There's something that jumped out at me in the New York Times obituary of Julian Bream, who was one of the most significant pioneers of what we generally call the classical guitar in the West. There are several things that sprung to mind but it's easier to highlight them in the obit itself than provide any further introduction:
...
Julian Alexander Bream was born in London on July 15, 1933, to Henry and Violet Jessie (Wright) Bream. His father was a commercial artist, his mother a homemaker. His parents divorced when he was 14.
Julian Alexander Bream was born in London on July 15, 1933, to Henry and Violet Jessie (Wright) Bream. His father was a commercial artist, his mother a homemaker. His parents divorced when he was 14.
Julian played the piano and the cello as a child but was
inspired to take up the guitar after hearing the virtuoso jazz guitarist Django
Reinhardt. His father, an amateur jazz guitarist, gave him his first lessons,
and when Julian heard some Segovia recordings in the mid-1940s, he decided to
study classical guitar music. [emphasis added]
“When my father saw that I was interested in following such a
career,” Mr. Bream was quoted as saying in “Life on the Road,” a 1982 biography
by Tony Palmer, “he had many reservations. His feeling was that there was no
chance to earn a livelihood unless I played jazz or something similar. And to
prove it he did say to me one day that if you take into account the whole
population of the world, and given that there’s only one world famous classical
guitarist so far, the chance of success for a second guitarist must be very
slender. But that remark made me all the more doggedly persistent.”
The persistence was necessary. At his audition for
admission to the Royal College of Music in London, Mr. Bream played the guitar
first, even though the instrument was not taught there, and then the piano. The
school admitted him as a pianist, cellist and composition student, and he was
advised not to bring his guitar into the building. [emphasis added]
But because he was giving late-night performances and playing
for film soundtracks to earn money, he brought his guitar to the
college anyway. When word got around that he could be heard playing Bach on it
in one of the practice rooms, the school’s director asked him again to leave
the guitar at home. Mr. Bream left the school instead. [emphasis added]
...
Had Julian Bream not heard Django ... we might not have been reading obituaries on how he was one of the most influential and significant classical guitarists of the last century.
I know I keep coming
back to the old 2003 post Kyle Gann wrote called "Make
Way for the Guitar Era". I don't see that anyone should blame me, as a
guitarist, for remembering Gann's post. Few guitarists defined (or perhaps prepared the way for) what Kyle Gann has called "the Guitar Era" in what tends to be called classical music as vividly and clearly as Julian Bream. Yes, Bream was inspired to take up classical guitar after hearing Segovia, whose artistry is also a remarkable testament to the musical possibilities of the guitar, but here in the twenty-first century it is Bream, more than even Segovia, whose ability to span the music of the lute in the Renaissance through to the works of Toru Takemitsu and including the touchstone repertoire of the Spanish and Italian proto-Romantic guitarist composers along the way, more accurately embodies how so many of us who are guitarists approach music and music history. Bream was an explorer and exponent of musical pasts who continually demonstrated an eagerness to engage in the musical life of the present. I enjoy music that was written for Segovia but it is the repertoire written for and commissioned by Julian Bream that I believe has more thoroughly defined the course of the classical guitar in the last sixty years.
As I think Angelo Gilardino has put it, the relative demise of the symphonic standards has been beneficial for guitarists and the guitar because we no longer have to be judged inferior on the basis of a real and perceived lack of timbrel variety compared to the symphony (so often seen as emblematic/symbolic of "society" in the long nineteenth century of theory and arts criticism). The demise of the German Romantic art religion isn't something we guitarists have any reason to feel too bad about and I'm about to show you an example of why that is.
I've mentioned in the past how
something I've noticed as a guitarist about guitarists is that we are not as
fixated on the boundaries of genre and style as pianists can so often seem to
be. Matanya Ophee said decades ago that he compiled a litany of invective
against the guitar and guitarists. He alluded to that work in his lecture "Repertoire Issues", reflecting ideas he had been presenting since the mid-1980s up through about 2000:
... The guitar today does not know any
geographical or political boundaries. It flourishes wherever the beauty and
passion of music are allowed to persist. Yet, the guitar has never achieved a
place of honor in the common society of music. Contrary to common
misconceptions, the guitar was never on an equal footing with the instruments
of the orchestra and the piano. Whatever “Golden Age” the guitar is supposed to
have endured, its splendor was mainly the product of wishful thinking on the
part of guitarists, a sentiment not shared by the general public. In the past
as in the present, guitarists searched for ways to reach a public wider than
that afforded by guitar societies and clubs.
