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 concerts with orchestras or play in the pit for musical theater.

Right now I’m really focusing my teaching on adult learners and offering classical guitar lessons and classes but also music theory and performance practice, which is another word for performance anxiety, for people who are nervous about performing. Trying to create environments in which they learn a bit about their nervous system and some tools that maybe they can apply to feel a bit more comfortable performing.

Scholarship was an unexpected part of my career. I have done a lot of research on the history of women in classical guitar and written, published, and lectured. Those are my big three umbrellas of work but I’ll also arrange and compose and write grants. Anything that has to do with music I’m in.”

Well, almost anything. Candice started out in the adjunct circuit, teaching guitar, music history, music theory, ensembles, and pedagogy. In a typical week, she bounced between schools in Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. It’s a pretty drive, and she loved the students, but the gigs were tough.

“Teaching in Higher Ed is in no way what I thought it would be. It’s not the teaching part that I’m talking about; it’s the being employed part. A job has to go both ways. We invest ourselves; it’s our passion; we feel duty, we feel our ethics, everything, in doing the best job that we possibly can but the circumstances of being employed in these environments for some of us is not conducive to well-being.”

Yeah. Let’s do a quick review of employment status for guitar in higher education. Full-time tenure-track jobs in guitar, with benefits like health care and pensions, are rare. At top institutions, a significant number of those positions are still held by the original hires, some of whom have been occupying the same studio for three or even four decades. When (or if) those people retire, there’s no guarantee the institution will replace the outgoing guitar professor at all. If they do, the job will likely be advertised at the assistant professor level, which doesn’t pay much at most music institutions. In many cases, that job will be removed from the tenure track altogether and replaced with a short-term instructor contract. Or, the institution takes a decidedly cheap-ass option and advertises the gig as an adjunct position. That means the lucky new hire gets no benefits and a salary cap that usually peters out around 20 hours per week, but it’s often less.

“It’s contract work that’s based on enrollment. You can plan for the fall semester that you anticipate having this many classes or this many private students or an ensemble. You’ve mapped that out on your life’s calendar and you even start writing syllabi and you start doing professional development and maybe you’re out doing recruitment and you’re doing the work but all of that is on you.

The week that classes start, that add/drop period, it affects what you’re going to earn that semester. It affects where you’re going to drive from day to day. It affects your eating schedule. It’s every aspect of your life.”

And not much effort goes into making the adjunct faculty feel welcome:

“You don’t even have a key card that will open your door to teach and you’re grabbing practice rooms, and carrying a music stand because you can’t reliably get a music stand. All the things that you need to go from one or two different schools that entire day and where you’re going to sneak a can of tuna fish and a diet root beer into that as your lunch. That was my teaching lunch for years actually. It was just that.”

Candice did everything right. She paid her dues. Those glossy college brochures are, after all, written for students exactly like her — the ones who work hard, earn terminal degrees, and, critically, pay tuition. So while new doctoral graduates are logging onto the Chronicle of Higher Education’s job board, eager to start paying off their student loans, the institutions that trained them have been quietly removing full-time positions from their payrolls for years.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle is also publishing what those institutions pay at the top. Public university presidents saw their take-home rise an average of 56% during the 2010s. Today, the average president at a large public or private institution easily clears $500,000. At the top of the heap, presidents of big-name private universities and the leaders of state college systems pull down between $2 and $4 million a year. Often more.

Now, just in case you’re going all “eat-the-rich” and cheering on those recent ham-fisted federal defunding efforts, rest assured, those efforts didn’t touch the salaries of the people at the top. Instead, the people at the top just canceled expensive offerings. You know, like music programs.

Eventually, Candice had to make a choice: continue feeding the system or prioritize her health and professional growth. It was a tough call.

There are some things about it, like the teaching part, that were great and I learned so much and all these great colleagues. But, there’s also the toll that it takes on your life and well-being and your finances and your household. So, over the years, what you need as a human being can evolve, and what you want for your life can evolve. That is something that is sad to me, that it didn’t really work out. It was something that I really, really wanted, was a full-time teaching position.”

Variation II: Thomas Viloteau finds Le Support in Champagne Country

We’re going to step away from Candice’s story before she gets her happy ending, because I want to sit in this “careful-what-you-wish-for” area of teaching in higher education. To do that, we’ll enlist the help of Thomas Viloteau, who, when I met him in 2019, had just been hired at Peabody Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. But, there was a catch:

“I got hired as an adjunct. This was for a position that did not exist. Basically, I was supposed to just fill up the studio, and they kind of messed that up because they couldn’t get an adjunct visa. So they were like, well we’ve got some good news and some bad news. Bad news: we can’t get you a visa. Good news: you’re full-time.”

Quick note: It was raining the day Thomas and I spoke, and he was outside, trying not to wake up two sleeping children. So you’ll hear a bit of that come through in the audio.

Anyway, back to the circumstances of ss employment:

“So I got a small salary to start with, but it was fine for me. Basically, all I had to do was recruit for 12 hours, and there were classes, so I was teaching the classes as well. It was like, okay, that’s fine, I can do this.

The plan was for three years. Each year, the salary would go up until I was full-time with a full studio. They asked me to recruit a lot, and maybe I would need to do some group classes on the main campus or things like this to start just filling up my hours. I was fine with all of this.”

In an effort to build his studio, Thomas came to Michigan to teach a masterclass at my school, Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding arts high school, and a common recruiting ground for conservatories like Peabody.

“You remember I came? I was like, “I’m just going to go everywhere and teach master classes. I need to recruit.” We had 50 students auditioning at Peabody that year, which was more than they’d seen recently.”

Yeah, so Thomas hit the pavement and drummed up students to come to Peabody for auditions. But he then discovered recruitment is a complicated business.

“I got one student admitted. The day before I started, I got an email threatening from the head of Peabody, saying, “This is not acceptable. You got one student.” I didn’t really understand because I didn’t get good scholarships. I mean, all the students just got bad scholarships, bad opportunities. I mean, they didn’t want to come; they had better deals elsewhere.”

Thomas trudged through the U.S. admissions process himself for a Professional Studies Diploma at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a Master’s at the University of Arizona, and a doctorate at the Eastman School of Music. But he discovered things looked very different from the other side of the glass.

“It took me a few years to really realize that you have to accept almost everyone. I got told by admissions that you can’t really predict how a student is going to do, which is true, I suppose. When they come in to audition, if you see some don’t have the level, you can’t really say, “Well, they’re not going to fit in.” This is supposed to be one of the finest colleges in the world, so I didn’t really understand how to navigate all this for a few years.”

