Writing about the classical guitar has been an important part of my working life for decades – for Classical Guitar magazine, and 30 years on, still continuing with the monthly Gendai Guitar. In this blog, I want to share my excitement at meeting up with Lance Bosman, an inspiring music writer from a pre-Internet time, where music print journalism was an important and essential part of our lives and our conversations.

Lance Bosman is someone whose work I read and learned a lot from in my student days in the 1980s, when I would eagerly await the publication of each monthly issue of Guitar International. The magazine started in August 1972 and it as originally called Guitar, subtitled ‘the journal of Britain’s guitarists’.

George Clinton was the Editor and Colin Cooper was the Features Editor; the publication address in the first few issues was given as Warner Road, London – Colin Cooper’s home and a place of guitar pilgrimage and sometimes over-night stays in his later Classical Guitar magazine days. John Williams was featured on the cover of the first issue of Guitar and he provided a ‘message’, which appeared in the Contents page:

A MESSAGE FROM JOHN WILLIAMS

One reprehensible drawback to the development of the guitar as an instrument with a classical background and technique has been the narrow-minded, reactionary and, in many cases, unmusical attitude of its most “pure” advocates. I say “has been” because this attitude is nearly dead and buried; however, any extra pushing towards this end can only be welcomed, and for this reason I wish you all the best on the occasion of your first issue of GUITAR.

Yours sincerely,

John Williams

This very much reflected the openness of Guitar magazine to all styles of music played on the guitar. As well as the John Williams interview and Gilbert Biberian talking about ‘The Alpha of Omega’, this first issue had an article by ‘Larry’ Bosman on ‘The Modal Scales’ and published Lance Bosman’s composition Lotus Pool.

In 2022,  I had the great pleasure of meeting for the first time another Guitar International writer, Sue McCreadie in Sydney and then, just a month or so later, I met Lance Bosman in London! Sue is still very involved with the guitar and is a radio presenter and programmer on 2MBS Fine Music Sydney, among other interesting work, and Lance lives in a ‘sleepy village’ in Suffolk and has a website where he shares some of his invaluable interviews with Julian Bream, John Williams, Jukka Savijoki, Siegfried Behrend, Magnus Andersson, Sharon Isbin, Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Reginald Smith Brindle, Stephen Dodgson, Hans Werner Henze, Hector Quine, Richard Rodney Bennett, Jim Hall, Charlie Byrd, Laurindo Almeida, Bireli Lagrene, Stanley Jordan, Ike Isaacs, Ralph Towner …

Lance very kindly agreed to write about his life’s work here in his article, ‘Crossing Boundaries’. Thank you, Lance!

Crossing Boundaries

Lance Bosman (2023)

From the first issue of Guitar magazine, launched in 1972, its founder and editor George Clinton began with a broad brush. Starting as it meant to continue for the next twenty years, Guitar International as it was subsequently called opened with a conversational exchange between John Williams and Andy Powell from the rock group ‘Wishbone Ash’. From the outset too, the journal spread its wings with classical guitar matters, a jazz column, a blues page, one given to flamenco and another to folksong. Joining the editorial team, I had no experience of writing then other than sending a postcard from Brighton. But George instilled confidence. He simply said meet the interviewee and see what comes up. So it was a matter of learning on the job. In later times, acting on the spur paid dividends since many concert guitarists made whirlwind visits, performed and then zoomed off. With an interview inevitably fixed in a rush, there was little time to glean background information beforehand.

Running an eye over these disclosures, it has since struck me that that in the 1970s and early 1980s adventurous movements were astir in the guitar’s repertoire. Advances and new thrusts were undertaken by progressive players along with contributions from mainstream composers. A stylistic spoke-wheeling was afoot with novel strides from all quarters. Without brushing aside the guitar’s legacy, the present generation of groundbreakers thrust the guitar and its music onto a further plateau. To this end, they declared their endeavours with conviction and enlightenment.

