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Today’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 Position

Los 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 Analogies

An ensemble’s early gigs, no matter how modest, are formative. You’re young, you’re inexperienced, and you find yourself in situations you’re not quite ready to be in. If the group can survive the hijinks, those hijinks become lore. Four decades on, Scott talks about being introduced to vegetarianism and feeling a long way from Detroit; John remembers a Self-Realization Fellowship group meditation just before a gig at Brigham Young, which led to a lugubrious opening number. Anisa recalls opening for Barry Manilow, of all people, at the Hollywood Bowl, of all places. Bill summarizes the whole experience as a “baptism of fire.” Returning listeners will note that this is the third baptism the show has covered in just six episodes, though this is the first of the burning variety.

I’d like to focus on one of those incendiary experiences, which Bill says helped forge the ensemble’s vibe and work ethic for the decades that followed.

Bill: “The first tour we did in Mexico was a five-week, 48-appearance tour, basically playing at schools and community centers in rural Mexico. All of the really hysterical disaster stories of touring happened on that trip. I think we were either going to anneal ourselves and be really strong as a group or we could have split up.”

The most disastrous of the Mexico disaster stories seems to have befallen Scott somewhere in the Yucatan, so let’s give him the mic for the rest of this story. Quick warning: it gets a little graphic. Also, Scott was recovering from the flu when we spoke, so he takes frequent pauses to avoid coughing or laughing…

Scott: “We had one afternoon off before our concert, and we’re going to the beach, man. We have a concert tonight, and we have all day.

Well, Mr. Gringo here, super, super bright white skin, freckles. I got in the water. The water down there is super clear. It’s like a magnifying glass, and so I’m just hanging out, trying to swim and trying to stay in the water. Somebody yelled at me, “Hey, you should put some kind of lotion on you.” Just to appease them, I did, but it washed off immediately.”

At the end of the day, we thought, well, we better start heading back to the van. I started getting sick and nauseous. By that night, when we arrived at the place where we were going to play the concert, I’d already had bubbles all over my body, and I couldn’t move my arms. I mean, it was such pain, so they helped me drape a shirt over my shoulders, and they handed my guitar to me. I could kind of sit in a guitar-player position. I couldn’t move my arms above my ears. It was really painful. It got worse.

It was like a second-degree burn. A doctor happened to be at the concert. He said, ‘Well, look, I’ll tell you that’s a bad burn. Don’t get bitten by any mosquitoes.’ He said, ‘Well, you need to get a mosquito net, but you can’t lie down.” Yeah, I had to sit up all night in a chair with a mosquito net over the chair, so I wouldn’t get bitten by a mosquito because I’d get infected. It was just one of those things. It was a horrible night.”

I want to reiterate that the dude couldn’t move his arms above his ears, so someone else had to drape a shirt over him. That’s deep into screw-this-I’m-out territory for a lot of young performers I know, but the thought of canceling the concert didn’t seem to occur to any of them. That said, Scott’s post-concert celebration was likely muted that night. And the next day didn’t offer much of an improvement:

Scott: “In the morning, they took me to this clinic. It wasn’t the cleanest place. They found an empty table and laid me on it. There were people there. There was a guy with a knife wound, so they proceeded to burst each bubble and pour alcohol on it. I had it all over my back and shoulders. This took a while. I didn’t pass out, but it was painful. I hadn’t slept the night before. I was just dying, and they bandaged me all up. I looked kind of like a mummy. They put this ointment on me, and I had to keep it on for a week or so, but we had a concert that night, so we played and kept going.”

Yup. They kept going. Banging out 48 shows, sometimes two a day. For Scott, that was the obvious choice.

Scott: “I have to say that was right there. That’s the place where if you’re put in that kind of situation, you can either say this life isn’t for me, or I can do this. That’s it. On that tour early on, that’s where I decided I can do this. Yeah, that was boot camp.”

VARIATION 3: And Then There Were…Five?

By the mid 1980’s, the Quartet was humming along nicely. They made their recording debut in 1983 with the now-defunct Orpharion label. They were getting high-visibility bookings within the guitar community, such as the Guitar Foundation of America and the Toronto International Guitar Festival, an event worthy of its own episode, by the way. After Orpharion, they made a pair of records with the Brussels-based outfit, GHA, which made them label mates with the Assad Brothers and David Russell.

Things were looking good for the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. But critical acclaim, a handful of albums, and some juicy festival gigs don’t necessarily produce enough scratch to cover car payments, food, and rent for four people living in the City of Angels. Bill says their agent came up with a solution:

Bill: “Maybe not too many people know this, but later on, to give us some work to keep us together because we didn’t have very many concerts, we ended up doing school concerts in LA. This was partially sponsored by the musicians’ union and had something called Music Center on Tour. We auditioned and got a slate of about 60 school gigs in a year, and it was pretty tough. 8:00 in the morning, show up at a middle school for kids who’d never seen a guitar before.

Bill: Anyway, we learned a lot from that. I became the de facto emcee and clown for those shows, and we ended up with a pretty entertaining show that worked well. For whatever reason, Anisa was just not into it, and she was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ There was this guy who was a studio major at USC named Andy York, and we were like, ‘Hey Andy, can you join us?’ He was like, ‘Sure.’ Andy, even though Anisa was in LAGQ, played these school gigs with us for a long time.”

This is that “another story” that Andy mentioned at the top of the show. Sixty school gigs in a year with John, Scott, and Bill pretty much made Andy the fifth member of the group. I asked Andy about those gigs, and aside from the 8:00 AM call time, they sound fun:

Andy: “We built a musical taco. Scott was chopping the lettuce as we did this song. We started layering this piece, and then there was a little bit of salsa in the spicy part, maybe a tremolo. I don’t even remember what the piece was now, but yeah, we all added something. There was the cheese, just to give them an idea of how music is composite, how additive things can be put on top of each other.

Then we did another thing, a classical piece that was very canonical. Every time we had an entrance with a theme, we would lift our heads. We’d be playing with our heads down, and then we’d lift them and play the main theme. Our heads would pop up like 1-2-3-4, then 1-3-2-4 because of the way it was written, and sometimes two at a time. The kids loved that! They’d be laughing, but they could also really hear and see visually where the theme was. It was a really fun show! I think it was very effective. Hopefully, it had a positive effect on some kids’ interest in music. I hope they didn’t go into it as a profession; I wouldn’t wish that on them!”

Yeah, that would be cruel and unusual…

The next phase for the group was transitional, and transitions are hard. We’ve all watched enough VH1 Behind the Music to know that a group’s brand can be riding high, while the human beings who created that brand can be struggling. I’m fascinated by a specific genre of music documentary that captures slow-moving train wrecks in which nobody in the band directly addresses the problem, but the problem is the documentary. Like “Loudquietloud: A Film About the Pixies,” “I am Trying to Break Your Heart, A Film About Wilco,” and the 1970, pre-Peter Jackson film about the Beatles called “Let It Be,” in which, and know I’m wading into treacherous waters here, but my interpretation of the footage is that an unwelcome E dominant 7 flat 9 chord during the arrangement process of “Get Back” became the proxy for everything that annoyed George Harrison about Paul McCartney.

When it comes to the LAGQ story, Anisa’s departure is the one area in which the people who lived through it are, to a person, cagey. I pressed a little during the interviews, but it was clearly a nonstarter, so I just let the tape roll.

But I will pull an old NPR trick here and choose a moody underscore so the ensemble members can tell their story, while the listener is cued to hear what is said and infer what isn’t. I may not have a Behind the Music production budget, but since Andy is peripherally involved in the narrative and can easily rock an underscore with the best of them, I’ll use his “Miur Woods” from the 1986 solo disc he made for GSP, titled Perfect Sky.

Bill: “The first ten years were developmental. That was when Anisa Angarola was in the group. Rightfully so, we saw ourselves as being kind of like a Romero tribute band. We played a lot of their repertoire and looked up to them so much. They were our idols and our role models. Near the end of that period, there were definitely some creative discrepancies about, well, do we want to keep doing the Romero shtick, or are we gonna find our own direction here?”

John says there was a disconnect between their personal identity and the music they were presenting as a quartet:

John: “ There was a little bit of a pull to maybe break away from the Romero mold. The Romeros grew up in Europe, in Málaga. Their mother was an opera singer, their father was a concert guitarist. They ARE Spain, you know? Spain, Spain, Spain! But we…I was playing Chet Atkins, Bill was in a rock band, Scott was into Roy Clark.”

And those influences were creeping into the school concerts that Bill, Scott, and John were doing with Andy:

John: “We were doing silly stuff. We were playing like “La Bamba” and bluegrass. Things that we weren’t doing in our concert repertoire. The funny thing is, Anisa was not like a snob or anything. She was really into Celtic music.”

That’s true. Here’s Anisa detailing some of her Celtic music activities:

“Outside of quartet work, I have had the opportunity of working with some of the best Irish traditional players…Paddy Keenan, Seamus Connolly, and Tommy Hayes. My recording, “Birdwatcher Hill,” has some of my compositions, as I have been involved for the last couple of years composing for documentaries and choirs.”