Historically, admission to Peabody is quite competitive. But if you listened to Part 1 of this series, you know that Peabody and its competitors are contending with a decades-long structural collapse in attitudes toward higher ed, driven by demographic and economic realities that many institutions seem to be only now waking up to. Thomas is a quick study. I’m pretty sure he would have found his footing eventually, but he then ran afoul of a system even more complicated and opaque than the U.S. college admissions process:

“Years later I got married to Alexandra and I did a green card application. When I did this card application I didn’t know, but I was supposed to do a work permit application with it. Since I had a work visa I thought I didn’t really need this. I made a big mistake. I traveled abroad and I came back. When I came back they gave me my passport but they didn’t scan my work visa. They scanned my green card application, I guess, because you can be in the country while your green card is being processed but you can’t work because they didn’t do the paperwork.”

Yeah…not a great situation. But surely the HR team at a reputable institution like Johns Hopkins was willing to lend a hand to support its faculty…right?

Right?

“So Peabody calls me: “There’s problems! You know, you cannot work. You can’t work! They were like: ‘Don’t come. Don’t talk to your students. Stay home! Get a lawyer and figure this out! You’re on paid leave for one month. If you can’t figure it out then we have to terminate your contract.’”

I was on my own basically. This was one week before our child was born so can you imagine the stress? Losing health insurance soon, we were just like freaking out, man, it was horrible.”

Uh…OK…

“Finally, I don’t know by what miracle, I write to a senator about green card applications being approved. I don’t know how. I go and get it, and I’m like, “Peabody, here’s my green card. I can come back to work.” OK that’s great. Now they say, “Now that you have your papers, next year you’ll be adjunct because this is the way we were supposed to hire you, right? I’m not even kidding, this is what happened.”

Remember, Thomas had a full-time contract for several years because of his work visa. He figured he had held up his end of the contract, built up his studio, and done the auxiliary teaching necessary to fill out his hours. He and his wife, Alexandra, were counting on health care because they had a new baby at home. So, the prospect of returning to a part-time adjunct position without health care was just a bridge too far.

“No health insurance with a baby. This is not going to work. I just told them right there and then: No, I’m not continuing. They were like: ‘We understand.’ (Laughs)

I mean you’re expendable and super easy to replace. That’s the thing because if you look at the number of jobs that open each year in the US, I’m thinking higher ed and the number of doctoral graduates. You just walk away. Well it’s OK. There are like ten other people behind you that are ready to take that job. For some people it wasn’t a great fit for me, that’s all.”

Thomas understands that the choice he made is not the choice everyone would have made. But, as a card-carrying and well-practiced member of the walk-away-from-a-bad-situation club, I get it.

“And I know it’s not every institution that’s like this as well. There’s plenty of other places who treat their faculty better. I think at Peabody I just had the misfortune of being in a place that was a little bit too worried about numbers. That’s a huge school. It’s Johns Hopkins and that’s how they work. They want to survive. They’re doing the math.”

Thomas and Alexandra did their own math. They moved to the Champagne region of France, where the cost of living is more affordable, and the health care system isn’t tied to employment. Thomas gave it a go with another teaching job in Burgundy, which he liked, but he also started a business, which he liked more.

“That’s when I started Le Support basically. I would have never done it if I’d stayed at Peabody because usually I didn’t have the time and I didn’t have the actual need. When we left it was just like, “Well let’s try it.” I did end up teaching for a little bit so then it’s like a full-time job with Le Support, full-time job practicing because I have concerts. You have to leave so you have to make up lessons and when you come back there is even more work on the company. It’s just too much. Something has to go and I don’t want to leave Le Support. I mean it’s kind of a cool project that I just started and let’s see where that goes.”

Le Support is a cool project. It’s a guitar elevation device — the kind that lets you play without a footstool — made of laser-cut cast acrylic. It’s Thomas’s unique design, and he’s been tinkering with it for as long as I’ve known him.

Thomas also mentions concerts. This is a topic we’ll cover in depth in later episodes, but the gist is that preparing for concerts and the associated travel requirements add up to a huge time suck. Professional performers devote hours every day to repertoire maintenance, bookings, and travel arrangements. Building out a performance calendar is its own full-time job.

“Obviously, I can’t just stop playing concerts. You know that’s what I’ve spent my life training for. So I go to concerts. They ask, “Where do you teach?” I’m like, “I don’t teach.” For everybody it’s like, “What, a musician that doesn’t teach?” It’s not that common because it’s a nice way to make a living. I think it’s safe, it’s secure, and if you want to start a family it’s great. It’s a paycheck. It’s not even the amount but it’s just secure.

When you play concerts it’s not secure. You have to be your own business owner basically. It’s the exact same thing: it’s your business, you’re the product, and if you don’t sell it, it’s not selling. So it’s work. Teaching is work but it’s done for you. Just have to show up to it and that’s kind of a nice thing.”

It is a nice thing, but therein lies the calculus at the heart of every performing educator’s financial reality. Wanna perform? Great. But there’s no guaranteed salary, and no predetermined career path. Want a full-time teaching job? No problem. But we need you on campus 35 weeks a year, so, unless you want to spend every break struggling to fit the guitar into the overhead compartment on a transcontinental flight, that performance career you spent years training for is more of a performance hobby now.

“It’s interesting that a lot of this evolution as a student of music is to get a job that is really basically not an artistic job. Strange!”

Yeah, strange. When Thomas left Peabody, he faced the same interminable conundrum that has plagued musicians across eras and genres. He found his own way through, but he thinks institutions can do a better job of preparing students for what’s coming:

“We need to actually be real a little bit. Fifty percent of the students that are in those institutions are not going to be in the field. That’s because of:

1. We accept them in those institutions.

2. They’re not being taught all the things they can do.

They’re being taught to play the Ponce Sonata really well, and that does not pay rent, let me tell you! No, they need to know all of the things that they could do in music, using their skills as guitarists, musicians, but also entrepreneurs basically, to make a living in this, because you have to be creative. You have to just find your own way. There is no way that’s just done for you. You know? Like, you go study medicine, it’s going to be way clearer what the steps are going to be. You go study music, you’re on your own. You can do anything you want. You can make a lot of money if you want if you actually work hard at it, but if you’re just being taught to be a good guitarist and know everything about your instrument to go play a concert, well that is not going to work, you know?”