Sitting at Julian Bream’s farmhouse kitchen in Wiltshire back in 1985, the first question came from him was: ‘do you mind if I smoke?’ Needless to say, his accomplishments concerning the lute and guitar are legion, with a particular landmark disk 20th Century Guitar (1967). Casting the instrument into a vibrant new light, the works he premièred then and subsequently endure as beacons, with Reginald Smith Brindle’s El Polifemo de Oro (1963) and Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal (1965) among them. For his guitar and lute renditions alike, Julian Bream’s interpretations are immediately identified by his treatment of tone colours. Such is the impact of their light and shade they seem to emanate at one remove from plucked strings, and instead are conveyed through some other if indeterminate sound source. Was his treatment of these timbres therefore spontaneous or premeditated to impart desired tonal contrasts and perspectives? No, he reflected, they were applied on impulse, as the spirit of the music moved.

Though some breakthrough compositions have received an airing through slots within standard programmes, they might well stand the risk of appearing as curiosities – so say committed recitalists of contemporary music. Other torchbearers, more outspoken, assert that through the perpetuation of the guitar’s traditional fare, it has lapsed into being a closet instrument. One contester is the Swedish guitarist Magnus Andersson, who in 1984 challenged the mixed programme as being positively unhealthy. As good as his word, he is committed to substantial works, elevating the guitar from ‘one of passive entertainment; it doesn’t provoke participants or listeners to think. The instrument’s character, its players, concern with nails, strings, comparing guitars and players. These superficial criteria, as well as contact with inferior music, inevitably leads to narcissism – where the instrument itself is the holy object over and above its creative potential, and so becoming a fetish.’ (Guitar, November 1980). At the time of our meeting, he was working on Maurice Ohana’s challenging Si le jour parait (1963) inspired by Goya’s sketch depicting emaciated souls peering at a starlit sky. In later years, Andersson worked with the English composer Brian Ferneyhough on Kurze Schatten II (1983). Of daunting complexity, a glance at the score and a vision flits across the mind of a teeming ants’ nest. Not too everyone’s taste, these marathons are nevertheless testaments to the reaches and outer soundposts that latter-day guitar music has since undergone.

Another concern of progressive thinkers is the adherence that guitarists have to written notes. Leave them awhile they maintain and experiment with improvisation. Prompt happenings by chance. Tinkering at the fingerboard, the glimmer of an idea might just surface. It catches the ear and conveys the promise of development. In a conversation from 1983 with Reginald Smith Brindle, an author of Serial Composition and a principal exponent of serial guitar music, well serendipity too had a part to play in his otherwise pursuit of dodecaphony: ‘My compositional processes are almost completely by improvisation, tape recorded then copied fairly precisely. The series is an incentive for ideas, giving me note shapes. I might apply it in two fragments, going over the notes to one point, then starting again and gradually move on. So far I’ve only used six, so I might continue the row or break off and do something completely different.’

Also urging players guitarists in this regard, the German guitarist Siegfried Behrend in conversation from 1984 had this to say: ‘Musicians never perform improvisation because they don’t care to learn it. But many soloists and chamber musicians do, and they profit from it, even for the classical repertoire because it gives a wider perceptual range of music vision.’ Speaking of musical vision, Behrend urged guitarists to look outward and seize the moment: ‘I think it’s most important for musicians to be ready for anything. You have to be there and prepared to do it; you have the music so perform it. Okay you might have to work on some but not hours and months. There is what I call a guitar fetishism, where many guitarists work on say Giuliani for half a year caressing it. It’s too perfectionist, it lacks a professional approach.’

Another perspective on assessing the role of guitar music in the world around us, the American guitarist David Starobin reflected our chat from 1985: ‘I’ve never been able to understand why people aren’t able to respond to music from our own time. To me, it’s the immediate experience for us because you have composers echoing everything going on around, the vibrancy of life today. In my own case, in New York city, I play music that lives there, and I really do get the feeling that the rhythms, the energy of the music is emanating from now.’ Perhaps the aversion – or is it complacency – towards today’s musical trends is the result of inordinate concentration on classical music at the expense of the new. ‘Complacency of guitar audiences, well that’s probably true. They are fond of the familiar, they don’t want to be challenged; and of course this comes down to educational shortcomings. The question the complexity of our music is a direct result of the world we live in. We are bombarded with so many influences. So a composer of our time must attune to that.’ And one work that certainly does have that contemporary ring is Elliot Carter’s Changes (1983) dedicated and performed by David Starobin.