Five people found themselves pulled into rather disparate musical orbits; John says it just wasn’t sustainable. Andy was doing the gigs, and…

John: “Anisa was doing the tours with us. Eventually, things came to a head with what she wanted to do and what we wanted to do, I guess you could say.”

Anisa didn’t offer details about the circumstances of her departure. Instead, she summarized her time with the quartet by focusing on the early days:

“I can tell you that the quartet was a lot of fun! We had many interesting experiences, particularly the tours we did through Mexico via the Department of Education. We were able to see much of the Yucatan, the temples, the archaeological sites in between concerts, though in general we played two concerts a day at two separate locations, so it was busy but fascinating.

There were also a lot of non sequiturs: one of the funnier ones was after we had been soaked, driving through rain for a concert at an elaborate but deserted church in the country (possibly San Luis Potosi), we saw a film crew, floodlights set up all around, and a host who wanted to interview Bill for TV. Bill had to borrow the interviewer’s coat and tie for optics, and of course the interview was all in Spanish, which Bill navigated well. But I have to say we were all cracking up behind the scenes, as it felt like something out of Comedy Central. I have fond memories of all my colleagues, and I always will!”

Obviously, there’s more to the story. If this were a think piece for The New Yorker, I’m sure the editor would assign some extended digging for salacious details under the guise of journalistic objectivity, which may be entertaining for those of us who weren’t there. But I’ve been through the whole artistic-differences thing, having lived it from the perspective of the one who leaves. Professional divorces are never just professional. I lost a good friend when I left the quartet I founded, and that was after a comparatively measly eight-year tenure, with two records and maybe a dozen concert bookings a year. I figure if you have the fortitude to look back on the good times, and call them good, you’ve earned the right to tell the story, or not tell the story, any way you want.

VARIATION 4: The New Lineup Takes On the Guitar Rags

It’s difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when MTV was culturally relevant because it played music, and Tower Records and Barnes & Noble were thriving retailers. For those of us who played guitar in the 1990s, these cultural institutions made up the bulk of our information diet, and it all culminated at the magazine rack, where a cornucopia of guitar periodicals, like Guitar Player, Guitar World, and Guitar for the Practicing Musician, awaited. The guitar rags provided a generation of aspiring hipsters, metalheads, chicken-pickers, and jazzers with lessons, transcriptions, reviews, plenty of gear to salivate over, and glossy cover photos featuring so, so much hair.

Nestled alongside Wolf Marshall’s transcriptions and Eddie Van Halen’s latest rig rundown was a classical guitar outfit from Los Angeles, featuring William Kanengiser, Scott Tennant, John Dearman, and their newest member, Andrew York, who feels he may have been a bit timid at the start:

Andy: “For about the first year, I laid low too much, I think, not asserting my personality. You may get different viewpoints, but because they were an established group and I was just kind of stepping into something that was already a going concern. Nothing like what we became later, but still. Had an agent, and we were doing tours, not for a whole lot of money yet, but some really nice shows.”

The quartet’s new lineup recorded one more album with GHA before signing with the American label Delos. They released four albums on the label from 1990 to 1997. Lineup changes aside, I see this period more as a gestation phase than a rebirth. You can still hear traces of what Bill described earlier as a “Romero Tribute Band,” especially on 1993’s An Evening in Granada.

Ahem, John?

John: “Spain, Spain, Spain!”

But then came Labyrinth, which veers in a completely different direction, opening with Andy’s original composition, Quiccan, then launching into Ian Krouse’s Labyrinth (On a Theme of Led Zeppelin), which features a trippy version of the Page and Plant classic “Friends,” assigning vocal parts to the players and incorporating improvisational elements alongside more traditional, guitary textures. If you listen closely, you can even catch a quote from Steely Dan’s “Reelin in the Years.” Anachronistic hat on a hat? Maybe. But, I mean, why the hell not?

The Delos years weren’t exactly a Moses-wandering-in-the-desert period for LAGQ. Important, concrete steps came along the way. The first thing to go was the getups:

Bill: “After a little while with Andy, he was like, ‘I don’t want to wear these tuxedos.’ We’re like, yeah, let’s not do that. And then he started writing this cool stuff. We started playing his Nutcracker arrangement, but I believe the first piece he wrote for us might have been Djembe. It was like, whoa, we’re going to play African music, and we’re going to imitate drumming! It just sort of opened up this, ‘oh, we can try to do this, and we can try to do that. It was a very important artistic divergence for us.”

The divergence was already underway on the recording that catapulted LAGQ into magazines alongside the icons of the day: the 1992 Dances from Renaissance to Nutcracker. Dances features John’s treatment of Praetorius and Bill’s Gabrieli arrangements, and of course, Andy’s setting of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, which served as my generation of players’ introduction to LAGQ. I was surprised to learn that Andy’s four-guitar version of Nutcracker Suite started its life as a duo:

Andy: “I did that before I even started playing with the group. I did it as a two-guitar version in maybe ‘84 or ‘85. Just as an aside, that’s how I met John Williams: I played at a festival in Spain. He was coaching ensembles. I had a duet partner, and we played my duet version of the Nutcracker Suite in 1986. That’s when I met him. The quartet version came later when I joined the group. I began arranging and filling it out for four guitars, going back to the orchestral score. I left two of them as duets because they were perfect as just duets. The others I enlarged and brought in more of the orchestra parts, but even as a duet it worked great.”

Andy recently published the manuscript of his duet version. It’s available on his website.

The Delos years featured recordings of arrangements by every member. Some of those arrangements had been part of the group’s stage show for years. There’s John’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from Handel’s opera Soloman, and Scott’s “Fuego el Fatuo” from Falla’s El Amor Brujo. Bill was emerging as the most prolific arranger in the group, and the quartet recorded Capriccio Espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov, and Copland compositions, “Simple Gifts” from Appalachian Spring, and 4 Dances from Rodeo, including the show-stopper “Hoe-Down.” LAGQ’s perennial crowd-pleaser, Pachelbel’s “Loose” Canon, has contributions by every member, proving good music can indeed be written by committee. That track is the first time their collective sense of humor shows up on disc, but John ain’t laughing:

John: “I was a real snob about the Pachelbel Canon even though it’s our most successful, most famous thing, and I had as much to do with that as anybody, really. Scott and I started that whole thing. I showed him that Foggy Mountain Breakdown that someone had shown me, but of course he ran with it. It started creeping into rehearsals when we were taking a break or something, and one of my students had shown me this (sings rhythmic pattern). Scott and I were the ones throwing out ideas, and then finally Bill was like, I’m gonna structure this thing. Of course, any genre you throw at Andy, he’s going to be a genius at.”

Sorry, John. I’m with, like, the rest of the population on this one.

A potential result of globalization in the late 80s and early 90s was the rise of what became known as World Music. In 1980, Peter Gabriel launched the WOMAD festival and collaborated with numerous international artists throughout his career. He featured Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour on “In Your Eyes” from his 1985 album, So. Paul Simon blew the doors off cross-cultural collaborations with projects like Graceland in 1986 and Rhythm of the Saints in 1990. A few hours’ drive north of LA, the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet was making waves with its 1992 world music classic Pieces of Africa.

LAGQ was listening.

Bill: “When Andy joined the group, and we started doing this very obvious world music thing, it was not ‘Oh, let’s do this because that will increase our audience interest or change our career.’ It was like, ‘Well, this would be really cool,’ and it was a kind of enthusiasm of discovery.”

The Kronos Quartet’s influence on LAGQ didn’t stop at world music. Kronos is likely best known as a commissioning body that redefined the string quartet repertoire with more than 400 works written for them. LAGQ’s approach to commissions built on their already fruitful collaborations, such as with their friend Ian Krouse. Ian’s 15-minute Folias is a major contribution to the guitar quartet repertoire, an absolute onslaught of variations and invention over the centuries-old ground-bass form.

I mentioned Ian’s Labyrinth (On a Theme of Led Zeppelin), and John remembers it being a handful:

John: We were playing these early pieces by Ian Krouse, and they were just showstoppers. They were massive, super difficult, not just technically difficult, but you’re just struggling on stage to count and to pull off these crazy dynamics. He was a real genius for pieces that were super meaty. The famous one was the Variations On A Theme of Led Zeppelin, which ends with a 12-tone fugue! (laughs)

I have a minor beef with music that is commissioned, not for the artistic merits of the project, but as a C.V. booster. I mean, it’s your money; do what you want. But as a listener, music from those sorts of projects always sounds a bit disconnected. As floofy as it sounds, I want to hear the relationship between a composer and the people that commission the work. LAGQ’s personal relationship with Ian Krouse is tangible, and it gives the music a lived-in quality.

Scott: “We met Ian right away, and he was an important element in our development, I have to say. He and I would go out and have sushi. I won’t go into it, but we were in this sushi restaurant he liked. We were just sitting there eating sushi and minding our business. Then the sushi master, or the chef at the counter, presented this fish on a bed of ice to this couple, and we thought, wow, that’s really artfully done. Then we see the fish start to move. We thought, What the? I was horrified.