Variation III: Candice Mowbray finds the other side of the K-Shaped Economy

Thomas found his way out of the adjunct teaching grind by starting a new business and doubling down on concertizing. But if there’s a thread running through these conversations with artist-educators, it’s that there isn’t just one path. To illustrate this, I’d like to return to Candice Mowbray, who, when we left her off, was still stuck in the adjunct teaching grind. What Candice didn’t know then was that a way out was about to find her. You remember those college-bound high school seniors from Part 1 of this series? The ones who developed skills in guitar programs or private studios, but, due to economic uncertainty and shifting cultural attitudes toward music in higher ed, decided to go into Pre-med, Pre-law, or STEM? A similar pattern played out thirty years ago. Those high school students are now parents and grandparents. They built careers, had families, got divorced, paid medical bills, and contributed to a 401(k). Late-stage Baby Boomers and early-stage Gen Xers, aged 55 and older, represent the other, wide end of the K-shaped guitar economy. That makes adult learners a star demographic of the guitar-teaching profession. They have disposable income, time to practice, and a penchant for building community. Candice discovered the skills she quietly built during her years in the adjunct purgatory were exactly what this new, underserved, and unaffiliated guitar community needed. And, well…

“I love it! I meet the most fascinating people, people who are great at so many different things, so many different careers, and we have this mutual opportunity, to pardon this expression but I can’t think of better words, to nerd out together.

I mean that as the ultimate compliment. We are all people who get excited about a subject, and we get excited about learning classical guitar. Their involvement and their interest is already exploding with fireworks and I just think that’s a beautiful thing. When you talk to people after a concert and you’re encouraging them to try, they listen and they believe you that, “Yeah okay well maybe I can do some of it.” Mixed with that is wanting truly wanting to create community within guitar. I know that’s a phrase that gets used a lot; it’s often in mission statements for nonprofits, and it is, in a lot of cases, really, really sincere.”

Candice offers one-on-one lessons and ensembles. She teaches classical guitar, music history research, music theory, mindful music performance practice, and Till Approach fundamentals applied to guitar. She works online with people from all over the world and gives in-person lessons and classes at her private studio in western Maryland. And she’s found a community of people who make the work meaningful to her.

“It’s just a lovely thing to get people to learn on their own but then to get them together and to let them commiserate about the challenges, let them enjoy playing music together in an ensemble. For example, I started a community ensemble this year with the intention that it wasn’t a performing ensemble, with the intention that it was really just a chance once or twice a month to get together and enjoy the process of making the air vibrate and doing that together, literally to harmonize, literally and figuratively, you know what I mean, to harmonize.

That’s why I do it because it’s great and the people are great and I get to spend time with them.”

Variation IV: Brandon Acker, “I Found Where I’m Best Suited”

I’ve taken a lot of swipes at institutional teaching on today’s show. I’ll repeat the sentiment from Part 1 of this series: the guitar-teaching industrial complex is anything but monolithic, and there are certainly healthy institutions that support faculty. There are even some who understand that the faculty is a big reason students attend the institution. Well, that and the branded sweatshirt. But the truth is, Thomas’s and Candice’s experiences aren’t particularly unique. I did my time in the adjunct mishegoss, first in Upstate New York and later at three separate institutions throughout the state of Georgia. When I handed in my resignation to each institution, I got the same “don’t let the door hit you” response from whoever was in a supervisory role at the time. Incidentally, there are no music supervisors left at one of those institutions. The buildings still exist, but the name on the campus entry changed, and they now train nurses there.

Thomas and Candice now both view their experiences teaching at institutions as a difficult but necessary step toward creating higher-quality work that matters to them. But what if that step wasn’t necessary? What if they never needed an institution to provide a job in the first place? Remember the single desktop computer I mentioned at the top of the show, the one everyone lined up in the school’s main hall to use? That machine has provided a lot of people with a lot of teaching work over the last 30 years. But, since this isn’t really my wheelhouse, I figure we should talk to an expert:

“Sure, hi, I’m Brandon Acker. I’m a classical guitarist, but also, I specialize in all sorts of early plucked instruments like the lute, theorbo, baroque guitar, all sorts of instruments there. I run a YouTube channel. I run some online courses. I do a lot of online courses through a school I call Classical Guitar Pro. I have an online music school with one-on-one teachers called Arpeggiato. Besides doing that I am a full-time traveling touring musician.”

Like our friends Candice and Thomas, Brandon’s work encompasses a number of activities. His YouTube videos currently hover around 83 million views, and he has upwards of 696,000 subscribers. Between online lessons, Classical Guitar Pro, and Arpeggiato, Brandon provides education products for well over 5,500 students. At 36, the guy’s already a walking teaching institution. But he never saw himself as part of the machine.

“I have always felt a bit like an outsider in the classical and early music world. I come from a metal background and did not grow up at all listening to classical music. It was not my culture, was not in my experience.

When I discovered, sort of as a happy accident, classical guitar right before I went to college and ended up doing two degrees in that, I was completely new. I was the rock guy at a music conservatory among all these orchestral players.”

The experience of being the rock guy at a music conservatory helped form the bedrock of Brandon’s communication philosophy:

“I really had the experience, coming into classical music, that some of the stereotypes rang true in the sense that when things were explained, they were always, by default, explained in a very professorial, academic way. Like you’re attending this 4-hour lecture on a subject which always goes deep into it and is sort of over my head instantly, using language and vocabulary that I feel like they don’t necessarily know what it is. I’m assuming I know all these things about all these books that I didn’t read so I don’t like doing that.

I like to speak in a way where I define my terms. If I say the word rubato, I don’t assume that a musician watching or an enthusiast knows what it is. I just add, ‘which is bending time.’ Just by adding and defining your words and describing things in a way that anyone off the street would understand, I think you clarify and simplify and therefore make things more accessible and therefore more entertaining and educational.”

Noted.

“By doing that, you aren’t diluting the seriousness of the conversation. Because it does feel, from the outside, that information is locked behind a vault of conservatories and a different class of people. There are always misconceptions like that. I think by presenting this information in a way, I like to use the word “stumbleable”. It’s very easy to stumble upon these videos. Oh, today I just opened my phone and now someone’s describing a theorbo? What the hell is a Theorbo? You know, but in a way that they can go, ‘Oh this is cool.’ I didn’t have to feel like I was talked down to or attending an academic lecture. I could just enjoy it.”

Yeah, we are allowed to enjoy this stuff, after all. Brandon’s outsider experience at conservatory coincided with a generational shift in the way we share information. Brandon discovered he didn’t need an Admissions team to bring people to the conservatory. Instead, he can bring conservatory to the people.