Prejudice against the guitar always existed, and
still exists today, even in countries like the United States where the guitar
is being taught in more than 800 conservatories and universities. Let me read
to you a short passage from a guitar concert review which clearly illustrates
the common perception of the guitar by the majority of professional musicians:
“. . . But here is an instrument
we long have not heard in our concerts, an instrument flying over from the
blazing south to our distant cold north, an instrument of Don Giovanni, Count
Almaviva, an inseparable companion of any Spaniard . . . in a
word, the Guitar, too inadequate an instrument for the concert
stage . . . we would have liked to listen to it under the window
of a beautiful maiden in a quiet summer night, under a silver moon, when a warm
breeze lightly ripples the mirror-like surface of the river, whispering to
itself in the rose bushes along the shore . . . but in the
theater, in the midst of crowds, under a painted ceiling, and by the light of
stage projectors, the guitar loses all its beauty, all its inherent
melody . . .” (Gazette Repertuar, 1839).
If we think that this early nineteenth century
contemptuous nonsense is an exaggeration by today’s standards, we only have to
observe that even in those conservatories and universities the guitar is
allowed to be taught, it is always delegated to a separate corner, with hardly
a contact with the rest of the students and faculty. We find it necessary to
apply to our instrument the adjective “Classical,” with the hope that by so
doing, we would somehow convey to our colleagues that we are not to be confused
with balladeers, rock’n’rollers, gypsies and mariachi. Violinists and pianists
have no need to use the adjective “classical,” even though the piano is still
the instrument of choice of many jazz players and one can find it in my country
in every bar, every hotel dining room. At the turn of the century, the piano
was also the favorite instrument in the public houses of San Francisco, New
Orleans and St. Louis and it was precisely in that environment that rag-time
piano music first became established. The violin is an important part of
hillbilly, Country-Western music in the USA, and is used as a folk instrument
in the British Isles, Scandinavia, France, Mexico, the Arab world from Marocco
to Iraq, and in many other countries. Violinists never worry about that.
The very concept of folk instruments, is one
which deserve closer attention. An instrument, as an artifice of human
craftsmanship, does not have any intrinsic attributes in and of itself, until
somebody plays it. It acquires whatever societal qualities we usually associate
with it, depending on the music being played. The Jews Harp is a so-called folk
instrument in use all over the world from the mountains of Northern Italy to
the frozen tundra of Siberia. But when Georg Albrechtsberger, Beethoven’s
teacher of harmony, wrote a concerto with orchestra for it, it did not matter
much that the instrument is also played by nomadic sheep herders.
Folk music is often defined as music which
exists in an oral tradition, while art music depends for its existence on the
written page. The music we play on the so-called “classical” guitar mostly
exist in written or printed form. Some of it was composed by people who are not
very well known outside the limited circles of guitar lovers. Some of it was
composed by main-stream composers such as Paganini, von Weber, Schubert,
Berlioz, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ponce, Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky, Mahler,
Schönberg, Asafiev, Webern, Hindemith, and Milhaud. In more recent times, music
for our instrument was written by Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Hans
Werner Henze, Eliot Carter, Edison Denisov and Sofia Gubaidulina. Considering
these composers and their music, the guitar cannot possibly be considered as a
folk instrument. Yet, the prejudice continues.
I have assembled a considerable lexicon of
anti-guitar invective from different countries and different times. I am at a
loss to explain why it is that of all musical instruments, the guitar, the
instrument which was part and parcel of European musical renaissance from the
sixteenth century on, is singled out by other musicians for ridicule and
derision. I have some theories on the subject, but they are not the kind that
can be discussed in polite society. The fact remains that we have a problem,
and if we wish to continue as a living musical discipline, we have to try and
find a way out. …
Bream was a guitarist (one of many) who devoted his career to "find a way out".
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