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

THEME Today’s dispatch comes from St. Leonard’s Churchyard in Semley, Wiltshire, a picturesque county in southwest England. St. Leonard’s is the final tour stop of Julian Bream, a name that is likely familiar to classical guitar enthusiasts, especially those of us of a certain age.Bream is one of those names you’re supposed to know. He’s the guy your guitar teacher actually respects and blathers on about ad nauseam. My own students know Bream that way—they nod politely when I speak glowingly of his accomplishments and personality, but their subtle eye-rolls betray that they suffer from the same indifference I had when I first encountered Bream at their age.I get it. My talented and driven boarding arts high school students are listening, or more likely watching, for a particular type of guitar playing presented with a particular aesthetic. They want the aspirational, competition-ready stuff: well-lit, highly coiffed, ultra-clean, rapid-fire displays of muscle and control that currently dominate their feed. They want the guitar equivalent of a Ferrari. At their age, I did too.Bream, by comparison, grunts and squeaks through guitar standards with an uneven tone, clunky and sometimes overdramatic phrasing choices, and a dynamic range that seems downright goofy by modern standards. He wears tweed and has a combover. And, along with Andrés Segovia, five will get you twenty, Julian Bream is the one guitarist who my students’ dental hygienist will be able to name after noticing their right-hand fingernails are longer than the left ones.To my young students, Julian Bream comes off as a relic, a jalopy. The preferred guitarist of adults with mortgages and lower back pain, who watch property shows like Escape to the Country or slow-moving British summertime mysteries, and still keep magazines around the house for some reason.At least, that’s how Bream appears to them from a distance. In the ten years I’ve been in my current role, I’ve watched Bream convert student after student from skeptic to believer. What first appears to them as faults looks more like quirks after a few listens. Then somehow those quirks become inspired choices. That’s about the time they discover William Walton’s Five Bagatelles and Leo Brouwer’s first Sonata, favorite selections in the contemporary competition scene, wouldn’t exist without Bream. By the time they figure out Toru Takemitsu’s All in Twilight was dedicated to Bream, and they hear him throwing down on his first recording of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, well…by that point, I’m usually talking to a lifelong Bream devotee.Up close, Julian Bream is no jalopy. He’s no sports car either. Part of what makes him a hard sell is his own self-crafting. Julian Bream left Battersea, along with any traces of a working-class London accent, and cultivated an English Country Gentleman persona that didn’t always land in interviews and can come off as a bit presentational. Ironically, it’s Julian Bream’s own branding that appears inauthentic to my young students — the same students whose aesthetic is shaped by today’s guitar influencers, with all their highly edited and digitally enhanced presentational choices.Getting past exterior trappings is tough. Julian Bream is a flawed, colorful titan of the instrument. He’s a workhorse, an artist, and storyteller who left the guitar in better shape than he found it. Julian Bream, CBE, is buried in a grade-two-listed parish behind wrought-iron gates. Like the parish itself, he’s very much worthy of a second lookLet’s get started.VARIATION 1: So what makes Julian Bream so special?Bream was born in Battersea, London, in 1933. I’ll spare you the remaining Wikipedia-style bio, and, spoiler alert, he gets a guitar, gets good at it, and enjoys some early success.To fully understand Bream’s impact on the guitar world, we need to examine the scene he inherited. Post-war Britain was not exactly the center of the universe for art music. The rather sober influence of Elgar and Vaughan Williams still dominated the orchestral world, but modernists like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett had a toe in the door. BBC’s Third Programme was particularly friendly to high-concept broadcasts, and the BBC’s in-house Symphony had a robust repertoire. There were conservatories such as the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music, and Guildhall, all established in the 19th century.But those institutions were designed as feeders to professional orchestras, and the guitar might as well have been the kazoo for all the orchestral world was concerned. Ernest Shand, the one significant British classical guitarist-composer of the previous generation, had written a substantial catalog. But Shand trafficked almost entirely in the domestic amateur music-making world of Victorian drawing rooms, and never made a d