Anyway, that’s one of the first traumatic experiences I had with my hangouts with Ian. It was never boring, and he’s still a really good friend. A really good friend.”

I doubt there’s much data on the success rates of Ikizukuri-fueled friendships, but I suppose we can add one more to the plus category. While we’re at it, we can add another tick to the “Scott experiences horrors, and the group thrives” corollary.

The final ingredient in the LAGQ artistic soup came when the ensemble committed Andy’s original compositions to disc. Pacific Coast Highway, Quiccan, and Bantu are all featured prominently on 1995’s Labyrinth. And any timidity Andy may have felt in his role in the group was replaced with a conviction to find a unique voice:

Andy: “You’ve got to find the authenticity of whatever you are and what you are as a musician and what you want to do. That became clear to me. As I began to write for the group, I began to assert more of my ideas for the group’s future. There was some tension from this but also some willingness.”

If the net effect of the group’s Delos tenure was evolution, it wasn’t strictly linear, and it never feels like they’ve arrived at any conclusions. I like that. Reminds me of experimental phases in great pop acts. For example, when you consider Radiohead’s complete discography, The Bends can be heard as a precedent for OK Computer and Kid A, in which experimentation is the arrival.

VARIATION 5: I’m Ready for my Close-Up, Mr. Sony

LAGQ spent the 90s carving out its own identity with a mix of arrangements, humor, world music influences, commissions, and Andy’s original compositions. That final element was the key that opened the door at Sony Classical.

Andy: “Grace Row, who was our producer at Sony, told me, ‘The reason we’re signing the group is because of your music.’ Now that was a very controversial thing for the others to hear because in a group…I don’t take that as a huge ego issue. I just thought it validated my idea for the group’s path. I didn’t want to dominate the group in any way. I wanted to create great music in a direction that would make the group more successful and give us an avenue to make new music.”

Right. And, if there was any “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” vibe from the other members at the time, it didn’t stick.

Bill: “That was the golden age for the quartet in terms of us becoming known, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and Japan especially. I’m very proud of a lot of the things we put out.

Their first Sony project, the eponymously titled LAGQ, continued to advance their world music ambitions with pieces like Andy’s Djembe and Brazilian composer Paulo Bellinati’s A Furiosa. In Bill’s case, the quartet’s travels were a direct influence on the music he was writing:

Bill: “We heard this gamelan ensemble when we were in Singapore. I was like, how can I possibly make four guitars sound like that? I just put all this weird stuff on the strings, trying different things until I came up with this pretty accurate way of making nylon strings sound like a gamelan, this piece called ‘Gongan’.”

LAGQ and their follow-up Air and Ground represent the group operating on all musical cylinders. From an audio engineering perspective, these are first-rate listening experiences. The only reason the Sony projects aren’t my favorite-sounding of the quartet’s records is that they were immediately followed by four albums produced by the incomparable Bob Woods at Telarc. More on that in the second installment. Returning to Sony, the relationship turned out to be short-lived:

John: I mean they were really going to promote us. We did the photo session, which was like an all-day thing. It was catered. They had brought all this wardrobe and stuff. They said, ‘Oh, you can take that home too when you’re done. Peter Gelb, he’s really famous now. He’s been the director of the Met Opera for the last 20 years or something. He left to take that gig, and he brought somebody else in, and then they had a lot of different ideas about what they were going to do. Shortly after that, our producer was gone. The engineer who did our stuff was gone. This is kind of like it’s like being in the movies or something. ‘Heads will roll’ kind of thing! (laughs)

That’s show business, I guess.

VARIATION 6: Steering the Boat With Four Separate Oars

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this shakeup at Sony happened before the Quartet won their Grammy and got a lifetime achievement award from the Guitar Foundation of America. We know now it was just another fork in the road for LAGQ. But they didn’t know that then. They didn’t know if their audience would embrace a group that wasn’t a Romero clone. They didn’t know their arrangements and original works would become repertoire standards. They didn’t know if people would get their humor, or if they could stick the landing with the world music and crossover projects. They couldn’t make those decisions assuming success was an inevitability. Really, the only inevitability while the group was taking these wild swings was artistic tension.

Andy: “We were young, and we were not hot-headed; we actually got along very well. But of course, that being said, we were in a band, and there were tensions, inevitably different ideas about the direction of the group.”

John: “I was still the biggest advocate for stuff like Ian’s music or doing stuff like the Kronos Quartet. Andy, in a way, was a populist. Bill saying, ‘what we do works. Why mess with it?’ There was this sort of triangle. Despite my complaints, if we had followed my idea about what the quartet should have done 30, 40 years ago, we probably wouldn’t have had any success at all.”

Maybe. But you can’t know that either. I asked Bill about the formula for surviving a 46-year musical partnership, and I still can’t decide if his answer was comforting or chilling:

Bill: “There is this kind of interesting dynamic of how choices are made because we’ve got four personalities with four musical aesthetics. Everybody’s got their own little ego and their own little place they want to be artistically and ethically. Part of the art of keeping a group together for 46 years is learning how to get the boat steered with four separate oars without running into the shore or beating each other over the head with the oars.”

So, if Bill gave us insight into how to steer a quartet using four oars, each individual member still needs their own why for putting up with it when things get tough. For Scott, the answer is simple:

Scott: “The joy of the hunt. Every question you asked today, you could formulate an answer based on that. Why pursue the quartet? Well, it was the joy of the hunt. How did you come up with new repertoire all the time or discussions? Joy of the hunt. There was always that joy, that inquisitiveness of the next thing.”

Andy: “The audience responded to that. To me, that was the right kind of tension: this beautiful energy flowing back and forth between current styles moving in new directions and older styles playing, not pristine but just bringing them to life as if they were new. I think that’s what we did, and that’s why we had, unlike most classical groups, when you looked out at the audience, you didn’t see a bunch of gray and white hair, which is what you get in a lot of classical. That’s just the way it is. The demographic we had was kids who were 18, very excited, and teenagers, and we had people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and, of course, the contingent that loved the classical music. We brought them all in, and that was one reason we were so successful. I think I did play a big part in that, but we all four did.”

Bill: “The gradual morphing of our identity was that there were no discrete moments where we said, ‘Okay, click, this is the turning point. We’re now this kind of group or that kind of group.’ It was just following our enthusiasm and our sense of creativity, and I think we felt it was validated by audience response.”

As a member of that audience, I suppose I should fess up: the 1990-2006 LAGQ lineup overlapped with my inculcation into the classical guitar community. That included a memorable masterclass in which I played Leo Brouwer’s first Sonata for LAGQ at Domaine Forget Academy in Quebec. It also included three performance degrees, during which I saw LAGQ perform about a half dozen times, and my first professional experiences on the festival circuit with my own guitar quartet. When those activities put our mugs on the same poster as LAGQ (albeit way, way beneath the headliners), my primary focus was to not audibly squeal when passing by my heroes in the green room. All that to say, I can’t claim much objectivity when it comes to telling their story.

So I won’t.

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!

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 look

Let’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 much made a career out of melancholy.

I love the very personal, connect-the-dots nature of Britten’s dedication. As I mentioned before, Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, went to great efforts to revive interest in Elizabethan music. Julian Bream was in the nascent stages of kick-starting an entire Early Music industry with a mixed ensemble called The Julian Bream Consort. These are 20th-century British musicians who are watching their nation recover from the age of austerity in real time. It’s no accident that Benjamin Britten chose this bummer of a tune from the golden age of Elizabethan Song. In the early 1960s, it was exactly that kind of national-mythmaking backward glance that was in the ether.

His treatment of the original material follows a theme-and-variations form, but since this is Benjamin Britten we’re talking about, it gets weird. Britten inverts the whole structure and puts the theme at the caboose, so now it’s a variations-and-theme. Britten’s harmonic language is modernist, his formal outline is revolutionary, and his references are metatextural.

Compared to the tonally conservative Spanish stuff Andrés Segovia was touring on at the time, Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland was a game changer. And when Julian Bream recorded the piece alongside works by Frank Martin, Reginald Smith Brindle, and Hans Werner Henze on the 1967 RCA release titled 20th Century Guitar, it was clear to Dorothy and everybody else that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

VARIATION 2: Julian Bream, A Lifestyle Brand

20th Century Guitar pulled off another trick that Julian Bream somehow repeated often throughout his long career: the album was a critical success that actually sold units. That one-two punch bought Bream precious autonomy with his record label, RCA. Careful to avoid getting pigeonholed, Bream’s recorded output strikes a balance between two impulses. On one side, projects devoted to documenting the major works in the guitar repertoire — Villa-Lobos, Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, Bach, Albéniz. On the other, commissions and dedications that push at the extremes of the guitar’s expressive capacity, like Hans Werner Henze’s Royal Winter Music and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Hill Runes.

Throw in the lute projects, concerti, chamber music, his duo with John Williams, and there are well over 50 commercial albums bearing Julian Bream’s name, and that’s before we start counting the box sets and compilations.