“What happened is, one day I got a call from the famous YouTuber named Rob Scallon (2 million subscribers), who was a full-time YouTuber as his job, and I didn’t even know that was possible. This is like 2019. He invited me over, did a video and the video went viral. It was me showing him a theorbo. Overnight I got like 20,000 new subscribers on YouTube and people started watching my old videos and I realized that I had never spoken in any of my videos. This was the first time I had really spoken on YouTube.And I thought, ‘What do I really have to say?’ You know there’s nothing I have to say because although I have a million things to say and I’ve lectured and given presentations on music. This is the internet. There’s always someone out there who can speak more articulately than I can, who knows more about the subject, whom I do add something here. I just thought, you know what, people seem to like it so I’ll make videos on topics that I have said over and over and over in my teaching. I made a video on how to practice, how to warm up, the importance of posture, and why I believe guitarists should never forget to use their ear, and therefore tune with their ear and not just with a display of a tuner. Those did well and I kept building on that until I realized online education was really a thing.

I’m reminded of that quote that gets attributed to Hedda Hopper or sometimes Milton Berle, that it takes 20 years to become an overnight sensation. Brandon did his homework. He earned his degrees, taught, and played concerts in the early music world. At some point in the process, he figured out how to set up a camera and record himself. So when Rob Scallon’s video focused millions of eyeballs on Brandon, Brandon was able to spin it into something sustainable.

“Now I’ve discovered that, number one: YouTube can be a job. If you have enough subscribers and enough monthly views, which they’ve just lowered, YouTube has just made it much easier to monetize. I think you only have like 500 subscribers and 1,000 watch hours a month, which is not that hard to do. You can monetize and make money from your YouTube videos. That’s an incredible new career pathway. Then of course there are online courses, which is a huge market. Especially I think COVID-19 really accelerated the online learning acceptance, pushed it into the mainstream because everyone was forced to figure it out.”

Right. Big global pandemic, meet big global technological revolution. Oh, demographic shift in post-industrialized nations, you’re here too? Welcome to the ride. The music institutions may or may not be joining us, but we have a number of their graduates hanging around in steerage. What are they doing back there, you ask?

Same thing they always do, Pinky…they adapt.

“Teaching online is amazing, and if you want that, you have to develop some type of online presence to be visible and be seen as someone worthy of reaching out to. And then of course there’s the online course strategies. There’s Patreon, which is amazing. The amalgamation of all these things has added up to a career for me financially but again none of it was planned. I haven’t until very recently felt like, “Okay now that I understand sort of how this works, I can now plan for the next thing and here’s what I should really be putting my time into.” The good old trial and error is tried and true; that was my case.”

Brandon’s trial-and-error process opened a number of doors. He found the work he wants to do, and the place he wants to do it.

I realize now I found my place. Now, to me, the traditional place, like a university, no longer feels like my place because I think I found where I’m best suited.”

By my estimation, that’s a good place to be.

CODA

Well, that’s all for today’s Classical Guitar Dispatch. Thanks to Candice Mowbray, Thomas Viloteau, and Brandon Acker for their insights and contributions to the show. Our next episode is another two-parter in which I sit down with current and former members of the legendary Los Angeles Guitar Quartet for a career retrospective spanning 46 years and counting.

Head over to the Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack for show details, extended interviews, full transcripts, and playlists. While you’re there, hit the subscribe button; it’s much appreciated. As always, I want to hear from you, so let me know in the comments what you think of today’s episode and what you’d like to hear on future shows.

To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. The recordings used on this episode are performed by our guests Candice Mowbray, Thomas Viloteau, and Brandon Acker. Theme and all other music written by Matthew Cochran, performed by Cochran & McAllister, and all used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

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 at the classroom:

“We do a lot of things outside of the building, right? So, we started the year playing for the Department of Education’s Board of Education. That was our first gig a week into the school year. We played for the State school board. We played for the Loudon County school board. We’ve played at Yale University many times; we just did Appalachian State’s festival this year. Reaching out like that, I think it’s kind of a form of advocacy, and I guess I’m just an advocate for the kids and for the programs.”

That advocacy currently includes a turn as vice president of the Virginia Guitar Directors Association and chair of the National Association for Music Education’s Council for Guitar Education.

“In terms of paying it forward, I just started seeing, year by year, seeing more and more what was going on. Not just in my district and other districts. And as I started working with organizations like the Virginia Music Educators Association, and NAfME, so many people that are teaching guitar that are not themselves guitarists. I found that there are so many needs that the profession needs. I just come into leadership roles that I found myself in. I said, OK well, if I’m in that spot, I might not know what to do, but I’m gonna do my best. I’m not afraid to be wrong about something. I need to learn from others. You need to learn from the band directors and the orchestra directors and the choral directors and all that stuff, right? You know, what’s going on well with them, and what can we bring to our system? I think everything that I’ve done is just been, it’s been inspired by trying to meet the needs of students at the end of the day.”

In the process of meeting the needs of students, Kevin had to buy some polish for all those awards he’s been racking up. In 2014, he was named the Shenandoah University Teacher of the Year. He’s also the Joan C. Edwards Distinguished Professor in the Arts at Marshall University. The guy was even presented with a Sir Winston Churchill Commemorative Crown for music education, but good luck getting him to try it on:

“When we do what we do, and we do it well, then it reflects and people recognize it. In the school culture, and in the school community, I don’t really like to talk about myself. I’d rather let my work speak for me, I guess would be a better way to put that. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.”

Sure you did, Dr. V.

VARATION II: STANLEY YATES

Money and enrollment shape policy. Fortunately for this show, the higher education landscape is anything but monolithic. To account for their accounting, I’ve invited two people to share their varied experiences with institutions. We’ll start with the view from the mountaintop from a person who has, in his own way, aged out of the guitar-teaching industrial complex

“Hey Matthew, Stanley Yates here. Thanks for your email and for thinking of me for your new podcast. Feel free to call me back at this number. I’m around all the time now, because I just retired. Uh…this week. Okay, bye.”

Stanley Yates celebrated his final commencement just before we sat down for this chat. At that time, he had completed nearly all of his institutional obligations:

“I got my full-time college position when I was in my mid-thirties here at Austin Peay State University, which was in 1994. I’m extremely grateful and fortunate to have gotten a position like this, and it’s been a 32-year tenure, which, once I turn my keys in on Wednesday, will be the end of my college institutional teaching life…and that’s about what I have to say about myself.”

(laughs) Let’s hope that’s not entirely true. Before we hear more from Stanley, let’s take a beat to explore what he said about gratitude. Full-time academic jobs in Classical Guitar Performance are indeed extremely rare. Though things have picked up a bit since Baby Boomers started retiring, there are maybe two open position announcements per academic year, and that’s in an active hiring cycle. Austin Peay State University and its many competitors pump out guitar students with terminal degrees every year. When those newly minted guitar doctors start looking for work, they face stiff competition and, due to the slow-to-die tenure system, they also face a so-called “labor squeeze,” which is economist-speak for a low-hire, low-fire job market.

