Show Notes
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
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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
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
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
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