My favorite period of Bream’s output began in the 1970s and continued uninterrupted until a serious elbow injury set him back in July of 1984. I hold this period up as the gold standard of productivity and sustained creative effort for any classical guitarist in the recorded age. A woefully incomplete listing of Bream albums during this period includes Romantic Guitar, Julian Bream Plays Villa-Lobos, Together and Together Again (with John Williams), The Woods So Wild, and Julian Bream ‘70s, which includes the first-ever recording of William Walton’s Five Bagatelles.

Bream could certainly have commuted to London and rented out, say, Abbey Road or Air Studios for his solo recordings. And it’s likely a series of studio albums would have resulted in a commercially viable product. Bream had the backing of the classical music establishment — professional management, publicity teams, and the RCA Red Seal brand supporting his efforts.

Yet the majority of Bream’s solo records were produced about a mile from his home at Wardour Chapel in Wiltshire. As someone who prefers to make records in a converted dairy barn — one with gorgeous high ceilings and natural wood surfaces, but unfortunately located in the middle of a municipal public garden — I imagine Bream and his team were obliged to contend with the occasional nuisance of working in a drafty, semi-public environment. You can hear doors closing and creaking, along with gusts and changes in air pressure throughout those recordings. To me, those are features, not bugs. James Burnett was Bream’s longtime producer, and John W. Bower was his intrepid audio engineer. Bream often used guitars made by José Romanillos, who conveniently maintained a workshop right down the road. What makes these records unique is the coziness of the whole operation. The same producer, the same engineer, the same luthier down the road, all working with Bream in a chapel about a mile from his house.

Speaking of the Bream house, it’s called Broad Oak. It’s a Georgian farmhouse in the village of Semley, just up the road from the churchyard where we started this dispatch. Broad Oak has twelve bedrooms and two reception rooms, and Bream had four extensions and a number of renovations made to the house. There are thirty acres of woods and an elaborate garden that Bream maintained with such fastidiousness that he planned his tour schedule around the gardening season.

Broad Oak was a big part of Bream’s life. It gets a full chapter in Tony Palmer’s book about Bream, A Life on the Road. Broad Oak is featured prominently in the 1976 BBC documentary A Life in the Country, and again in his 2006 retirement celebration, My Life in Music, where Bream also introduced his dog, Django, to the audience.

Broad Oak was the epicenter of what we might today call a lifestyle brand. Bream cultivated a public/private persona as an English country gentleman, ostensibly as a foil to his relentless professional ambitions. Bream’s bread and butter was a grinding concert tour schedule.

His first public appearance was on February 17, 1946, at the Cheltenham Art Gallery, when he was 12 years old. His first tour of England in 1951 included his London debut at Wigmore Hall — five years to the day after that first public appearance at Cheltenham.

Once he got started, Bream toured consistently until his final concert on May 6th, 2002, just shy of his 69th birthday. In case you’re counting, that’s over five decades of planes, trains, and automobiles. Of delayed flights, flat tires, and road food. Concert promoters, lighting inspections, and contract negotiations. Television appearances and photo shoots. Off the road, it was more practice for the next tour, and always a new recording to plan. We haven’t even covered the many editions and publications Bream edited. I’m exhausted just writing about Bream’s productivity. No wonder the guy loved his garden so much.

VARIATION 3: The Julian Bream Reader, Where Do You Start?

If you’re still with me, you’re either already a fan, or I’ve managed to convince you that the stuffy old British guy with a combover is indeed worth a second look. If that’s the case, you’re probably looking at Bream’s Spotify or Discogs profile and wondering where the hell to start.

In the spirit of a proud and true podcast host, I now present to you my highly biased listening and reading recommendations, offered here without a shred of scholarly objectivity, to be consumed exclusively for entertainment purposes or, inadvisably, to be used as fodder for the next online argument you intend to pick with someone you’ve never met but have already determined is your intellectual inferior:

First, for the most concentrated form of Julian Bream at his Julian Breamiest, I suggest a trio platter of the following albums, to be listened to in order:

1. Together, with Julian Bream and John Williams. This is fun, lighthearted Bream alongside his dear friend who just happens to be one of the great guitarists of the modern age. Their program is virtuosic, but doesn’t skimp on substance. First released in 1972, it’s fun for the whole family.

2. The Woods So Wild. Solo Renaissance lute music from Da Milano to Dowland to Byrd. This is 1970s-era Early Music, not bogged down with scholarly dryness or preachy expressions of historical authenticity, just a bunch of fun lute music played beautifully.

3. Dedication. Buckle up, kids, this is Julian Bream in his new music nastiness. Released in 1984, Dedication features Hans Werner Henze’s first sonata on Shakespearean characters titled Royal Winter Music, Richard Rodney Bennett’s post-tonal masterpiece, Five Impromptus, Peter Maxwell Davies’ finger-buster Hill Runes, and pretty much the only piece on the album that your mom will listen to, William Walton’s Five Bagatelles.

From there, I recommend reading Tony Palmer’s often-hilarious, sometimes poignant, and not too stringently fact-checked Julian Bream: A Life on the Road. It’s Bream in his own words, getting lost in Rome traffic, smoking, drinking, and eating his way through touring life in the early 80s. This is Bream in apex storyteller mode.

Once you’ve made your way through A Life on the Road, I’d hit the big recording projects like 20th Century Guitar, and the collaborations Music for Voice and Guitar with Peter Pears, and the Julian Bream Consort’s An Evening of Elizabethan Music. If you can add one more, I’d go with The Music of Spain, Volume 5, Julian Bream Plays Granados and Albéniz.

So now you’re ready for the cold, hard facts. Two essential, well-researched, and decidedly non-commercial books about Julian Bream are Graham Wade’s The Art of Julian Bream and Stuart Button’s Julian Bream: the Foundations of a Musical Career.

VARIATION 4: Further Reading: Julian Bream: A Life on the Road Live Book Club

Congratulations on making it this far, fellow member of the Julian Bream fan club! Feel free to mingle; there are a lot of us here. Matthew McAllister and I will host a live book club event on Matthew’s YouTube channel, Gallery of Guitar, to discuss Tony Palmer’s Julian Bream: A Life on the Road. We’d love to have you join the discussion. If you’re listening in July or August 2026, the event will be on Saturday, August 8th, at 4 pm Eastern Time and 9 pm in the UK. Go to Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack or Gallery of Guitar on YouTube for links and further information.

CODA

That’s all for today’s Classical Guitar Dispatch. The last two episodes of the summer will be a career retrospective of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, featuring interviews with past and current members. As I mentioned at the top of the show, securing music permissions for podcasts is tricky. If it’s not too cost-prohibitive, I hope to have licensing sorted for the LAGQ shows, so bear with me while I wade through the legal kerfuffle.

To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. Theme music written by Matthew Cochran, performed by Cochran & McAllister on their album Pale Blue Dot, and used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

Music used in the episode

1. “Voyager” from Pale Blue Dot (After Carl Sagan) for 2 guitars. Composed by Matthew Cochran. Performed by Cochran & McAllister.

Link to listen:

Link to score:

https://www.sacredblackrecords.org/product/matthew-cochran-pale-blue-dot-suite-for-two-guitars-score-and-parts-pdf-download

2. Arroyo Secco for solo guitar. Composed by Sean Hickey. Performed by Matthew Cochran. Unpublished; DM for info.

Link to listen:

3. “Gigue” for solo lute. Composed by David Kellner. Performed by Matthew Cochran.

4. “Allegro” from Three Inward Glances for solo guitar. Composed by Matthew Cochran. Performed by Stephen Mattingly.

Link to watch/listen:

Link to score:

https://www.sacredblackrecords.org/product/matthew-cochran-three-inward-glances-for-solo-guitar-pdf-download

5. “The Promise of Something New” from Three Non-Algorithmic Human Interactions. Composed and performed by Matthew Cochran.

Link to listen:

Link to watch/listen:

Link to score:

https://productionsdoz.com/en/catalogue/sheet-music-for-guitar/solo-guitar/solo-guitar/cochran-matthew/arranger/les-productions-d-oz/advanced/solo-guitar-cochran-matthew-dz-3819-9124

6. “Aberrations of Light” from Pale Blue Dot (After Carl Sagan) for two guitars. Composed by Matthew Cochran. Performed by Cochran & McAllister.

Link to listen:

Link to score:

https://www.sacredblackrecords.org/product/matthew-cochran-pale-blue-dot-suite-for-two-guitars-score-and-parts-pdf-download

THEME

Today’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 1

Parkening 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 2

In 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 temporary reprieve and welcomed back to Pennsylvania to provide pro bono wedding music and to retrieve a few boxes my parents had discovered while selling their home. It was a rough trip, and it ended abruptly, so the boxes sat in the trunk of my car for a couple of weeks before I could muster the wherewithal to unpack them. When I eventually did, I was surprised to find the handsome, pouty-faced man once again looking up from the bottom of a Chiquita banana box and in reasonably good shape. He looks to me like a young man now. A bit warped and moldy around the edges, but after 38 years, I suppose we should all expect to take on some damage. Under the right conditions, vinyl records and banana boxes can be surprisingly resilient. They can be found, and lost, and found again. Still, it’s best to handle these things with care.

