatibility was getting noticed around campus. They were playing the scant catalog of classical guitar quartet standards of the day, pretty much the Los Romeros songbook. But Bill dropped a bit of info that was definitely new to me:Bill: “I also want to dispel the idea that Pepe was our day-to-day, building-our-ensemble-chops kind of guy because he only came in four times a year. It was really Jim Smith, who passed away about 12 years ago. Jim had arranged some amazing arrangements. Those were some of the first things we played in addition to some of the Romero repertoire. Jim Smith’s arrangement, for instance, of the Brandenburg Sixth Concerto, was one of the first pieces we learned together. Jim’s arrangement of ‘La Soirée dans Granade’ by Debussy. This fantastic version of the ‘Circus Polka’ by Stravinsky. Those are some of the first things we played and the first things we actually recorded on the Orpharion LP that we made in 1983.”Moving into year two and the transition from their first on-the-nose moniker, USC Guitar Quartet, to the on-the-nose one that stuck:Bill: “Even though we were just students, we were still just the USC Guitar Quartet at that point. We put energy into it, and step by step we ended up getting a local manager to get a couple of gigs. We changed our name. We couldn’t think of anything better. We thought of all these different names, and the only thing was, Okay, we can’t think of anything. Let’s call ourselves the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Okay, it was our fallback position, but here we are, 46 years later, three membership changes later, and still doing it!”VARIATION 2: Baptism by One Too Many Fire AnalogiesAn ensemble’s early gigs, no matter how modest, are formative. You’re young, you’re … Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

A big thank you to everyone who tuned into the first Classical Guitar Dispatch livestream! I loved hearing about readers’ favorite moments from Tony Palmer’s “Julian Bream: A Life on the Road” and discovering details about the process of filming Bream’s final project: “Julian Bream: My Life in Music” from Paul Balmer. You can watch the stream in this app or on my YouTube channel: I’d love to keep the conversation going, and will continue to monitor comments on all streaming platforms. For those of you watching after August 8: what are some of your favorite Julian Bream stories, recordings, or if you were lucky enough to see him perform, concerts? I also discuss upcoming episodes for summer and fall 2026, plus an exciting collaboration with Interlochen Public Radio, a charter member station of National Public Radio. Thanks for supporting the podcast with subs, likes, and comments. We’re off to a wonderful start! Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

THEME Today’s dispatch comes from St. Leonard’s Churchyard in Semley, Wiltshire, a picturesque county in southwest England. St. Leonard’s is the final tour stop of Julian Bream, a name that is likely familiar to classical guitar enthusiasts, especially those of us of a certain age.Bream is one of those names you’re supposed to know. He’s the guy your guitar teacher actually respects and blathers on about ad nauseam. My own students know Bream that way—they nod politely when I speak glowingly of his accomplishments and personality, but their subtle eye-rolls betray that they suffer from the same indifference I had when I first encountered Bream at their age.I get it. My talented and driven boarding arts high school students are listening, or more likely watching, for a particular type of guitar playing presented with a particular aesthetic. They want the aspirational, competition-ready stuff: well-lit, highly coiffed, ultra-clean, rapid-fire displays of muscle and control that currently dominate their feed. They want the guitar equivalent of a Ferrari. At their age, I did too.Bream, by comparison, grunts and squeaks through guitar standards with an uneven tone, clunky and sometimes overdramatic phrasing choices, and a dynamic range that seems downright goofy by modern standards. He wears tweed and has a combover. And, along with Andrés Segovia, five will get you twenty, Julian Bream is the one guitarist who my students’ dental hygienist will be able to name after noticing their right-hand fingernails are longer than the left ones.To my young students, Julian Bream comes off as a relic, a jalopy. The preferred guitarist of adults with mortgages and lower back pain, who watch property shows like Escape to the Country or slow-moving British summertime mysteries, and still keep magazines around the house for some reason.At least, that’s how Bream appears to them from a distance. In the ten years I’ve been in my current role, I’ve watched Bream convert student after student from skeptic to believer. What first appears to them as faults looks more like quirks after a few listens. Then somehow those quirks become inspired choices. That’s about the time they discover William Walton’s Five Bagatelles and Leo Brouwer’s first Sonata, favorite selections in the contemporary competition scene, wouldn’t exist without Bream. By the time they figure out Toru Takemitsu’s All in Twilight was dedicated to Bream, and they hear him throwing down on his first recording of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, well…by that point, I’m usually talking to a lifelong Bream devotee.Up close, Julian Bream is no jalopy. He’s no sports car either. Part of what makes him a hard sell is his own self-crafting. Julian Bream left Battersea, along with any traces of a working-class London accent, and cultivated an English Country Gentleman persona that didn’t always land in interviews and can come off as a bit presentational. Ironically, it’s Julian Bream’s own branding that appears inauthentic to my young students — the same students whose aesthetic is shaped by today’s guitar influencers, with all their highly edited and digitally enhanced presentational choices.Getting past exterior trappings is tough. Julian Bream is a flawed, colorful titan of the instrument. He’s a workhorse, an artist, and storyteller who left the guitar in better shape than he found it. Julian Bream, CBE, is