VARIATION III. CHUCK HULIHAN

“We’re rocking audio only, so I can look as stupid as I want. I can make funny faces and all, right, we’re good?” (laughs)

Feel free to make as many faces as you want, Chuck. But we should probably make some introductions first:

“My name is Chuck Hulihan, and I am currently in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area. I live in Peoria. I’ve taught since 1999 at one of our 10 Maricopa Community Colleges. Specifically, my campus is Glendale Community College, and I’ve served in various roles with the Guitar Foundation of America for the last decade. I currently serve as the Ensemble’s and Engagement Director, and if I had to label myself or sort of self-describe, I’m the Ensemble Guy.”

Yup. Chuck is the Ensemble Guy. A fixture in the American guitar festival circuit who can swing a conductor’s baton while keeping a group of middle and high-schoolers on summer break focused, has premiered ensemble works by the who’s who of guitar composers, and does it all with a sartorial flair that somehow comes across through radio. But it didn’t happen by accident:

“I believe a lot in manifestation and projection, and that’s something that’s always been really important to me: my imagination and thinking about intentional actions to move me closer to a reality that only currently existed in my mind. Pretty much everything I’ve ever done professionally has been very strategic and intentional, and it always has something to do with a foreseeable outcome that I’m either at the subconscious or very much at the conscious level attached to.”

“It was only then that I realized you guys don’t all conduct. Like everyone here is, it’s like you’re not all in the guitar ensemble. No, it was just the normal studio of soloists who occasionally played in a duet or did some chamber music, but nobody conducted. Everyone found it odd, and that was probably my first light that really went off.

This one room over here to the left is really busy. This room over here to the right looks wide open. The lights are on and the AC’s blowing, and I think I’m just going to go step over here.”

So Chuck chose the room with air conditioning, which came in handy during summers in the greater Phoenix area. Chuck’s interest in guitar ensembles also came in handy when the high school guitar program phenomenon came to Arizona via a charter school mandate in 1996:

“It was 1997 and that second year that I was offered a job at the Arizona School for the Arts, which was a performing arts charter school for arts and academics but their angle was they were hiring all professional musicians.”

Great, so you get a job teaching guitar ensembles. You’re in the pink, right?

“For me it became obvious that I needed to have materials that were high quality and that embraced a multitude of levels. I’m in 1997 so there’s not a lot of resources. We are before, like, way before all the great stuff that we have now in terms of ensemble methods, in terms of all these wonderful organizations. We are a century later in just a few decades, in my opinion.

There were definitely other people out there doing it but I, sort of in Phoenix, felt a little bit like a one-man island.”

Eventually, Chuck found people like Kevin Vigil who were working through some of the same issues. They fixed the repertoire problem by making arrangements, commissioning original pieces, and getting the stuff to print. They organized. They shared information. And when Chuck was hired at Glendale Community College, he took all that organization and repertoire, and applied it to his studio there. But, like Stanley Yates, Chuck recognizes that graduates of a guitar program need to understand the market they’re walking into:

“There are far more opportunities in K-12 education at the moment than there are in college opportunities and that’s just being honest. If you need a job and you’ve got to keep a roof over your head and you’ve got to provide for a family, someone’s got to talk reality to you. The college jobs are really hard to come by, extremely competitive. You’re going to be able to teach all your heroes and they don’t all pay so well and most of them don’t have any long-term sustainability.

I don’t even think intentionally but we are all just indoctrinated into thinking that is the only clear goal. If I’m going to teach I want it to be, I want it to be at Juilliard. That’s the only place to teach. Opportunities are far, far, far more wide open in K-12. That’s one thing I just have to say. Yes that’s not for everyone; doesn’t mean everyone shouldn’t even teach in the first place, never mind where you’re teaching. This is not for everyone. Period. End of story.”

“It’s not for everyone” could have been the title of this episode. And I know I promised not to get too sentimental about the whole education grind, but I do this work too, and I know it’s hard. So I asked Chuck what he wished people understood about the work that he, Stanley, and Kevin already know about their profession:

“Probably that the word “play”, like teaching people to play the guitar or the act of playing the guitar, is flipping hard work. Though it might look like we’re just hanging out and playing the instruments, really, really, really, flipping hard, particularly at the beginning stages, like really, really hard. All instruments present this paradigm that as you get better you realize it’s even harder and then as you get better and better you realize you are way worse than you thought. This is this cruel inverse.

I guess what I would want people to know, being a musician or a career as a musician or just learning an instrument or teaching someone else an instrument, is that it’s hard and it might take a long time. You might not have instant success. There are going to be struggles. You’re going to want to throw in the towel. It’s far easier to quit. It’s far easier to not do that thing you said you were gonna do, but if you keep at it, if you grind and you keep working, you’ve got a chance.”

Yeah. But you’re not gonna find that on a syllabus.

THE CLASSICAL GUITAR DISPATCH

S1 Ep 1: Cochran & McAllister in Sutherland, Scotland

I’m Matthew Cochran. Welcome to the first episode of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, a new podcast dedicated to telling the story of the guitar. The first season of the show covers music from Asencio to Dowland to Tárrega. I speak with current and former members of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, discuss economic and demographic trends affecting students and educators, and I go behind the scenes at international guitar festivals. I’ll dig into arranging and recording, and you’re all invited to join the Classical Guitar Dispatch Book Club. This summer’s read covers A Life On the Road, Tony Palmer’s fly-on-the-wall account of Julian Bream at the peak of his career. This week’s show is part memoir and part travelogue, a format I plan to return to from time to time. As the show finds its footing, I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions. My hope is that the Classical Guitar Dispatch provides a sounding board for all members of the guitar community. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your interests, whether you’re just starting out or you’re a grizzled, road-hardened pro, or, if the sound of my voice just helps you get to sleep, all are welcome.

Today’s Dispatch comes from County Sutherland in Scotland, where Matthew McAllister and I visit luthier Michael Ritchie, busk at a bakery, lead an accidental singalong, and take home a brand-new guitar. Let’s get started.

It’s not easy to travel from my home in Traverse City, located in Michigan’s northwestern Lower Peninsula, to Strath Halladale in the northern part of mainland Scotland. But the promise of a new guitar from luthier Michael Ritchie and the start of a spring tour with my duo partner, Matthew McAllister, more than justified the effort. After a series of flights, Matthew and I met in Inverness. He flew from his home base in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was in jolly spirits as he retrieved his bag from the luggage carousel, which he balanced alongside two guitar cases, one containing a traditional six-string guitar and another with a ten-string instrument. Matthew has made this trip several times, and he has that “just wait until you see this” face that I’ve come to expect from trips like this.

