Classical Guitar Dispatch

THEME
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.


Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

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


Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

Julian Bream: A Life on the Road is a piece of classical guitar history.
Tony Palmer rode along with Julian Bream during the 1981 touring season. A Life on the Road chronicles the pair getting lost in Rome traffic, drinking copiously, and frequently lighting up what Bream calls “tubes of joy,” while Bream plays concerts, records, and obsesses over gardening and the game of cricket.
I’ll host the first Classical Guitar Dispatch livestream this Saturday, August 8th at 4 pm Eastern (9 pm UK) to discuss the book and celebrate Julian Bream’s artistry, and I’d love for you to join the conversation. It’s free. No expertise required, just curiosity about and/or a bit of enthusiasm for the classical guitar’s closest thing to a Tolkien character. Here are some links (they all take you to the same stream, just viewable on different platforms):
YouTube:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/19DvyrnPd8/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7490748513644027904?viewAsMember=true
I’m using this event as a test balloon. If the live video format catches on with our growing community, I’ll add live streamed video chats to future podcasts.
Thanks for listening!Matthew


Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

THEME
Today’s dispatch comes from St. Leonard’s Churchyard in Semley, Wiltshire, a picturesque county in southwest England. St. Leonard’s is the final tour stop of Julian Bream, a name that is likely familiar to classical guitar enthusiasts, especially those of us of a certain age.
Bream is one of those names you’re supposed to know. He’s the guy your guitar teacher actually respects and blathers on about ad nauseam. My own students know Bream that way—they nod politely when I speak glowingly of his accomplishments and personality, but their subtle eye-rolls betray that they suffer from the same indifference I had when I first encountered Bream at their age.
I get it. My talented and driven boarding arts high school students are listening, or more likely watching, for a particular type of guitar playing presented with a particular aesthetic. They want the aspirational, competition-ready stuff: well-lit, highly coiffed, ultra-clean, rapid-fire displays of muscle and control that currently dominate their feed. They want the guitar equivalent of a Ferrari. At their age, I did too.
Bream, by comparison, grunts and squeaks through guitar standards with an uneven tone, clunky and sometimes overdramatic phrasing choices, and a dynamic range that seems downright goofy by modern standards. He wears tweed and has a combover. And, along with Andrés Segovia, five will get you twenty, Julian Bream is the one guitarist who my students’ dental hygienist will be able to name after noticing their right-hand fingernails are longer than the left ones.
To my young students, Julian Bream comes off as a relic, a jalopy. The preferred guitarist of adults with mortgages and lower back pain, who watch property shows like Escape to the Country or slow-moving British summertime mysteries, and still keep magazines around the house for some reason.
At least, that’s how Bream appears to them from a distance. In the ten years I’ve been in my current role, I’ve watched Bream convert student after student from skeptic to believer. What first appears to them as faults looks more like quirks after a few listens. Then somehow those quirks become inspired choices. That’s about the time they discover William Walton’s Five Bagatelles and Leo Brouwer’s first Sonata, favorite selections in the contemporary competition scene, wouldn’t exist without Bream. By the time they figure out Toru Takemitsu’s All in Twilight was dedicated to Bream, and they hear him throwing down on his first recording of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, well…by that point, I’m usually talking to a lifelong Bream devotee.
Up close, Julian Bream is no jalopy. He’s no sports car either. Part of what makes him a hard sell is his own self-crafting. Julian Bream left Battersea, along with any traces of a working-class London accent, and cultivated an English Country Gentleman persona that didn’t always land in interviews and can come off as a bit presentational. Ironically, it’s Julian Bream’s own branding that appears inauthentic to my young students — the same students whose aesthetic is shaped by today’s guitar influencers, with all their highly edited and digitally enhanced presentational choices.
Getting past exterior trappings is tough. Julian Bream is a flawed, colorful titan of the instrument. He’s a workhorse, an artist, and storyteller who left the guitar in better shape than he found it. Julian Bream, CBE, is buried in a grade-two-listed parish behind wrought-iron gates. Like the parish itself, he’s very much worthy of a second 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


Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe

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.


Get full access to Classical Guitar Dispatch at classicalguitardispatch.substack.com/subscribe