buried in a grade-two-listed parish behind wrought-iron gates. Like the parish itself, he’s very much worthy of a second lookLet’s get started.VARIATION 1: So what makes Julian Bream so special?Bream was born in Battersea, London, in 1933. I’ll spare you the remaining Wikipedia-style bio, and, spoiler alert, he gets a guitar, gets good at it, and enjoys some early success.To fully understand Bream’s impact on the guitar world, we need to examine the scene he inherited. Post-war Britain was not exactly the center of the universe for art music. The rather sober influence of Elgar and Vaughan Williams still dominated the orchestral world, but modernists like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett had a toe in the door. BBC’s Third Programme was particularly friendly to high-concept broadcasts, and the BBC’s in-house Symphony had a robust repertoire. There were conservatories such as the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music, and Guildhall, all established in the 19th century.But those institutions were designed as feeders to professional orchestras, and the guitar might as well have been the kazoo for all the orchestral world was concerned. Ernest Shand, the one significant British classical guitarist-composer of the previous generation, had written a substantial catalog. But Shand trafficked almost entirely in the domestic amateur music-making world of Victorian drawing rooms, and never made a dent on the art music establishment.Like Shand, Julian Bream came up in the amateur environment of social clubs. He was particularly embraced by the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists, which was established in 1929 and played a significant role in attracting the scant number of international touring artists, such as Andrés Segovia, to perform in London.The adult Bream loved to play up the self-made-man schtick, but there’s a whole stack of stage-dad letters from Julian’s father Henry, written to everybody and anybody who would plop young Julian on the planks for a bob or two. By the way, Henry Bream was the official librarian of the Philharmonic Society of Guitarists, and the PSG’s president, Wilfrid Appleby, gifted Bream his first lute, so the kid had help.Bream attended the Royal College of Music as a Piano and Composition major at the age of 15 and remained until his National Service number was up in 1952. Bream was pretty dismissive about the RCM experience, and later in his career, he liked to tell a story about the guitar being unwelcome in the “hallowed halls” of the RCM. Like a number of Bream’s yarns, that incident was never independently verified.Bream was, after all, a showman, living in the age of Salvador Dalí and Igor Stravinsky, both of whom took a rather liberal approach to their own fact sheets. Bream’s gift for mythmaking tended to kick into high gear when applied to his own origin story, so a bit of healthy skepticism is necessary when sorting through the what-really-happened chunks of a Bream bio.Bream’s interest in early music was helped along by instrument maker Thomas Goff, who built several lutes for Bream between the 1950s and 1960s. Though the young John Williams was kicking around London at the time, Bream had nearly a decade head start and was pretty much the only game in town for guitar recitals. On lute, he was virtually peerless — especially when the BBC wanted to make its heady Shakespeare productions sound more authentically Elizabethan.Another boon for Bream was his relationship with tenor Peter Pears, who was keen on promoting Elizabethan music in what would then be considered a historically accurate way. Bream and Pears first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1958, a recital attended by festival organizer and Pears’ longtime partner, Benjamin Britten. Bream and Pears would continue to record and perform together into the 1980s. Benjamin Britten arranged his 6th volume of folksongs for the duo, and the beautiful Songs from the Chinese, Op. 58.Guitar enthusiasts already know where I’m heading next. Bear with me. What’s coming is arguably the most significant dedication of Julian Bream’s career.By all accounts, Bream hounded Benjamin Britten for a solo guitar piece for several years. In 1963, Bream’s persistence was rewarded with a large-scale work titled Nocturnal after John Dowland, Op. 70. The piece references an emotionally wrought meditation on death by Elizabethan lutenist, singer, and composer John Dowland called “Come, Heavy Sleep.” The song is, indeed, heavy. Published in Dowland’s First Book of Songs in 1597, “Come, Heavy Sleep” was on brand for a composer who pretty m… Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

THEMEToday’s Dispatch comes from my hometown in rural Pennsylvania on Thanksgiving Day in 1988. I was twelve years old, and doing my best to avoid food-prep chores when the doorbell rang. It was Brian, a friend of my dad’s, who had recently been baptized at the Brethren in Christ Church my family attended. The Brethren are full-immersion dunkers, and had an oversized bathtub installed directly under the altar, accessible by a trap door. Pastor Rick forgot to heat the water before the morning service, so Brian’s proclamation of faith was a particularly dramatic affair. After his third dip, he gasped and shivered through pledges to remove temptations of all sorts from his life.Standing outside our family home, Brian revealed that one of his temptations was an extensive collection of vinyl records, which he decided to gift me. He passed me a hand trolley, lowered the tail gate of his pickup truck, tore off a plastic tarp that would contain a deer carcass later that season, and said, “ OK, kid, have fun.” The records were piled high in a series of cardboard boxes with the Chiquita Banana logo. Apparently, Brian and, for once, my parents found themselves unbothered by how those boxes of temptation might negatively impact my moral fiber, and to this day I remain grateful for their oversight.After green bean casserole and pumpkin pie, the fancy dishes were washed, and I was free to start in on the banana boxes. The discovery process began with the usual suspects: the Doors, the Beatles, the