Quotes from Julian Bream

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.

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

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

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.

I like to play the lute full-bloodedly, with passion, as well as with delicacy and, I hope, refinement.

I'm quite reflective - I listen to music, I read, I walk with Django.

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

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.

When I feel like improvising, I always improvise on the guitar, never on the lute. It's as natural to me as breathing.

Your experience of life is to a large part distilled into your performing. As you grow older, you concentrate on aspects of music that you perhaps only touched on earlier.

When my father saw that I was interested in following such a career he had many reservations. His feeling was that there was no chance to earn a livelihood unless I played jazz or something similar.

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.

One thing you learn very rapidly in this business is that you are part of a continuing tradition.

Music has been my real solace. And that's why I play music. And that's why I'm so determined, or have been so determined to pursue what I wanted to do, come what may.

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.

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

Michael Berkeley's 'Sonata' is very - what can you say - melodious.

The guitar is the most beautiful of all instruments.

I think Englishmen or Northern Europeans in general are more naturally attracted to the lute than to the guitar, which always seems Spanish exotic - to our ears.

I've always played a lot of Spanish music, but not as much as most guitarists do.

The guitar speaks for me and it says things - hopefully - for everybody that I play for.

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.

Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.

You're never static as a performer. You either get better or you get worse. As I see it, you have an equal chance at either.