CODA

Well, that’s all for today’s Classical Guitar Dispatch. I’m on the road for the next two weeks for concerts and teaching, including a stop at one of my favorite guitar events on the planet, the Classical Guitar Retreat in St Andrews, Scotland, where I will perform with my duo partner Matthew McAllister, alongside our friends the Magma Guitar Duo from Iceland. Matthew will also debut a new solo work I wrote for him, titled “An Awakening,” which you can hear on Matthew’s upcoming album on Sacred Black Records.

So, if you’re listening to this podcast in June of 2026, the next episode will come out July 17th and will feature conversations with current and former members of the legendary Los Angeles Guitar Quartet for a career retrospective spanning 46 years and counting.

Head over to the Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack for show details, extended interviews, full transcripts, and playlists. While you’re there, hit the subscribe button; it’s much appreciated. As always, I want to hear from you, so let me know in the comments what you think of today’s episode and what you’d like to hear on future shows.

To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. Theme music written by Matthew Cochran, recordings performed by Matthew Cochran and Cochran & McAllister, and used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

THEME

I 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 Beer

Candice 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 their payrolls for years.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle is also publishing what those institutions pay at the top. Public university presidents saw their take-home rise an average of 56% during the 2010s. Today, the average president at a large public or private institution easily clears $500,000. At the top of the heap, presidents of big-name private universities and the leaders of state college systems pull down between $2 and $4 million a year. Often more.

Now, just in case you’re going all “eat-the-rich” and cheering on those recent ham-fisted federal defunding efforts, rest assured, those efforts didn’t touch the salaries of the people at the top. Instead, the people at the top just canceled expensive offerings. You know, like music programs.

Eventually, Candice had to make a choice: continue feeding the system or prioritize her health and professional growth. It was a tough call.

There are some things about it, like the teaching part, that were great and I learned so much and all these great colleagues. But, there’s also the toll that it takes on your life and well-being and your finances and your household. So, over the years, what you need as a human being can evolve, and what you want for your life can evolve. That is something that is sad to me, that it didn’t really work out. It was something that I really, really wanted, was a full-time teaching position.”

Variation II: Thomas Viloteau finds Le Support in Champagne Country

We’re going to step away from Candice’s story before she gets her happy ending, because I want to sit in this “careful-what-you-wish-for” area of teaching in higher education. To do that, we’ll enlist the help of Thomas Viloteau, who, when I met him in 2019, had just been hired at Peabody Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. But, there was a catch:

“I got hired as an adjunct. This was for a position that did not exist. Basically, I was supposed to just fill up the studio, and they kind of messed that up because they couldn’t get an adjunct visa. So they were like, well we’ve got some good news and some bad news. Bad news: we can’t get you a visa. Good news: you’re full-time.”

Quick note: It was raining the day Thomas and I spoke, and he was outside, trying not to wake up two sleeping children. So you’ll hear a bit of that come through in the audio.

Anyway, back to the circumstances of ss employment:

“So I got a small salary to start with, but it was fine for me. Basically, all I had to do was recruit for 12 hours, and there were classes, so I was teaching the classes as well. It was like, okay, that’s fine, I can do this.

The plan was for three years. Each year, the salary would go up until I was full-time with a full studio. They asked me to recruit a lot, and maybe I would need to do some group classes on the main campus or things like this to start just filling up my hours. I was fine with all of this.”

In an effort to build his studio, Thomas came to Michigan to teach a masterclass at my school, Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding arts high school, and a common recruiting ground for conservatories like Peabody.

“You remember I came? I was like, “I’m just going to go everywhere and teach master classes. I need to recruit.” We had 50 students auditioning at Peabody that year, which was more than they’d seen recently.”

Yeah, so Thomas hit the pavement and drummed up students to come to Peabody for auditions. But he then discovered recruitment is a complicated business.

“I got one student admitted. The day before I started, I got an email threatening from the head of Peabody, saying, “This is not acceptable. You got one student.” I didn’t really understand because I didn’t get good scholarships. I mean, all the students just got bad scholarships, bad opportunities. I mean, they didn’t want to come; they had better deals elsewhere.”

Thomas trudged through the U.S. admissions process himself for a Professional Studies Diploma at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a Master’s at the University of Arizona, and a doctorate at the Eastman School of Music. But he discovered things looked very different from the other side of the glass.

“It took me a few years to really realize that you have to accept almost everyone. I got told by admissions that you can’t really predict how a student is going to do, which is true, I suppose. When they come in to audition, if you see some don’t have the level, you can’t really say, “Well, they’re not going to fit in.” This is supposed to be one of the finest colleges in the world, so I didn’t really understand how to navigate all this for a few years.”

Historically, admission to Peabody is quite competitive. But if you listened to Part 1 of this series, you know that Peabody and its competitors are contending with a decades-long structural collapse in attitudes toward higher ed, driven by demographic and economic realities that many institutions seem to be only now waking up to. Thomas is a quick study. I’m pretty sure he would have found his footing eventually, but he then ran afoul of a system even more complicated and opaque than the U.S. college admissions process:

“Years later I got married to Alexandra and I did a green card application. When I did this card application I didn’t know, but I was supposed to do a work permit application with it. Since I had a work visa I thought I didn’t really need this. I made a big mistake. I traveled abroad and I came back. When I came back they gave me my passport but they didn’t scan my work visa. They scanned my green card application, I guess, because you can be in the country while your green card is being processed but you can’t work because they didn’t do the paperwork.”

Yeah…not a great situation. But surely the HR team at a reputable institution like Johns Hopkins was willing to lend a hand to support its faculty…right?

Right?

“So Peabody calls me: “There’s problems! You know, you cannot work. You can’t work! They were like: ‘Don’t come. Don’t talk to your students. Stay home! Get a lawyer and figure this out! You’re on paid leave for one month. If you can’t figure it out then we have to terminate your contract.’”

I was on my own basically. This was one week before our child was born so can you imagine the stress? Losing health insurance soon, we were just like freaking out, man, it was horrible.”

Uh…OK…

“Finally, I don’t know by what miracle, I write to a senator about green card applications being approved. I don’t know how. I go and get it, and I’m like, “Peabody, here’s my green card. I can come back to work.” OK that’s great. Now they say, “Now that you have your papers, next year you’ll be adjunct because this is the way we were supposed to hire you, right? I’m not even kidding, this is what happened.”

Remember, Thomas had a full-time contract for several years because of his work visa. He figured he had held up his end of the contract, built up his studio, and done the auxiliary teaching necessary to fill out his hours. He and his wife, Alexandra, were counting on health care because they had a new baby at home. So, the prospect of returning to a part-time adjunct position without health care was just a bridge too far.

“No health insurance with a baby. This is not going to work. I just told them right there and then: No, I’m not continuing. They were like: ‘We understand.’ (Laughs)

I mean you’re expendable and super easy to replace. That’s the thing because if you look at the number of jobs that open each year in the US, I’m thinking higher ed and the number of doctoral graduates. You just walk away. Well it’s OK. There are like ten other people behind you that are ready to take that job. For some people it wasn’t a great fit for me, that’s all.”

Thomas understands that the choice he made is not the choice everyone would have made. But, as a card-carrying and well-practiced member of the walk-away-from-a-bad-situation club, I get it.

“And I know it’s not every institution that’s like this as well. There’s plenty of other places who treat their faculty better. I think at Peabody I just had the misfortune of being in a place that was a little bit too worried about numbers. That’s a huge school. It’s Johns Hopkins and that’s how they work. They want to survive. They’re doing the math.”

Thomas and Alexandra did their own math. They moved to the Champagne region of France, where the cost of living is more affordable, and the health care system isn’t tied to employment. Thomas gave it a go with another teaching job in Burgundy, which he liked, but he also started a business, which he liked more.

“That’s when I started Le Support basically. I would have never done it if I’d stayed at Peabody because usually I didn’t have the time and I didn’t have the actual need. When we left it was just like, “Well let’s try it.” I did end up teaching for a little bit so then it’s like a full-time job with Le Support, full-time job practicing because I have concerts. You have to leave so you have to make up lessons and when you come back there is even more work on the company. It’s just too much. Something has to go and I don’t want to leave Le Support. I mean it’s kind of a cool project that I just started and let’s see where that goes.”

Le Support is a cool project. It’s a guitar elevation device — the kind that lets you play without a footstool — made of laser-cut cast acrylic. It’s Thomas’s unique design, and he’s been tinkering with it for as long as I’ve known him.

Thomas also mentions concerts. This is a topic we’ll cover in depth in later episodes, but the gist is that preparing for concerts and the associated travel requirements add up to a huge time suck. Professional performers devote hours every day to repertoire maintenance, bookings, and travel arrangements. Building out a performance calendar is its own full-time job.