Stones. But at the bottom of the first box was a record cover featuring the profile of a handsome, pouty-faced man, with the title Parkening Plays Bach in bold white and orange lettering. I thought the man in the photo looked a bit like Harrison Ford, and the prospect of Han Solo playing the music of Bach piqued my curiosity, so I dropped the needle. About 45 seconds into the first track, I forgot about all the other records.VARIATION 1Parkening Plays Bach was released by Angel Records, a Capitol/EMI subsidiary, in 1972. Christopher Parkening was in his mid-20s and had already recorded three other albums for the label. His playing is confident and mature, and there’s a freshness to his interpretations that is unusual for classical guitar records of that time period. The looming, grandfatherly presence of the era’s dominant guitar figure, Andres Segovia, is barely detectable. Parkening places Bach’s melodic material squarely on the beat, and doesn’t go ham with the rolled chords and swooping portamenti that permeate Segovia’s 1969 Bach album. The influence of John Williams—six years Parkening’s senior and a fellow star pupil in the Segovia lineage—is far more apparent. The Williams influence is particularly present in Parkening’s sound, which is warm yet direct. That’s thanks in part to the 1967 cedar-top MT Ramirez guitar he plays on the record, which is currently on display to be seen but not heard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.For me, the standout track on the album is Rick Foster’s arrangement of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” from Cantata BWV 147. It’s a deceptively tricky arrangement. Foster set the material in the key of C, which limits the availability of open bass strings, so producing any semblance of legato requires prolonged contact with the fretboard. That means by the first repeat of the A section, the left hand is pooped, and there are still two minutes to go in the piece. Parkening makes tidy work of Foster’s arrangement, and considering they were cutting the record onto two-inch magnetic tape controlled by massive reel-to-reels, I can’t imagine there were many edits in those sessions.Parkening Plays Bach was an immediate success, and helped establish the young American guitarist squarely alongside the likes of Segovia and John Williams at the peak of Mount Classical Guitar. But there were early indications that a conventional, public-facing career with up to 90 concerts annually was ill-suited to Parkening’s demeanor. In one bizarre incident, he cut off his nails in the middle of a tour in what he called an “act of self-sabotage.” Now, if you’re not familiar with the classical guitar, cutting off your right-hand fingernails in the middle of a tour may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Right-hand nails are the primary way we guitarists produce a sound, so Parkening’s move was basically the equivalent of a pop singer showing up to Coachella and refusing to use a microphone. I’ve devoted a not-insubstantial number of hours to imagining how concert organizers and the PR team at Columbia Artists Management began squirming as one of the most recognizable faces on their artist roster began to fray at the edges.The fraying eventually unraveled, leading to a 4-year wholesale retreat from the planks. As far as retreats go, Parkening pretty much set the industry standard. He bought a ranch in Montana, announced his retirement at the ripe old age of 30, and devoted his time to fly fishing. During this period, he attended a service at Grace Community Church, then pastored by John F. MacArthur, a forefather of the megachurch phenomenon in the U.S. MacArthur’s charisma and on-air presence helped grow the congregation, doubling its tithing intake every two years or so. “Parkening, caught up in the fervor, got religion in a big way. Though Grace Community Church is a full-immersion dunking environment, Parkening had already been baptized as a baby, so his conversion was of a dry sort. To the best of my knowledge, he did not give his record collection away to a 12-year-old kid.When it was time to once again earn a living, Parkening’s “early retirement” was amended to “hiatus.” But even that decision happened on his terms:“It became evident that the Lord wanted me to return to playing the guitar again, but this time for a different purpose—to honor and glorify my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”Parkening’s first offering to the lord was the 1982 LP, Simple Gifts, which features solid guitar playing and innovative arrangements. I’m partial to the charming adaptation of the title track on that album. It’s a hoot to play, and requires the performer to detune the sixth string by a whole step from D to C with the left hand, while the right hand keeps things moving with open strings just before launching into the final variation.VARIATION 2In the church community I grew up in, Parkening’s conversion was regarded as a win for the home team. I recall a counselor at church camp using Christopher Parkening’s Simple Gifts album as Exhibit A to prove that Parkening was “God’s chosen guitarist.” “And,” he added, “just imagine how cool Heaven would be if we only got to Jimi Hendrix sooner.”As the 80s turned into the 90s, I graduated from compulsory church camp to voluntary guitar camp. I was disoriented to find myself in a community that, if they regarded Parkening at all, did so with a modicum of distaste. The narrative, as I understood it, was that Parkening started out with promise but traded his artistic integrity to shill for Jesus. It must have been a convincing narrative, because I managed to finish three degrees, perform, compose, and teach for 25 years before I spared Christopher Parkening another thought. In those intervening years, Parkening managed to shoehorn some rather disparate interests into a long and impressive career, including, but not limited to, a win at the International Gold Cup Tarpon Fly Fishing Tournament, solo appearances with the London Philharmonic and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a string of appearances on the Today Show (to my knowledge, the only classical guitarist ever featured on the program), and a collaboration with soprano Kathleen Battle that produced several albums, my favorite of which is Angels’ Glory, a worthy inclusion on any Christmas playlist.I never went in for the whole baptism thing, which is one of the reasons I don’t talk to my family much. Well, it’s the reason they don’t talk to me. But a while ago, I was granted a… Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