I arrived in Inverness after flying without a guitar for the first time in recent memory. It was an eerily peaceful experience, traveling without the constant, low-grade anxiety of handing over the primary tool of my livelihood to an overworked baggage handler or an irritable flight attendant. As the throng of golfers and salmon anglers passed by, Matthew and I met the men we had come to see, master luthier Michael Ritchie, flanked by his son, Hamish. We loaded guitars and gear into Michael’s Volvo, one of those classic wagon models with a mileage counter that loses its relevance long before the car loses functionality. We began the last two-and-a-half hours of our trip starting on the commercialized A9 and then moving onto a 40-mile stretch of single-lane road that’s more populated by grazing sheep than motorists. We passed iconic dry-stone boundary walls through the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland, where the world’s first peatland, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, teems with birdlife and bog moss. The dirt road narrowed, and we arrived at a stone cottage on an idyllic piece of farmland in Strath Halladale, featuring a handful of outbuildings dedicated to the two ventures that keep the family busy, Michael Ritchie’s guitar shop and his partner Susan Wallace’s small batch pop-up bakery, Loaf, known online as the Peat Bog Baker.

In his previous life, Michael Ritchie was a guitar tech traveling for months-long stints with indie bands like Belle and Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand, who rode to prominence during the heyday of the corporate touring economy in the 90s and early aughts. Michael problem-solved overheating amps, readjusted truss rods, and maintained fussy vintage gear while thousands of concert goers chanted along to “Take Me Out.” Meanwhile, Susan was (and still is) the lead singer of the Glasgow-based trip-hop duo Cinephile, who built their reputation on television and film soundtracks. On paper, it might be difficult to square Michael and Susan’s transition from road-dog to peat bog, but after spending a couple of days with the Ritchies, it’s easy to see the appeal of a mostly off-grid lifestyle in rural Scotland devoted to family, bread, and guitars.

Michael showed me to the cabin where I would stay, a cozy hut just big enough for a bed, a heating unit, and a toilet-and-sink combo. Meanwhile, Matthew got the in-house option, bunking in Hamish’s room alongside Legos and remote-controlled cars. It was Friday, which meant Susan and her assistant Paco were busy in the baking shed, preparing the 350 or so individual sourdoughs, pastries, loaves, and cakes that would go to market the next morning. The smell was glorious, but my gluten intolerance meant those smells were as close as I could get to sampling Susan’s work without risking an undignified episode in the smallest room of their cottage. For the record, I gave in to temptation twice during my visit. Also, for the record, it was worth it.

I tried to nap, but even after a 25-hour trek, the new guitar occupied my thoughts. This particular guitar was about three years in the planning. Matthew McAllister and I gave our first duo concert in February 2023 in Crail, a little seaport town on the East Coast of Scotland. I love playing with Matthew. He makes every phrase sound like he’s making it up on the spot, while simultaneously making it sound as though it always existed. Of course, it’s not all fun and games, and we occasionally need to go into ensemble problem-solving mode. For example, getting our two sounds to match has proved challenging. Some of that is due to the fact that Matthew’s sound is produced by organic matter (i.e., his fingernails), and my sound is produced by synthetic matter (i.e., plastic nail tips and super glue). Those different materials cause a volume imbalance, which is annoying, but they are a far subtler issue than the challenges of balancing the actual instruments that we have played over the past three years.

In 2007, Delta’s baggage goons smashed my 1993 Robert Ruck, and the American luthier Stephan Connor came through with an excellent, punchy replacement. The Connor is a loud guitar with a thin top, a sound port, modern bracing, and materials that favor midrange frequencies. Originally built for Eliot Fisk and later owned by Angel Romero, the Connor was an ideal companion for nearly 20 years and has more than earned its now comfortable retirement.

As Matthew and I continue to increase our concert bookings over the next couple of seasons, and we develop the material for our second album, we’ve decided to address the problem of matching our dynamics head-on.

As someone who makes a living playing, teaching, recording, and writing for and about the guitar, I admit that I have a non-scientific and, at times, downright mystical understanding of what makes a great guitar great. I am more concerned about how I feel and what I hear when I play a fine handmade instrument than I am curious about how it was made. A luthier’s artistry only becomes evident to me when I clock how an instrument feels in my lap, vibrates against my chest, and how I perceive the sound when I play.

Subjective? Yes.

But that subjectivity led me to a recent fascination with so-called “traditional” Spanish guitar construction, which dates back to the 1800s and began with the Andalusian luthier Antonio Torres, many of whose methods are still practiced today, notably in Granada. I enjoy the balanced frequency range these guitars produce, which, to my ears, gives them a warm, rich, and rounded tone.

When it comes to traditional guitar construction, many in the UK consider Michael Ritchie one of the best in the business. So, when Matthew showed up for a duo gig with a brand-new cedar-top instrument fresh from Michael’s shop, featuring a small body and cocobolo back and sides, I knew exactly what I wanted. Matthew and I hatched a plan to approach Michael about making a second guitar with the same design and materials.

So, in July of that year, as Michael set up his table for the luthier’s exhibit at the Classical Guitar Retreat at St Andrews, Scotland, I made a beeline for the unsuspecting luthier with a challenge. At first, Michael was resistant to the idea. “I can’t guarantee they will sound the same,” Michael said. “I mean, I can probably get them close if I use the same or similar materials, but it’s not a science. There are countless unknowns when dealing with wood, so if you want the same guitar as Matthew, there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed.”

“That’s fair,” I admitted. “But you know…a pair of guitars made in the same shop by the same luthier using the same materials will get us a hell of a lot closer to the sound we imagine in our heads than what we can otherwise achieve. Plus, regardless of how well the two guitars match, I know it’ll be a killer instrument.”

Michael crossed his arms, which I’ve come to know as his thinking pose. After more than a little silence, he nodded, uncrossed his arms, and shook my hand.

Challenge accepted.

Michael produces guitars in his Strath Halladale shop, but the methods he employs are rooted in his time in Granada, where he lived, learned, and practiced his craft in the storied Barrio Del Realejo. There’s a traditionalism that permeates those building practices, including glue made from all kinds of animal and fish parts, which I try not to think too much about, but if you listen to Michael waxing rhapsodic about affixing a brace using hides and glands, you can see the romance. He says, “There’s something poetic about the old ways, and it adds joy to the work.”