“Obviously, I can’t just stop playing concerts. You know that’s what I’ve spent my life training for. So I go to concerts. They ask, “Where do you teach?” I’m like, “I don’t teach.” For everybody it’s like, “What, a musician that doesn’t teach?” It’s not that common because it’s a nice way to make a living. I think it’s safe, it’s secure, and if you want to start a family it’s great. It’s a paycheck. It’s not even the amount but it’s just secure.

When you play concerts it’s not secure. You have to be your own business owner basically. It’s the exact same thing: it’s your business, you’re the product, and if you don’t sell it, it’s not selling. So it’s work. Teaching is work but it’s done for you. Just have to show up to it and that’s kind of a nice thing.”

It is a nice thing, but therein lies the calculus at the heart of every performing educator’s financial reality. Wanna perform? Great. But there’s no guaranteed salary, and no predetermined career path. Want a full-time teaching job? No problem. But we need you on campus 35 weeks a year, so, unless you want to spend every break struggling to fit the guitar into the overhead compartment on a transcontinental flight, that performance career you spent years training for is more of a performance hobby now.

“It’s interesting that a lot of this evolution as a student of music is to get a job that is really basically not an artistic job. Strange!”

Yeah, strange. When Thomas left Peabody, he faced the same interminable conundrum that has plagued musicians across eras and genres. He found his own way through, but he thinks institutions can do a better job of preparing students for what’s coming:

“We need to actually be real a little bit. Fifty percent of the students that are in those institutions are not going to be in the field. That’s because of:

1. We accept them in those institutions.

2. They’re not being taught all the things they can do.

They’re being taught to play the Ponce Sonata really well, and that does not pay rent, let me tell you! No, they need to know all of the things that they could do in music, using their skills as guitarists, musicians, but also entrepreneurs basically, to make a living in this, because you have to be creative. You have to just find your own way. There is no way that’s just done for you. You know? Like, you go study medicine, it’s going to be way clearer what the steps are going to be. You go study music, you’re on your own. You can do anything you want. You can make a lot of money if you want if you actually work hard at it, but if you’re just being taught to be a good guitarist and know everything about your instrument to go play a concert, well that is not going to work, you know?”

Variation III: Candice Mowbray finds the other side of the K-Shaped Economy

Thomas found his way out of the adjunct teaching grind by starting a new business and doubling down on concertizing. But if there’s a thread running through these conversations with artist-educators, it’s that there isn’t just one path. To illustrate this, I’d like to return to Candice Mowbray, who, when we left her off, was still stuck in the adjunct teaching grind. What Candice didn’t know then was that a way out was about to find her. You remember those college-bound high school seniors from Part 1 of this series? The ones who developed skills in guitar programs or private studios, but, due to economic uncertainty and shifting cultural attitudes toward music in higher ed, decided to go into Pre-med, Pre-law, or STEM? A similar pattern played out thirty years ago. Those high school students are now parents and grandparents. They built careers, had families, got divorced, paid medical bills, and contributed to a 401(k). Late-stage Baby Boomers and early-stage Gen Xers, aged 55 and older, represent the other, wide end of the K-shaped guitar economy. That makes adult learners a star demographic of the guitar-teaching profession. They have disposable income, time to practice, and a penchant for building community. Candice discovered the skills she quietly built during her years in the adjunct purgatory were exactly what this new, underserved, and unaffiliated guitar community needed. And, well…

“I love it! I meet the most fascinating people, people who are great at so many different things, so many different careers, and we have this mutual opportunity, to pardon this expression but I can’t think of better words, to nerd out together.

I mean that as the ultimate compliment. We are all people who get excited about a subject, and we get excited about learning classical guitar. Their involvement and their interest is already exploding with fireworks and I just think that’s a beautiful thing. When you talk to people after a concert and you’re encouraging them to try, they listen and they believe you that, “Yeah okay well maybe I can do some of it.” Mixed with that is wanting truly wanting to create community within guitar. I know that’s a phrase that gets used a lot; it’s often in mission statements for nonprofits, and it is, in a lot of cases, really, really sincere.”

Candice offers one-on-one lessons and ensembles. She teaches classical guitar, music history research, music theory, mindful music performance practice, and Till Approach fundamentals applied to guitar. She works online with people from all over the world and gives in-person lessons and classes at her private studio in western Maryland. And she’s found a community of people who make the work meaningful to her.

“It’s just a lovely thing to get people to learn on their own but then to get them together and to let them commiserate about the challenges, let them enjoy playing music together in an ensemble. For example, I started a community ensemble this year with the intention that it wasn’t a performing ensemble, with the intention that it was really just a chance once or twice a month to get together and enjoy the process of making the air vibrate and doing that together, literally to harmonize, literally and figuratively, you know what I mean, to harmonize.

That’s why I do it because it’s great and the people are great and I get to spend time with them.”

Variation IV: Brandon Acker, “I Found Where I’m Best Suited”

I’ve taken a lot of swipes at institutional teaching on today’s show. I’ll repeat the sentiment from Part 1 of this series: the guitar-teaching industrial complex is anything but monolithic, and there are certainly healthy institutions that support faculty. There are even some who understand that the faculty is a big reason students attend the institution. Well, that and the branded sweatshirt. But the truth is, Thomas’s and Candice’s experiences aren’t particularly unique. I did my time in the adjunct mishegoss, first in Upstate New York and later at three separate institutions throughout the state of Georgia. When I handed in my resignation to each institution, I got the same “don’t let the door hit you” response from whoever was in a supervisory role at the time. Incidentally, there are no music supervisors left at one of those institutions. The buildings still exist, but the name on the campus entry changed, and they now train nurses there.

Thomas and Candice now both view their experiences teaching at institutions as a difficult but necessary step toward creating higher-quality work that matters to them. But what if that step wasn’t necessary? What if they never needed an institution to provide a job in the first place? Remember the single desktop computer I mentioned at the top of the show, the one everyone lined up in the school’s main hall to use? That machine has provided a lot of people with a lot of teaching work over the last 30 years. But, since this isn’t really my wheelhouse, I figure we should talk to an expert:

“Sure, hi, I’m Brandon Acker. I’m a classical guitarist, but also, I specialize in all sorts of early plucked instruments like the lute, theorbo, baroque guitar, all sorts of instruments there. I run a YouTube channel. I run some online courses. I do a lot of online courses through a school I call Classical Guitar Pro. I have an online music school with one-on-one teachers called Arpeggiato. Besides doing that I am a full-time traveling touring musician.”

Like our friends Candice and Thomas, Brandon’s work encompasses a number of activities. His YouTube videos currently hover around 83 million views, and he has upwards of 696,000 subscribers. Between online lessons, Classical Guitar Pro, and Arpeggiato, Brandon provides education products for well over 5,500 students. At 36, the guy’s already a walking teaching institution. But he never saw himself as part of the machine.

“I have always felt a bit like an outsider in the classical and early music world. I come from a metal background and did not grow up at all listening to classical music. It was not my culture, was not in my experience.

When I discovered, sort of as a happy accident, classical guitar right before I went to college and ended up doing two degrees in that, I was completely new. I was the rock guy at a music conservatory among all these orchestral players.”

The experience of being the rock guy at a music conservatory helped form the bedrock of Brandon’s communication philosophy:

“I really had the experience, coming into classical music, that some of the stereotypes rang true in the sense that when things were explained, they were always, by default, explained in a very professorial, academic way. Like you’re attending this 4-hour lecture on a subject which always goes deep into it and is sort of over my head instantly, using language and vocabulary that I feel like they don’t necessarily know what it is. I’m assuming I know all these things about all these books that I didn’t read so I don’t like doing that.

I like to speak in a way where I define my terms. If I say the word rubato, I don’t assume that a musician watching or an enthusiast knows what it is. I just add, ‘which is bending time.’ Just by adding and defining your words and describing things in a way that anyone off the street would understand, I think you clarify and simplify and therefore make things more accessible and therefore more entertaining and educational.”

Noted.

“By doing that, you aren’t diluting the seriousness of the conversation. Because it does feel, from the outside, that information is locked behind a vault of conservatories and a different class of people. There are always misconceptions like that. I think by presenting this information in a way, I like to use the word “stumbleable”. It’s very easy to stumble upon these videos. Oh, today I just opened my phone and now someone’s describing a theorbo? What the hell is a Theorbo? You know, but in a way that they can go, ‘Oh this is cool.’ I didn’t have to feel like I was talked down to or attending an academic lecture. I could just enjoy it.”

Yeah, we are allowed to enjoy this stuff, after all. Brandon’s outsider experience at conservatory coincided with a generational shift in the way we share information. Brandon discovered he didn’t need an Admissions team to bring people to the conservatory. Instead, he can bring conservatory to the people.