THEMEI had a wonderful education. I came into the music degree process underprepared and a bit terrified, but hungry to devour as much music and art as I could cram into my soft, still underdeveloped frontal lobe. I hit the conservatory scene at a moment when libraries were still the best place to locate hard-to-find scores and recordings. By the way, there was a time when every piece of music ever recorded wasn’t just…available.There were hi-fi systems in the listening cubicles, and headphones you could check out at the library by leaving your dorm key or student ID badge. There was a single desktop computer in the main hall of my school, and students, the maintenance team, and professors all lined up together to look something up or write an email on the old dial-up network. Seems quaint now. Handheld phones were reserved as movie props for douchebags in Porsches who always get their comeuppance in Act 3, so people standing in line actually had to interact with each other or just stand there, suffering the indignity of their own thoughts.These days, I spend a lot of time on university campuses, mostly as a visiting performer or composer-in-residence. Campuses are noticeably quieter places now than they were when I was a student. What little human interaction there is before masterclasses or lectures tends to come from two or three people commenting on the same 15-second clip that an algorithm coughed up on their tiny screens.And I know, I know, I’m coming off as a fuddy-duddy, “things-were-better-in-my-day” Gen Xer. But that’s only because a) I am a Gen Xer, and b) a lot of things were better. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to put in a bit of effort. You had to buy or borrow the music, or make a friend. CDs sounded better than the compressed MP3 garbage the streamers serve to us now. Chit-chat at the bank teller was more pleasant because people had to practice it in order to function. You could arrive at the airport at least two hours later than you do now. Dating was…not what it is. You could get in a car and actually get lost. If you left the house, nobody knew where you were most of the time. It was an inconvenient era to be alive, and it was glorious.It’s likely because of nostalgia for that time that I wholeheartedly believe in the value of higher education, mostly as a jumping-off point for a lifetime of learning and intellectual growth, and less as a direct path to gainful employment. And if you listened to the first installment of this series, you heard quite a bit from late Baby Boomers and Gen Xers like me bemoaning the cultural, demographic, and economic shifts that led to the current state of institutional education. Like me, all three guests devoted the lion’s share of their careers to institutional teaching. Also like me, they got into the field when the system was a bit easier to navigate. Not easy, but easier. Today, we’ll hear from people who are my age or younger. They had to navigate a downshifting education system, which either spat them out entirely or was so inaccessible that it propelled them to innovate. And here’s the thing: as a direct result of their difficulties, they’re all thriving. We’ll hear from Candice Mowbray, who put adjunct life in the rear view with a can of tuna fish and a bottle of diet root beer. We’ll talk to Thomas Viloteau, who, with apologies to The Boss, had a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack. They packed up for France, and they never went back. Finally, we’ll talk to Brandon Acker, who says he’s found exactly where he’s best suited.Let’s get started.Variation I: Candice Mowbray, A Can of Tuna Fish, and a Diet Root BeerCandice Mowbray does enough different things that it takes her a minute to describe all of them:“I am a performer, a scholar, and an educator.As a performer, that’s been a huge part of my career and primarily it’s been as a classical guitarist. A large percentage of that has been as a chamber musician, which I absolutely love. I often play pops concerts with orchestras or play in the pit for musical theater.Right now I’m really focusing my teaching on adult learners and offering classical guitar lessons and classes but also music theory and performance practice, which is another word for performance anxiety, for people who are nervous about performing. Trying to create environments in which they learn a bit about their nervous system and some tools that maybe they can apply to feel a bit more comfortable performing.Scholarship was an unexpected part of my career. I have done a lot of research on the history of women in classical guitar and written, published, and lectured. Those are my big three umbrellas of work but I’ll also arrange and compose and write grants. Anything that has to do with music I’m in.”Well, almost anything. Candice started out in the adjunct circuit, teaching guitar, music history, music theory, ensembles, and pedagogy. In a typical week, she bounced between schools in Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. It’s a pretty drive, and she loved the students, but the gigs were tough.