Another breakthrough in recent guitar music and exclusive to the instrument is through the dynamic contrasts of percussive-acoustic timbres harnessed at the fingerboard. Requiring aural adjustment and a flexible ear on the part of the listener, these exposures are not of lyrical unfoldings. Without excluding normal pitched notes, they are however primarily juxtapositions of tone colours. Themes, motives initially discerned in pitch onwardly materialise in diffuse guises as sheens of tremolos, skimming pizzicato, muted, swooping glissandos, blurred and bristling textures. Allowing the imagination free rein, they might well be perceived as diagonal shots and superimposed layers. Spatially disposed, they take on a certain velocity, as orbital sonic ‘objects’ thrust to the foreground advancing, retreating. The stimulus for these often as not is extra-musical. In a recording by the Finnish guitarist Jukka Savijoki, The Contemporary Finnish Guitar (1982), it remains for the listener to conjure nocturnal images from Midnight (1978) composed by compatriot Pavo Heininen (1978). Within a turbulence of ever-changing timbres, a figure breaks through and thereon is subjected to disturbing, nightmarish and, at times, dreamlike states as they strike us.

From another standpoint, the Czech Štěpán Rak, a guitarist and painter, visualised colours and actions in his conceptions. Drawing analogies between tones and imagery, special effects are intended to evoke the orb’s first rays to full shine in The Sun (1981). Depicting its skybound course are iridescent discords and muted rasgueado. Beginning with a slow unfolding of harmonics as if to portray dawn’s filters, the music subsequently gathers pace to culminate with blurred rasgueado ‒ the sun at its zenith.

Among further new strengths to the repertoire, accomplished players have deployed classical guitar techniques to jazz settings. From them we hear ballads with entwined linework, chordal runs and pressing bass pedals. In this field, Charlie Byrd has excelled with his three-pronged deliveries of evergreens and their spin-offs. In conversation with him over a drink in 1979, I wondered just how much of his improvisations were sketched beforehand to a degree or left to the spur of the moment: ‘Setting an arrangement I’ll plan the first chorus, an interlude and the end, or just the outer sections. A matter of experimenting, until I get a feel for the flow of a number. The improvisation will then evolve rather than be worked out in front’. Teaming up with Stan Getz in the 1960s, Byrd provided the samba rhythms and extended harmonies to their bossa nova renditions. At the bossa nova’s height of popularity in the 1960s, a forerunner of the idiom was the Brazilian guitarist, Laurindo Almeida, who 1979 related: ‘

Bud Shank and I got together and we formed a quartet. I had some sambas which I brought from Brazil and we changed them a little with enriched harmonies, more sophisticated. We cut that album in 1952, and that you know was the marriage of samba and jazz; it was this thing, although we didn’t then call it the bossa nova.

To conclude on a personal note, jazz changes have held an enduring fascination for me, and stimulated composing in that vein. From running over routine sequences such as ‘round the clock’ I set to drumming up individual formations. Countless numbers of these await discovery at the fingerboard. A spectrum of shades and lustres, not least are those unique to the guitar, that is the luminous sonorities issuing from overlapping open- and stopped-sounding strings. Under their sway and with a repository of self-conceived harmonies, my jazz-inclined numbers and miniatures took shape.

Rounding up, since the latter decades of the twentieth century, the guitar’s showing has been of revolutionary strides. Landmarks and the oblique limbs of the repertoire aside, no end of studies and readily accessible assortments have sprung up, nourished by the musical tender of late. Each tracking their own course, we detect within them filters of jazz, exotica, renewed traditions and piquant modernism.

Never has the repertoire been so prodigious, brimming with creativity and variety. The most fertile period in the guitar’s history, its presence is assured by its embrace of contemporary idioms, advance playing techniques, sonic resources, stylistic multiplicity and the increasing numbers of present-day composers attracted to it.

© Lance Bosman 2023

Lance Bosman’s interviews and his compositions can be found at his website: https://www.lancebosman.co.uk/

Lance also recommends for readers to visit Vincenzo Pocci’s open-access site, which has 62,000 references from 1900 to the guitar citing solos, composers and ensembles. Database Pocci Catalogue online, VP Music Media 62: www.vpmusicmedia.com

 © Thérèse Wassily Saba 2023