“What happened is, one day I got a call from the famous YouTuber named Rob Scallon (2 million subscribers), who was a full-time YouTuber as his job, and I didn’t even know that was possible. This is like 2019. He invited me over, did a video and the video went viral. It was me showing him a theorbo. Overnight I got like 20,000 new subscribers on YouTube and people started watching my old videos and I realized that I had never spoken in any of my videos. This was the first time I had really spoken on YouTube.And I thought, ‘What do I really have to say?’ You know there’s nothing I have to say because although I have a million things to say and I’ve lectured and given presentations on music. This is the internet. There’s always someone out there who can speak more articulately than I can, who knows more about the subject, whom I do add something here. I just thought, you know what, people seem to like it so I’ll make videos on topics that I have said over and over and over in my teaching. I made a video on how to practice, how to warm up, the importance of posture, and why I believe guitarists should never forget to use their ear, and therefore tune with their ear and not just with a display of a tuner. Those did well and I kept building on that until I realized online education was really a thing.

I’m reminded of that quote that gets attributed to Hedda Hopper or sometimes Milton Berle, that it takes 20 years to become an overnight sensation. Brandon did his homework. He earned his degrees, taught, and played concerts in the early music world. At some point in the process, he figured out how to set up a camera and record himself. So when Rob Scallon’s video focused millions of eyeballs on Brandon, Brandon was able to spin it into something sustainable.

“Now I’ve discovered that, number one: YouTube can be a job. If you have enough subscribers and enough monthly views, which they’ve just lowered, YouTube has just made it much easier to monetize. I think you only have like 500 subscribers and 1,000 watch hours a month, which is not that hard to do. You can monetize and make money from your YouTube videos. That’s an incredible new career pathway. Then of course there are online courses, which is a huge market. Especially I think COVID-19 really accelerated the online learning acceptance, pushed it into the mainstream because everyone was forced to figure it out.”

Right. Big global pandemic, meet big global technological revolution. Oh, demographic shift in post-industrialized nations, you’re here too? Welcome to the ride. The music institutions may or may not be joining us, but we have a number of their graduates hanging around in steerage. What are they doing back there, you ask?

Same thing they always do, Pinky…they adapt.

“Teaching online is amazing, and if you want that, you have to develop some type of online presence to be visible and be seen as someone worthy of reaching out to. And then of course there’s the online course strategies. There’s Patreon, which is amazing. The amalgamation of all these things has added up to a career for me financially but again none of it was planned. I haven’t until very recently felt like, “Okay now that I understand sort of how this works, I can now plan for the next thing and here’s what I should really be putting my time into.” The good old trial and error is tried and true; that was my case.”

Brandon’s trial-and-error process opened a number of doors. He found the work he wants to do, and the place he wants to do it.

I realize now I found my place. Now, to me, the traditional place, like a university, no longer feels like my place because I think I found where I’m best suited.”

By my estimation, that’s a good place to be.

CODA

Well, that’s all for today’s Classical Guitar Dispatch. Thanks to Candice Mowbray, Thomas Viloteau, and Brandon Acker for their insights and contributions to the show. Our next episode is another two-parter in which I sit down with current and former members of the legendary Los Angeles Guitar Quartet for a career retrospective spanning 46 years and counting.

Head over to the Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack for show details, extended interviews, full transcripts, and playlists. While you’re there, hit the subscribe button; it’s much appreciated. As always, I want to hear from you, so let me know in the comments what you think of today’s episode and what you’d like to hear on future shows.

To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. The recordings used on this episode are performed by our guests Candice Mowbray, Thomas Viloteau, and Brandon Acker. Theme and all other music written by Matthew Cochran, performed by Cochran & McAllister, and all used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

THEME

Today’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 VIGIL

The 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 YATES

Money 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 competitors pump out guitar students with terminal degrees every year. When those newly minted guitar doctors start looking for work, they face stiff competition and, due to the slow-to-die tenure system, they also face a so-called “labor squeeze,” which is economist-speak for a low-hire, low-fire job market.

VARIATION III. CHUCK HULIHAN

“We’re rocking audio only, so I can look as stupid as I want. I can make funny faces and all, right, we’re good?” (laughs)

Feel free to make as many faces as you want, Chuck. But we should probably make some introductions first:

“My name is Chuck Hulihan, and I am currently in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area. I live in Peoria. I’ve taught since 1999 at one of our 10 Maricopa Community Colleges. Specifically, my campus is Glendale Community College, and I’ve served in various roles with the Guitar Foundation of America for the last decade. I currently serve as the Ensemble’s and Engagement Director, and if I had to label myself or sort of self-describe, I’m the Ensemble Guy.”

Yup. Chuck is the Ensemble Guy. A fixture in the American guitar festival circuit who can swing a conductor’s baton while keeping a group of middle and high-schoolers on summer break focused, has premiered ensemble works by the who’s who of guitar composers, and does it all with a sartorial flair that somehow comes across through radio. But it didn’t happen by accident:

“I believe a lot in manifestation and projection, and that’s something that’s always been really important to me: my imagination and thinking about intentional actions to move me closer to a reality that only currently existed in my mind. Pretty much everything I’ve ever done professionally has been very strategic and intentional, and it always has something to do with a foreseeable outcome that I’m either at the subconscious or very much at the conscious level attached to.”

“It was only then that I realized you guys don’t all conduct. Like everyone here is, it’s like you’re not all in the guitar ensemble. No, it was just the normal studio of soloists who occasionally played in a duet or did some chamber music, but nobody conducted. Everyone found it odd, and that was probably my first light that really went off.

This one room over here to the left is really busy. This room over here to the right looks wide open. The lights are on and the AC’s blowing, and I think I’m just going to go step over here.”

So Chuck chose the room with air conditioning, which came in handy during summers in the greater Phoenix area. Chuck’s interest in guitar ensembles also came in handy when the high school guitar program phenomenon came to Arizona via a charter school mandate in 1996:

“It was 1997 and that second year that I was offered a job at the Arizona School for the Arts, which was a performing arts charter school for arts and academics but their angle was they were hiring all professional musicians.”

Great, so you get a job teaching guitar ensembles. You’re in the pink, right?

“For me it became obvious that I needed to have materials that were high quality and that embraced a multitude of levels. I’m in 1997 so there’s not a lot of resources. We are before, like, way before all the great stuff that we have now in terms of ensemble methods, in terms of all these wonderful organizations. We are a century later in just a few decades, in my opinion.

There were definitely other people out there doing it but I, sort of in Phoenix, felt a little bit like a one-man island.”

Eventually, Chuck found people like Kevin Vigil who were working through some of the same issues. They fixed the repertoire problem by making arrangements, commissioning original pieces, and getting the stuff to print. They organized. They shared information. And when Chuck was hired at Glendale Community College, he took all that organization and repertoire, and applied it to his studio there. But, like Stanley Yates, Chuck recognizes that graduates of a guitar program need to understand the market they’re walking into:

“There are far more opportunities in K-12 education at the moment than there are in college opportunities and that’s just being honest. If you need a job and you’ve got to keep a roof over your head and you’ve got to provide for a family, someone’s got to talk reality to you. The college jobs are really hard to come by, extremely competitive. You’re going to be able to teach all your heroes and they don’t all pay so well and most of them don’t have any long-term sustainability.

I don’t even think intentionally but we are all just indoctrinated into thinking that is the only clear goal. If I’m going to teach I want it to be, I want it to be at Juilliard. That’s the only place to teach. Opportunities are far, far, far more wide open in K-12. That’s one thing I just have to say. Yes that’s not for everyone; doesn’t mean everyone shouldn’t even teach in the first place, never mind where you’re teaching. This is not for everyone. Period. End of story.”

“It’s not for everyone” could have been the title of this episode. And I know I promised not to get too sentimental about the whole education grind, but I do this work too, and I know it’s hard. So I asked Chuck what he wished people understood about the work that he, Stanley, and Kevin already know about their profession:

“Probably that the word “play”, like teaching people to play the guitar or the act of playing the guitar, is flipping hard work. Though it might look like we’re just hanging out and playing the instruments, really, really, really, flipping hard, particularly at the beginning stages, like really, really hard. All instruments present this paradigm that as you get better you realize it’s even harder and then as you get better and better you realize you are way worse than you thought. This is this cruel inverse.

I guess what I would want people to know, being a musician or a career as a musician or just learning an instrument or teaching someone else an instrument, is that it’s hard and it might take a long time. You might not have instant success. There are going to be struggles. You’re going to want to throw in the towel. It’s far easier to quit. It’s far easier to not do that thing you said you were gonna do, but if you keep at it, if you grind and you keep working, you’ve got a chance.”

Yeah. But you’re not gonna find that on a syllabus.

THE CLASSICAL GUITAR DISPATCH

S1 Ep 1: Cochran & McAllister in Sutherland, Scotland

I’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 gig with a brand-new cedar-top instrument fresh from Michael’s shop, featuring a small body and cocobolo back and sides, I knew exactly what I wanted. Matthew and I hatched a plan to approach Michael about making a second guitar with the same design and materials.

So, in July of that year, as Michael set up his table for the luthier’s exhibit at the Classical Guitar Retreat at St Andrews, Scotland, I made a beeline for the unsuspecting luthier with a challenge. At first, Michael was resistant to the idea. “I can’t guarantee they will sound the same,” Michael said. “I mean, I can probably get them close if I use the same or similar materials, but it’s not a science. There are countless unknowns when dealing with wood, so if you want the same guitar as Matthew, there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed.”