“Teaching in Higher Ed is in no way what I thought it would be. It’s not the teaching part that I’m talking about; it’s the being employed part. A job has to go both ways. We invest ourselves; it’s our passion; we feel duty, we feel our ethics, everything, in doing the best job that we possibly can but the circumstances of being employed in these environments for some of us is not conducive to well-being.”Yeah. Let’s do a quick review of employment status for guitar in higher education. Full-time tenure-track jobs in guitar, with benefits like health care and pensions, are rare. At top institutions, a significant number of those positions are still held by the original hires, some of whom have been occupying the same studio for three or even four decades. When (or if) those people retire, there’s no guarantee the institution will replace the outgoing guitar professor at all. If they do, the job will likely be advertised at the assistant professor level, which doesn’t pay much at most music institutions. In many cases, that job will be removed from the tenure track altogether and replaced with a short-term instructor contract. Or, the institution takes a decidedly cheap-ass option and advertises the gig as an adjunct position. That means the lucky new hire gets no benefits and a salary cap that usually peters out around 20 hours per week, but it’s often less.“It’s contract work that’s based on enrollment. You can plan for the fall semester that you anticipate having this many classes or this many private students or an ensemble. You’ve mapped that out on your life’s calendar and you even start writing syllabi and you start doing professional development and maybe you’re out doing recruitment and you’re doing the work but all of that is on you.The week that classes start, that add/drop period, it affects what you’re going to earn that semester. It affects where you’re going to drive from day to day. It affects your eating schedule. It’s every aspect of your life.”And not much effort goes into making the adjunct faculty feel welcome:“You don’t even have a key card that will open your door to teach and you’re grabbing practice rooms, and carrying a music stand because you can’t reliably get a music stand. All the things that you need to go from one or two different schools that entire day and where you’re going to sneak a can of tuna fish and a diet root beer into that as your lunch. That was my teaching lunch for years actually. It was just that.”Candice did everything right. She paid her dues. Those glossy college brochures are, after all, written for students exactly like her — the ones who work hard, earn terminal degrees, and, critically, pay tuition. So while new doctoral graduates are logging onto the Chronicle of Higher Education’s job board, eager to start paying off their student loans, the institutions that trained them have been quietly removing full-time positions from … Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

THEMEToday’s Dispatch comes from the teaching studio. I’ve occupied a number of them over a 25-year span, ranging in aesthetic appeal from a dingy backroom owned by a guy who won the lottery and spent his winnings mismanaging a guitar shop to the vestibule of a 17th-century cathedral.Most of the musical personalities I admire also occupied teaching studios, from Bach to Beethoven to Aaron Copland. A number of the direct influences on this podcast were also educators, such as Carl Sagan and Leonard Bernstein, and though they weren’t associated with any particular institution, I consider Anthony Bourdain and Julia Child to be among the great educators of the television age.The guitar’s history is rife with great teachers, such as the 19th-century icons Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani, and the 20th-century pioneers like Andres Segovia and Aaron Searer, whose efforts helped pave the way for the instrument’s inclusion in conservatories and universities.With all this vaunted pedagogical history, it’s tempting to see the teaching profession as providing the essential springboard for greatness in the lives and careers of the artists I mentioned. But a casual read-through of the historical materials left behind by various composers and performers provides a more nuanced view. Beethoven, in particular, had a thorny relationship with teaching. His letters indicate that he would clearly have preferred to spend his days creating, but teaching helped him pay the bills. And it seems he had a lot of bills.I frequently hear the phrase “teaching is a noble profession,” and my thoughts reflexively turn to a friend of mine whose student brought an incontinent goat to a lesson at a university campus. I wonder if my friend felt noble as he spread a layer of paper towels on the studio carpet and fogged the room with Febreze in an unsuccessful attempt to mitigate the remnants of that encounter. Considering I most often hear that phrase from those who left the classroom to climb the income ladder and become administrators, it seems to me a more accurate amendment to that phrase would be “teaching is a profession.”VARIATION I: KEVIN VIGILThe first stop on our educator tour brings us to one of the success stories in the contemporary teaching racket. If you’ve ever sat through a school board meeting, you’re aware that cost-cutting measures are a perennial topic. While middle and high school band and orchestra programs are generally expensive, savvy administrators figured out a while ago that guitar programs are comparably cheap to build and maintain. Buy a couple of dozen Yamaha C-40s, hire one of the many fresh-faced graduates from a reputable doctoral program, guide the new hire through a certification process, and in many cases, you find yourself with an if-you-build-it-they-will-come situation. Add a bit of can-do attitude and a sprinkling of advocacy to the mix, and you get…you know what? I’ll just let him introduce himself:“Well, uh, my name is Kevin Vigil. I have been teaching in the public school system for the last 21 years at Heritage High School in Loudoun County, Virginia. You know, I get paid to teach people how to play guitar.”To this day, many public high school music programs in the U.S. with a guitar component are taught by non-guitarists. The poor band or choir director gets assigned a guitar class and, of course, they try their best, but that Guitar Methods course from their undergrad was no match for a 15-year-old shredder who showed up with a Van Halen solo under their fingers. Loudoun County public schools happen to be just a stone’s throw away from several excellent conservatories. Those conservatories pump out guitarists with doctoral degrees at a much faster rate than colleges and universities produce the jobs those degrees are designed to fill. Loudoun County Public Schools saw a hiring opportunity, and for over 20 years, they’ve employed an impressive stable of guitar instructors, whose work, like Kevin’s, doesn’t stop at the classroom:“We do a lot of things outside of the building, right? So, we started the year playing for the Department of Education’s Board of Education. That was our first gig a week into the school year. We played for the State school board. We played for the Loudon County school board. We’ve played at Yale University many times; we just did Appalachian State’s festival this year. Reaching out like that, I think it’s kind of a form of advocacy, and I guess I’m just an advocate for the kids and for the programs.”That advocacy currently includes a turn as vice president of the Virginia Guitar Directors Association and chair of the National Association for Music Education’s Council for Guitar Education.