The Julian Bream Way

For years I thought that classical guitar was boring - obviously, I was wrong. In 2008 I heard Julian Bream for the first time and it changed the way I thought about classical guitar. I'd never heard humanity coming from a classical guitar before.

Julian Bream didn't study the way most classical guitarists do and was mostly self taught apart from what he learned from his father growing up and played quite a bit of jazz.

One of my favourite examples is Julian Breams dynamic performance of Seville by Issac Albeiniz. This is a Spanish dance and at one point Mr Bream quite literally jumps out of his seat, lifted up by the spirit of the piece he is fully playing and enjoying. How many times has anyone seen that from a classical guitarist?

My Classical Journey

I've been studying classical guitar now since 2008 with Sor, Villa Lobos, Aguado, Guillani and Tarrega by my side, and Julian Bream as my mentor. The more I have learned, the more I have come to realise how much more there is still to learn.

I think it was Segovia who first said: "the guitar has to be played like an orchestra" or something to the effect that each voice of the piece needs to be expressed as if it were a different orchestral instrument.

The first challenge I realised was getting a reliable tone from the classical guitar for every note I pluck.

I started learning on a relatively cheap Spanish guitar and thought at the time that I made a good sound. A few years later I got my first hand made concert guitar and realised I still had almost no control over tone, texture and dynamic.

There was nowhere to hide on this harmonically superior instrument and my sloppy technique was exposed. Mistakes I had got away with on my cheap guitar that had been muted by the lacquer covered instrument, were now amplified by the new one. I couldn't make it sound good, I'd spent all that money on a guitar that made me sound worse!

An instrument that is capable of expressing every nuance also makes it possible to produce the tone and textures needed for human expression. So I needed a much greater level of control in my right and left hands - I knew I had to start again.

The first challenge for me was my right hand and the fingernail shapes I needed to pluck the strings and produce tone and volume. I learned then to think about the relative volume of each voice[instrument] within the piece - not just a bunch of notes in order, but orchestrated voices that needed consideration.

For example, the melody might need to be played at a higher volume to the mid chord voicing, with the bass notes at a lower volume to the lead voice but higher than the chord voice.

Learning to do this takes time and a lot of practise. This is where Classical Guitar has the advantage, being much older and mature than contemporary styles that dominate today. There is more than a lifetimes work in all the material that has been written for Classical Guitar and a variety of guitar method books that represent a lifes work each.

Julian Bream will always (I hope) be there (on youTube) to remind me how I should express myself and respect the music that I play. But most importantly he reminds me that it's OK to Jazz it up , just a little.