“That’s fair,” I admitted. “But you know…a pair of guitars made in the same shop by the same luthier using the same materials will get us a hell of a lot closer to the sound we imagine in our heads than what we can otherwise achieve. Plus, regardless of how well the two guitars match, I know it’ll be a killer instrument.”

Michael crossed his arms, which I’ve come to know as his thinking pose. After more than a little silence, he nodded, uncrossed his arms, and shook my hand.

Challenge accepted.

Michael produces guitars in his Strath Halladale shop, but the methods he employs are rooted in his time in Granada, where he lived, learned, and practiced his craft in the storied Barrio Del Realejo. There’s a traditionalism that permeates those building practices, including glue made from all kinds of animal and fish parts, which I try not to think too much about, but if you listen to Michael waxing rhapsodic about affixing a brace using hides and glands, you can see the romance. He says, “There’s something poetic about the old ways, and it adds joy to the work.”

That joy was on display as Michael lifted his latest instrument from the humidification case and placed it in my hands for the first time. I set the guitar on my lap, tuned it, and played a chord. Matthew set up cameras and microphones to record the moment. I felt a bit out of body, playing while listening, listening while playing an instrument I will practice, write, and perform on, and will be my primary traveling companion for the foreseeable future. It occurred to me that playing a guitar I commissioned for the first time is not unlike a first date, with all the hopes and insecurities that come with the experience. Though for this particular first date, I had already signed the marriage certificate and booked the photographer. Unlike any other first date I’ve ever been on, the experience of playing Michael’s newest instrument lived up to my expectations. The next test was to see how the sister guitars sounded together. Matthew grabbed an arrangement I sent him during a layover the day before from J.S. Bach’s Actus tragicus Cantata BWV 106. By the end of the first phrase, Michael, Matthew, and I knew we had something special. Matthew and I spent the afternoon in Michael’s shop, working through our repertoire, growing increasingly excited about the new, balanced sound we were hearing. Finally, the exhaustion from the trip overcame our excitement, and we headed back to Michael and Susan’s cottage and celebrated with what the Scotsmen inaccurately described as a “wee” dram. I slept very well that night.

I woke the next morning to the sounds and smells of bakery preparations. There were plumes of smoke coming from Susan’s baking hut. Crates of bread, pastry, and cakes covered every surface of the kitchen and spread to the living room in the cottage. Michael, Paco, and Hamish loaded a van and their Volvo with product, while Matthew and I packed for a bit of low-pressure busking at the bake shop to promote our evening concert. That was Michael’s idea, and it proved to be a good one.

After a cup of coffee and the first certifiably worthwhile gluten risk of the tour, consisting of a moist and rich pistachio cake made from spelt flour, Matthew and I loaded into the van driven by Paco, a convivial fellow from Valencia, who first visited Northern Scotland with the intention of staying for a summer and never left. There was just enough room to fit guitars and concert gear among the baked goods, and we careened down the one-lane road toward our first delivery of sourdough at the Reay Golf Club. From there, it was a straight shot along the coast of the North Sea to Thurso. When we arrived, Michael and Hamish were already rushing bread crates from the Volvo Wagon through a brewer’s basement and up a rickety set of stairs, and into the Bakery. Matthew and I followed with guitars, set up in a corner, and began tuning while the line of customers snaked down Traill Street, waiting for Susan to open the shop.

A couple of hours later, the shelves were cleared out. The last of the locals said their farewells, and a few loaves of sourdough—serving as the only remaining proof of Susie and Paco’s baking efforts that week—were taken to a local coffee shop and sliced for sandwiches. Matthew and I packed up and headed to our sound check at Thurso West Church, which was first established in 1860 as a “Free Church” and later became part of the Church of Scotland in 1929. Michael was present at the sound check to listen to the sister guitars in action. He paced from one corner of the sanctuary to the other, arms crossed, listening closely. Matthew called out to Michael, who had sneaked into the balcony, “What are you hearing?”

“All good from here, boys.”

“Balance?”

“Aye. Better now. How does it feel, Matthew C?”

“Feels great, Michael. I’m really pushing the top string. Is it too much?”

“You can push. It won’t go splat on you.”

We went to Capilla Tapas Restaurant for dinner, which overlooks Scrabster Harbor, where trawlers hauling whitefish were nearly finished bringing in the day’s catch. I noticed a tiny landmass jutting into the distance and asked Matthew what it was. “Those are the Orkneys. In fact, that’s Stromness just there.” You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know the small seaport town of Stromness, an old Viking settlement that currently supports about 2,500 residents. But to me, just seeing the silhouette of Stromness was akin to a celebrity sighting. That’s because Stromness is named-checked in the 1980 Peter Maxwell Davies musical The Yellow Cake Revue. At the time, uranium mining posed a very real threat to the region, and Maxwell Davies, a longtime Orkney resident, composed The Yellow Cake Revue as a protest. Nestled among the cabaret-style songs that propel the narrative, a little piano interlude called “Farewell to Stromness” emerged as one of Maxwell Davies’ most beloved pieces. Like the solo piano works of Albeniz and Granados, “Farewell to Stromness” was quickly and successfully adapted to the guitar and has become a staple of the repertoire. I found it irksome to be within spitting distance of Stromness, knowing our tour schedule wouldn’t allow for a quick ferry to the town. Matthew, who has performed in Stromness as part of the St. Magnus Festival and is familiar with the local audience, suggested we add “Farewell to Stromness” to the evening’s program. That idea also proved to be a good one.

By concert hour, the church was packed. We stepped into the sanctuary, gave our bows, and recognized most of the faces in the audience from the bakery earlier that day. Susan and Michael sat in the front row, and I felt a bit nervy, wanting to give Michael’s new guitar the best debut performance I could manage. And it almost went off without a hitch. During a particularly strummy moment in our arrangement of Chick Corea’s “Spain,” I hammered on a chord that knocked the soundhole tuner right off its clamp, dislodging the battery and sending the entire mechanism flying into the back of the guitar with a clank. It sounded like a pinball machine. Live performance is always an adventure.

There was no printed program, and we announced our pieces from the stage. When we got to “Farewell to Stromness,” the audience let out a collective sigh of recognition, and I’m sure I could make out people singing along as we played the piece. It was a thrill to hear a staple of the guitar repertoire given the hero treatment by a decidedly non-guitar, mostly bakery audience.

Back at the cottage, we settled in for one of those late-night conversations that are sort of a debate, but the kind of debate that makes your face hurt from laughter. I’m pretty sure we solved a few of the world’s problems, and I’d happily share the solutions if I could only remember what they were. I gave up around the time Michael and Matthew started in on cryptocurrency, and left the old friends sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, bickering, and laughing. I just remembered to duck my head to avoid a low beam when the shock of the night air forced me to inhale, and I looked up at a sky free of light pollution, the smell of woodworking and bread baking still in the air, and the feel of the damp, ancient soil under my feet. And for the second night in a row, I slept very well.

Monday morning, we took the two-and-a-half-hour trip back through magical terrain, and my mood darkened as we pulled up to the Inverness train station. If you ever find yourself in a situation where it is genuinely difficult to say goodbye to friends and you are considering calling your wife to discuss leaving your life in Michigan and moving to the Flow Country of Northern Scotland, I highly recommend the ScotRail route from Inverness to Edinburgh, which cuts through the Highlands, hugging the Cairngorms National Park. The trip may not convince you to stay in Michigan, but it will provide you with a renewed appreciation for how stunning all of Scotland is, so just for now, maybe keep your options open.

On the train, Matthew and I did a bit of tour planning, discussed programming for the next album, and caught each other up on the comings and goings of the people in our lives. Matthew mentioned that he ran into his mother while shopping in Belfast. “Shopping, huh?” I asked, “For what?” “A ring for Eleanor,” he answered. “A ring?” “No,” he said, with what I can only describe as a shit-eating grin, “The ring.”

The rest of that story involves fermented shark, a serious winter storm, and a broken-down bus in a remote part of Iceland. But that’s another trip. So, stay tuned to the Classical Guitar Dispatch for more tales from the road, plus interviews, composition tips, listening and reading recommendations, histories, and more. Next week, I speak with Kevin Vigil, Stanley Yates, and Chuck Hullihan for Part 1 of my series, “The Noble Profession,” an examination of the guitar teaching industrial complex.

As always, I want to hear from you, so let me know in the comments what you think of today’s episode and what you’d like to hear on future shows. For listeners who subscribe to Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack, I’ve included a free download link to my arrangement of J.S. Bach’s “Sinfonia” from Cantata BWV 106. You can also get full transcripts of the show and a playlist of all the pieces I mention. To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. All compositions by Matthew Cochran. Music featured on this episode is from the album Pale Blue Dot by Cochran & McAllister on Sacred Black Records, and is used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

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.

Searching for the Soul of the Guitar

I’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.