“In terms of paying it forward, I just started seeing, year by year, seeing more and more what was going on. Not just in my district and other districts. And as I started working with organizations like the Virginia Music Educators Association, and NAfME, so many people that are teaching guitar that are not themselves guitarists. I found that there are so many needs that the profession needs. I just come into leadership roles that I found myself in. I said, OK well, if I’m in that spot, I might not know what to do, but I’m gonna do my best. I’m not afraid to be wrong about something. I need to learn from others. You need to learn from the band directors and the orchestra directors and the choral directors and all that stuff, right? You know, what’s going on well with them, and what can we bring to our system? I think everything that I’ve done is just been, it’s been inspired by trying to meet the needs of students at the end of the day.”In the process of meeting the needs of students, Kevin had to buy some polish for all those awards he’s been racking up. In 2014, he was named the Shenandoah University Teacher of the Year. He’s also the Joan C. Edwards Distinguished Professor in the Arts at Marshall University. The guy was even presented with a Sir Winston Churchill Commemorative Crown for music education, but good luck getting him to try it on:“When we do what we do, and we do it well, then it reflects and people recognize it. In the school culture, and in the school community, I don’t really like to talk about myself. I’d rather let my work speak for me, I guess would be a better way to put that. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.”Sure you did, Dr. V.VARATION II: STANLEY YATESMoney and enrollment shape policy. Fortunately for this show, the higher education landscape is anything but monolithic. To account for their accounting, I’ve invited two people to share their varied experiences with institutions. We’ll start with the view from the mountaintop from a person who has, in his own way, aged out of the guitar-teaching industrial complex“Hey Matthew, Stanley Yates here. Thanks for your email and for thinking of me for your new podcast. Feel free to call me back at this number. I’m around all the time now, because I just retired. Uh…this week. Okay, bye.”Stanley Yates celebrated his final commencement just before we sat down for this chat. At that time, he had completed nearly all of his institutional obligations:“I got my full-time college position when I was in my mid-thirties here at Austin Peay State University, which was in 1994. I’m extremely grateful and fortunate to have gotten a position like this, and it’s been a 32-year tenure, which, once I turn my keys in on Wednesday, will be the end of my college institutional teaching life…and that’s about what I have to say about myself.”(laughs) Let’s hope that’s not entirely true. Before we hear more from Stanley, let’s take a beat to explore what he said about gratitude. Full-time academic jobs in Classical Guitar Performance are indeed extremely rare. Though things have picked up a bit since Baby Boomers started retiring, there are maybe two open position announcements per academic year, and that’s in an active hiring cycle. Austin Peay State University and its many co… Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

THE CLASSICAL GUITAR DISPATCHS1 Ep 1: Cochran & McAllister in Sutherland, ScotlandI’m Matthew Cochran. Welcome to the first episode of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, a new podcast dedicated to telling the story of the guitar. The first season of the show covers music from Asencio to Dowland to Tárrega. I speak with current and former members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, discuss economic and demographic trends affecting students and educators, and I go behind the scenes at international guitar festivals. I’ll dig into arranging and recording, and you’re all invited to join the Classical Guitar Dispatch Book Club. This summer’s read covers A Life On the Road, Tony Palmer’s fly-on-the-wall account of Julian Bream at the peak of his career. This week’s show is part memoir and part travelogue, a format I plan to return to from time to time. As the show finds its footing, I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions. My hope is that the Classical Guitar Dispatch provides a sounding board for all members of the guitar community. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your interests, whether you’re just starting out or you’re a grizzled, road-hardened pro, or, if the sound of my voice just helps you get to sleep, all are welcome. Today’s Dispatch comes from County Sutherland in Scotland, where Matthew McAllister and I visit luthier Michael Ritchie, busk at a bakery, lead an accidental singalong, and take home a brand-new guitar. Let’s get started.It’s not easy to travel from my home in Traverse City, located in Michigan’s northwestern Lower Peninsula, to Strath Halladale in the northern part of mainland Scotland. But the promise of a new guitar from luthier Michael Ritchie and the start of a spring tour with my duo partner, Matthew McAllister, more than justified the effort. After a series of flights, Matthew and I met in Inverness. He flew from his home base in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was in jolly spirits as he retrieved his bag from