That joy was on display as Michael lifted his latest instrument from the humidification case and placed it in my hands for the first time. I set the guitar on my lap, tuned it, and played a chord. Matthew set up cameras and microphones to record the moment. I felt a bit out of body, playing while listening, listening while playing an instrument I will practice, write, and perform on, and will be my primary traveling companion for the foreseeable future. It occurred to me that playing a guitar I commissioned for the first time is not unlike a first date, with all the hopes and insecurities that come with the experience. Though for this particular first date, I had already signed the marriage certificate and booked the photographer. Unlike any other first date I’ve ever been on, the experience of playing Michael’s newest instrument lived up to my expectations. The next test was to see how the sister guitars sounded together. Matthew grabbed an arrangement I sent him during a layover the day before from J.S. Bach’s Actus tragicus Cantata BWV 106. By the end of the first phrase, Michael, Matthew, and I knew we had something special. Matthew and I spent the afternoon in Michael’s shop, working through our repertoire, growing increasingly excited about the new, balanced sound we were hearing. Finally, the exhaustion from the trip overcame our excitement, and we headed back to Michael and Susan’s cottage and celebrated with what the Scotsmen inaccurately described as a “wee” dram. I slept very well that night.

I woke the next morning to the sounds and smells of bakery preparations. There were plumes of smoke coming from Susan’s baking hut. Crates of bread, pastry, and cakes covered every surface of the kitchen and spread to the living room in the cottage. Michael, Paco, and Hamish loaded a van and their Volvo with product, while Matthew and I packed for a bit of low-pressure busking at the bake shop to promote our evening concert. That was Michael’s idea, and it proved to be a good one.

After a cup of coffee and the first certifiably worthwhile gluten risk of the tour, consisting of a moist and rich pistachio cake made from spelt flour, Matthew and I loaded into the van driven by Paco, a convivial fellow from Valencia, who first visited Northern Scotland with the intention of staying for a summer and never left. There was just enough room to fit guitars and concert gear among the baked goods, and we careened down the one-lane road toward our first delivery of sourdough at the Reay Golf Club. From there, it was a straight shot along the coast of the North Sea to Thurso. When we arrived, Michael and Hamish were already rushing bread crates from the Volvo Wagon through a brewer’s basement and up a rickety set of stairs, and into the Bakery. Matthew and I followed with guitars, set up in a corner, and began tuning while the line of customers snaked down Traill Street, waiting for Susan to open the shop.

A couple of hours later, the shelves were cleared out. The last of the locals said their farewells, and a few loaves of sourdough—serving as the only remaining proof of Susie and Paco’s baking efforts that week—were taken to a local coffee shop and sliced for sandwiches. Matthew and I packed up and headed to our sound check at Thurso West Church, which was first established in 1860 as a “Free Church” and later became part of the Church of Scotland in 1929. Michael was present at the sound check to listen to the sister guitars in action. He paced from one corner of the sanctuary to the other, arms crossed, listening closely. Matthew called out to Michael, who had sneaked into the balcony, “What are you hearing?”

“All good from here, boys.”

“Balance?”

“Aye. Better now. How does it feel, Matthew C?”

“Feels great, Michael. I’m really pushing the top string. Is it too much?”

“You can push. It won’t go splat on you.”

We went to Capilla Tapas Restaurant for dinner, which overlooks Scrabster Harbor, where trawlers hauling whitefish were nearly finished bringing in the day’s catch. I noticed a tiny landmass jutting into the distance and asked Matthew what it was. “Those are the Orkneys. In fact, that’s Stromness just there.” You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know the small seaport town of Stromness, an old Viking settlement that currently supports about 2,500 residents. But to me, just seeing the silhouette of Stromness was akin to a celebrity sighting. That’s because Stromness is named-checked in the 1980 Peter Maxwell Davies musical The Yellow Cake Revue. At the time, uranium mining posed a very real threat to the region, and Maxwell Davies, a longtime Orkney resident, composed The Yellow Cake Revue as a protest. Nestled among the cabaret-style songs that propel the narrative, a little piano interlude called “Farewell to Stromness” emerged as one of Maxwell Davies’ most beloved pieces. Like the solo piano works of Albeniz and Granados, “Farewell to Stromness” was quickly and successfully adapted to the guitar and has become a staple of the repertoire. I found it irksome to be within spitting distance of Stromness, knowing our tour schedule wouldn’t allow for a quick ferry to the town. Matthew, who has performed in Stromness as part of the St. Magnus Festival and is familiar with the local audience, suggested we add “Farewell to Stromness” to the evening’s program. That idea also proved to be a good one.

By concert hour, the church was packed. We stepped into the sanctuary, gave our bows, and recognized most of the faces in the audience from the bakery earlier that day. Susan and Michael sat in the front row, and I felt a bit nervy, wanting to give Michael’s new guitar the best debut performance I could manage. And it almost went off without a hitch. During a particularly strummy moment in our arrangement of Chick Corea’s “Spain,” I hammered on a chord that knocked the soundhole tuner right off its clamp, dislodging the battery and sending the entire mechanism flying into the back of the guitar with a clank. It sounded like a pinball machine. Live performance is always an adventure.

There was no printed program, and we announced our pieces from the stage. When we got to “Farewell to Stromness,” the audience let out a collective sigh of recognition, and I’m sure I could make out people singing along as we played the piece. It was a thrill to hear a staple of the guitar repertoire given the hero treatment by a decidedly non-guitar, mostly bakery audience.

Back at the cottage, we settled in for one of those late-night conversations that are sort of a debate, but the kind of debate that makes your face hurt from laughter. I’m pretty sure we solved a few of the world’s problems, and I’d happily share the solutions if I could only remember what they were. I gave up around the time Michael and Matthew started in on cryptocurrency, and left the old friends sitting at the kitchen table, drinking, bickering, and laughing. I just remembered to duck my head to avoid a low beam when the shock of the night air forced me to inhale, and I looked up at a sky free of light pollution, the smell of woodworking and bread baking still in the air, and the feel of the damp, ancient soil under my feet. And for the second night in a row, I slept very well.

Monday morning, we took the two-and-a-half-hour trip back through magical terrain, and my mood darkened as we pulled up to the Inverness train station. If you ever find yourself in a situation where it is genuinely difficult to say goodbye to friends and you are considering calling your wife to discuss leaving your life in Michigan and moving to the Flow Country of Northern Scotland, I highly recommend the ScotRail route from Inverness to Edinburgh, which cuts through the Highlands, hugging the Cairngorms National Park. The trip may not convince you to stay in Michigan, but it will provide you with a renewed appreciation for how stunning all of Scotland is, so just for now, maybe keep your options open.

On the train, Matthew and I did a bit of tour planning, discussed programming for the next album, and caught each other up on the comings and goings of the people in our lives. Matthew mentioned that he ran into his mother while shopping in Belfast. “Shopping, huh?” I asked, “For what?” “A ring for Eleanor,” he answered. “A ring?” “No,” he said, with what I can only describe as a shit-eating grin, “The ring.”

The rest of that story involves fermented shark, a serious winter storm, and a broken-down bus in a remote part of Iceland. But that’s another trip. So, stay tuned to the Classical Guitar Dispatch for more tales from the road, plus interviews, composition tips, listening and reading recommendations, histories, and more. Next week, I speak with Kevin Vigil, Stanley Yates, and Chuck Hullihan for Part 1 of my series, “The Noble Profession,” an examination of the guitar teaching industrial complex.

As always, I want to hear from you, so let me know in the comments what you think of today’s episode and what you’d like to hear on future shows. For listeners who subscribe to Classical Guitar Dispatch on Substack, I’ve included a free download link to my arrangement of J.S. Bach’s “Sinfonia” from Cantata BWV 106. You can also get full transcripts of the show and a playlist of all the pieces I mention. To keep up with my performances and compositions, follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at @matthewccochran. Classical Guitar Dispatch is written and produced by yours truly. All compositions by Matthew Cochran. Music featured on this episode is from the album Pale Blue Dot by Cochran & McAllister on Sacred Black Records, and is used by permission. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll talk soon.

This is a snippet from the first episode of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, where Matthew McAllister and I visit master luthier Michael Ritchie and his partner, master baker Susan Wallace, who runs a small batch bakery, Loaf. Michael and Susan live at the northern tip of Scotland, on a stunningly beautiful peat bog. The show chronicles the commissioning process for a new guitar, my switch from a loud, modern instrument to a refined traditional build, a concert, an accidental sing-along, and pushing my gluten intolerance past the safe zone. The full episode drops Friday, June 5.

Searching for the Soul of the Guitar

I’m Matthew Cochran, host of the Classical Guitar Dispatch, this brand-new podcast that you are kind enough to be listening to. Normally, the tagline that I’ll use to end my intro is that the show is dedicated to telling the story of the guitar. And while that statement is true, it’s not the whole, entire truth.

The whole, entire truth is that I’m on a mission to find the soul of the guitar. And look, I know how that sounds. It’s a frankly embarrassing statement for me to make. I worry that you will think it’s pretentious, cheesy, and self-indulgent. And maybe it is. But I turn 50 this year, which means I’m on the back nine of my time as a conscious entity on this little blue orb. And so far, most of my good memories involve the guitar. Most of the beauty I’ve experienced has been in some way shaped by the guitar. I play the guitar, write music for it, record myself and others playing it, and I love it. I just love it.

But there’s a frustrating element to loving the guitar, particularly the classical guitar. And that is how profoundly misunderstood the instrument is. Even in specialist circles, it’s often portrayed as the cartoon version of itself. You know, the hyper-macho, Spanish Romance version of the instrument. That may have something to do with the fact that every regional, semi-professional, or professional orchestra puts the Aranjuez on its Valentine’s Day concert or its "Spanish Fire Fundraising Extravaganza" once every five seasons or so. Yet, if you’d like to hear one of the hundreds of other guitar concertos available by any composer whose name is not Rodrigo, I mean, just forget it.

As far as music institutions go, there’s a constant drumbeat from administrators to sell the guitar as the everything instrument, which, of course, dilutes the quality of their offerings and makes the guitar into an advertising tagline.  Like, “come to our school, and our single-person guitar faculty who by the way studied classical guitar performance will magically make you an expert in jazz slash rock slash songwriting slash composition slash music production slash classical/flamenco blah blah blah…which, if you know anything about how hard each one of those individual artistic disciplines are, then you know that those admissions programs, development offices, and marketing teams are, knowingly or not, slinging a load of horseshit just to get another student in the door because they care way more about their job security than they care about actually educating the students who pay those salaries. By the way, if this sounds heretical, don’t take my word for it, just look up dwindling enrollment numbers, demographic shifts, and superimpose those numbers onto how many eliminated positions, cost-cutting measures, and music school closures there have been over the past decade or so, and do your own math.

That’s the way I view the state of affairs in the most visible areas of the mainstream classical music profession, so it’s no wonder how superficially the guitar is presented to the general public. But I’m sooooo tired of seeing the guitar as a prop in press photos and Instagram posts that aren’t about the guitar at all; they’re just thirst traps that want me to buy stuff or click on a link or whatever. And I’m exhausted by my YouTube or TikTok channel’s dumb algorithm that thinks I want to hear Leyenda. Again. Played pretty well. Again. By yet another person that the algorithm thinks I will find attractive. Again. Please don’t misunderstand me here, I have nothing against youth and beauty. It’s a time-tested mechanism to get people’s attention. If that’s what you’ve got to offer, go for it. And if that’s all you need from the guitar, you know, have fun or whatever.   

But for me, it’s just not enough. I mean, we live in an age when most of the music written for the guitar is available for us to play, to listen to, to enjoy. Much of the repertoire has been recorded, in some cases multiple times, by some of the greatest artists to ever play the instrument.  The guitar has breadth, depth, history, and profound expressions of the human condition. Yet, if my feed has anything to say about it, I’m supposed to be happy with advertising. I’m supposed to be satisfied with the most superficial AI-generated, Spotify playlist-type crap. To just gobble it up as if I don’t know the difference between quality and garbage.  

But I think I do know the difference, and that’s exactly why I’m not satisfied. And I bet a lot of you know the difference between quality and garbage, too. And you aren’t satisfied. Especially if you’re even vaguely aware that the level of performance at the professional level is as high as it’s ever been; there are resources, there are festivals, there are student-level opportunities, there is a growing adult learner community out there, it is truly a golden age for lovers of the classical guitar, but only if you know where to look. This new podcast chronicles my personal search for the guitar’s soul. And I’m gonna warn you upfront: it’s a deep, nerdy dive into something, maybe only a few of us care about, and that’s just fine with me. I’ll let Joe Rogan talk to the masses; he doesn’t need my help. I’m looking for meaning, for knowledge, for beauty, for human connections in this enormous, yet somehow hidden world of the classical guitar. I’ll try to share my discoveries in a way that is entertaining, but never pandering. And I want you to join me. So, let’s make it official: for the Classical Guitar Dispatch, I’m Matthew Cochran. Let’s get started.