Top 33 Julian Bream Quotes

I don’t mean this to sound pretentious but I think that artists of all kinds are a rung up the ladder of the spiritual heirarchy, and for me there is something very religious about music.

I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.

I have cut away what I call the excess stuff in my life.

Some specialist guitar music is not of the highest intellectual calibre, so I must make it sound as though it is. If it bores me, it certainly won’t please an audience.

It’s quite a feeling to be all alone on the stage!

The Nocturnal’ was very nearly beyond me.

Segovia was a Spaniard and it seemed natural that he should play the guitar.

Guitar was just a hobby, but it seemed to me that the instrument had possibilities, not least of which was that there was no one else playing it. I could be, as it were, the best boy in an all-girls school.

Midwesterners make good audiences.

I don’t do much relaxing. When I’m not giving a recital I practise.

My father played one of the first electric guitars in England. He built his own in 1940, because you couldn’t buy them in those days. He used three telephone pickups under the strings, which gave chronic distortion on chords but was quite good on single notes.

Wanting to play the guitar was neither a wild dream nor a realistic ambition. It was simply inevitable.

The cult of the instrument is O.K. for people who are mad about the guitar. But I love music. The guitar is just the instrument I happen to play.

You have to get the attention of the audience. You have to make sure they know you are starting. You have to achieve a rapport with them on the very first chord.

The guitar is the most beautiful of all instruments.

Michael Berkeley’s ‘Sonata’ is very – what can you say – melodious.

What do I think of digital recording? Well, it’s all right. But those old thorn needles, now, that was a sound.

I learned mainly by listening to Andres Segovia and that was a great inspiration. And also the gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

It’s very good for one’s brain and muscular system to work in harmony. If you keep up your playing it just keeps things ticking over.

In 1984, I was contacted by Michael Taylor, who had won a commission from a sponsor and decided he would like to paint a picture of me. I agreed to do it, because I’m not unused to sitting for portraits: my father was a commercial artist and I used to model for him.

It takes a lifetime and a half to master the classical guitar.

I was mostly self-taught on guitar and that had its benefits. It’s a great thing to work through problems on your own.

I used to drive myself about in an old Austin van… and then have to sleep in the back because I couldn’t afford a hotel.

The lute is tuned differently than the guitar and of course it has many more strings.

When I was 18, I went into the army as a payroll clerk because otherwise I was headed for Korea.

I’ve had a lovely life. I’ve had a great life.

The guitar was not treated very seriously as a concert recital instrument.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

I was passionately interested in Elizabethan history at school, so it was natural for me as a musician to take interest in the music of that period.

I love playing jazz because I love the freedom you have to improvise. It has given me a feeling in my classical repertoire of creating the atmosphere of the here and now.

Using modern guitar techniques and modern methods on an early instrument is not a very clever thing to do, because it is the authentic spirit of the instrument that should dictate the quality and characteristic of the sound.

Some composers end up writing for the guitar as they would write piano music or, more often, harp music. It isn’t the same.