the luggage carousel, which he balanced alongside two guitar cases, one containing a traditional six-string guitar and another with a ten-string instrument. Matthew has made this trip several times, and he has that “just wait until you see this” face that I’ve come to expect from trips like this. I arrived in Inverness after flying without a guitar for the first time in recent memory. It was an eerily peaceful experience, traveling without the constant, low-grade anxiety of handing over the primary tool of my livelihood to an overworked baggage handler or an irritable flight attendant. As the throng of golfers and salmon anglers passed by, Matthew and I met the men we had come to see, master luthier Michael Ritchie, flanked by his son, Hamish. We loaded guitars and gear into Michael’s Volvo, one of those classic wagon models with a mileage counter that loses its relevance long before the car loses functionality. We began the last two-and-a-half hours of our trip starting on the commercialized A9 and then moving onto a 40-mile stretch of single-lane road that’s more populated by grazing sheep than motorists. We passed iconic dry-stone boundary walls through the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland, where the world’s first peatland, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, teems with birdlife and bog moss. The dirt road narrowed, and we arrived at a stone cottage on an idyllic piece of farmland in Strath Halladale, featuring a handful of outbuildings dedicated to the two ventures that keep the family busy, Michael Ritchie’s guitar shop and his partner Susan Wallace’s small batch pop-up bakery, Loaf, known online as the Peat Bog Baker.In his previous life, Michael Ritchie was a guitar tech traveling for months-long stints with indie bands like Belle and Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand, who rode to prominence during the heyday of the corporate touring economy in the 90s and early aughts. Michael problem-solved overheating amps, readjusted truss rods, and maintained fussy vintage gear while thousands of concert goers chanted along to “Take Me Out.” Meanwhile, Susan was (and still is) the lead singer of the Glasgow-based trip-hop duo Cinephile, who built their reputation on television and film soundtracks. On paper, it might be difficult to square Michael and Susan’s transition from road-dog to peat bog, but after spending a couple of days with the Ritchies, it’s easy to see the appeal of a mostly off-grid lifestyle in rural Scotland devoted to family, bread, and guitars. Michael showed me to the cabin where I would stay, a cozy hut just big enough for a bed, a heating unit, and a toilet-and-sink combo. Meanwhile, Matthew got the in-house option, bunking in Hamish’s room alongside Legos and remote-controlled cars. It was Friday, which meant Susan and her assistant Paco were busy in the baking shed, preparing the 350 or so individual sourdoughs, pastries, loaves, and cakes that would go to market the next morning. The smell was glorious, but my gluten intolerance meant those smells were as close as I could get to sampling Susan’s work without risking an undignified episode in the smallest room of their cottage. For the record, I gave in to temptation twice during my visit. Also, for the record, it was worth it.I tried to nap, but even after a 25-hour trek, the new guitar occupied my thoughts. This particular guitar was about three years in the planning. Matthew McAllister and I gave our first duo concert in February 2023 in Crail, a little seaport town on the East Coast of Scotland. I love playing with Matthew. He makes every phrase sound like he’s making it up on the spot, while simultaneously making it sound as though it always existed. Of course, it’s not all fun and games, and we occasionally need to go into ensemble problem-solving mode. For example, getting our two sounds to match has proved challenging. Some of that is due to the fact that Matthew’s sound is produced by organic matter (i.e., his fingernails), and my sound is produced by synthetic matter (i.e., plastic nail tips and super glue). Those different materials cause a volume imbalance, which is annoying, but they are a far subtler issue than the challenges of balancing the actual instruments that we have played over the past three years. In 2007, Delta’s baggage goons smashed my 1993 Robert Ruck, and the American luthier Stephan Connor came through with an excellent, punchy replacement. The Connor is a loud guitar with a thin top, a sound port, modern bracing, and materials that favor midrange frequencies. Originally built for Eliot Fisk and later owned by Angel Romero, the Connor was an ideal companion for nearly 20 years and has more than earned its now comfortable retirement.As Matthew and I continue to increase our concert bookings over the next couple of seasons, and we develop the material for our second album, we’ve decided to address the problem of matching our dynamics head-on.As someone who makes a living playing, teaching, recording, and writing for and about the guitar, I admit that I have a non-scientific and, at times, downright mystical understanding of what makes a great guitar great. I am more concerned about how I feel and what I hear when I play a fine handmade instrument than I am curious about how it was made. A luthier’s artistry only becomes evident to me when I clock how an instrument feels in my lap, vibrates against my chest, and how I perceive the sound when I play.Subjective? Yes. But that subjectivity led me to a recent fascination with so-called “traditional” Spanish guitar construction, which dates back to the 1800s and began with the Andalusian luthier Antonio Torres, many of whose methods are still practiced today, notably in Granada. I enjoy the balanced frequency range these guitars produce, which, to my ears, gives them a warm, rich, and rounded tone.When it comes to traditional guitar construction, many in the UK consider Michael Ritchie one of the best in the business. So, when Matthew showed up for a duo g… Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

This is a snippet from the first episode of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, where Matthew McAllister and I visit master luthier Michael Ritchie and his partner, master baker Susan Wallace, who runs a small batch bakery, Loaf. Michael and Susan live at the northern tip of Scotland, on a stunningly beautiful peat bog. The show chronicles the commissioning process for a new guitar, my switch from a loud, modern instrument to a refined traditional build, a concert, an accidental sing-along, and pushing my gluten intolerance past the safe zone. The full episode drops Friday, June 5. Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

Searching for the Soul of the GuitarI’m Matthew Cochran, host of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, this brand-new podcast that you are kind enough to be listening to. Normally, the tagline that I’ll use to end my intro is that the show is dedicated to telling the story of the guitar. And while that statement is true, it’s not the whole, entire truth.The whole, entire truth is that I’m on a mission to find the soul of the guitar. And look, I know how that sounds. It’s a frankly embarrassing statement for me to make. I worry that you will think it’s pretentious, cheesy, and self-indulgent. And maybe it is. But I turn 50 this year, which means I’m on the back nine of my time as a conscious entity on this little blue orb. And so far, most of my good memories involve the guitar. Most of the beauty I’ve experienced has been in some way shaped by the guitar. I play the guitar, write music for it, record myself and others playing it, and I love it. I just love it.But there’s a frustrating element to loving the guitar, particularly the classical guitar. And that is how profoundly misunderstood the instrument is. Even in specialist circles, it’s often portrayed as the cartoon version of itself. You know, the hyper-macho, Spanish Romance version of the instrument. That may have something to do with the fact that every regional, semi-professional, or professional orchestra puts the Aranjuez on its Valentine’s Day concert or its "Spanish Fire Fundraising Extravaganza" once every five seasons or so. Yet, if you’d like to hear one of the hundreds of other guitar concertos available by any composer whose name is not Rodrigo, I mean, just forget it. As far as music institutions go, there’s a constant drumbeat from administrators to sell the guitar as the everything instrument, which, of course, dilutes the quality of their offerings and makes the guitar into an advertising tagline.  Like, “come to our school, and our single-person guitar faculty who by the way studied classical guitar performance will magically make you an expert in jazz slash rock slash songwriting slash composition slash music production slash classical/flamenco blah blah blah…which, if you know anything about how hard each one of those individual artistic disciplines are, then you know that those admissions programs, development offices, and marketing teams are, knowingly or not, slinging a load of horseshit just to get another student in the door because they care way more about their job security than they care about actually educating the students who pay those salaries. By the way, if this sounds heretical, don’t take my word for it, just look up dwindling enrollment numbers, demographic shifts, and superimpose those numbers onto how many eliminated positions, cost-cutting measures, and music school closures there have been over the past decade or so, and do your own math.That’s the way I view the state of affairs in the most visible areas of the mainstream classical music profession, so it’s no wonder how superficially the guitar is presented to the general public. But I’m sooooo tired of seeing the guitar as a prop in press photos and Instagram posts that aren’t about the guitar at all; they’re just thirst traps that want me to buy stuff or click on a link or whatever. And I’m exhausted by my YouTube or TikTok channel’s dumb algorithm that thinks I want to hear Leyenda. Again. Played pretty well. Again. By yet another person that the algorithm thinks I will find attractive. Again. Please don’t misunderstand me here, I have nothing against youth and beauty. It’s a time-tested mechanism to get people’s attention. If that’s what you’ve got to offer, go for it. And if that’s all you need from the guitar, you know, have fun or whatever.   But for me, it’s just not enough. I mean, we live in an age when most of the music written for the guitar is available for us to play, to listen to, to enjoy. Much of the repertoire has been recorded, in some cases multiple times, by some of the greatest artists to ever play the instrument.  The guitar has breadth, depth, history, and profound expressions of the human condition. Yet, if my feed has anything to say about it, I’m supposed to be happy with advertising. I’m supposed to be satisfied with the most superficial AI-generated, Spotify playlist-type crap. To just gobble it up as if I don’t know the difference between quality and garbage.  But I think I do know the difference, and that’s exactly why I’m not satisfied. And I bet a lot of you know the difference between quality and garbage, too. And you aren’t satisfied. Especially if you’re even vaguely aware that the level of performance at the professional level is as high as it’s ever been; there are resources, there are festivals, there are student-level opportunities, there is a growing adult learner community out there, it is truly a golden age for lovers of the classical guitar, but only if you know where to look. This new podcast chronicles my personal search for the guitar’s soul. And I’m gonna warn you upfront: it’s a deep, nerdy dive into something, maybe only a few of us care about, and that’s just fine with me. I’ll let Joe Rogan talk to the masses; he doesn’t need my help. I’m looking for meaning, for knowledge, for beauty, for human connections in this enormous, yet somehow hidden world of the classical guitar. I’ll try to share my discoveries in a way that is entertaining, but never pandering. And I want you to join me. So, let’s make it official: for the Classical Guitar Dispatch, I’m Matthew Cochran. Let’s get started. Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe