A biography for Julian Breamhasn’t been written yet.
“If the orchestra's not enjoying itself, the concerto will not succeed, with the players confined to using half an inch of bow.”
“I don't do much relaxing. When I'm not giving a recital I practise.”
“I found I could speak through the guitar. Because you have the feel of the strings with both hands and it's up against your solar plexus, it's real, and so there's nothing between you and the music.”
“One thing you learn very rapidly in this business is that you are part of a continuing tradition.”
“It is difficult to understand the fortunes of an instrument. There was music written for the guitar until the mid-19th century. Then the instrument declined in popularity.”
“The guitar is the most beautiful of all instruments.”
“When I feel like improvising, I always improvise on the guitar, never on the lute. It's as natural to me as breathing.”
“The future of the guitar is every bit as important as its past.”
“What do I think of digital recording? Well, it's all right. But those old thorn needles, now, that was a sound.”
“The lute I use has 10 courses and 19 strings, which is quite a lot of strings and a quite different fingerboard width from a classical guitar. I use a combination of flesh and nail when plucking the strings.”
“I suppose that when I started to play the lute it was fairly esoteric.”
“I learned mainly by listening to Andres Segovia and that was a great inspiration. And also the gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.”
“I enjoy having a large audience, but I don't do anything special to attract them.”
“You have to get the attention of the audience. You have to make sure they know you are starting. You have to achieve a rapport with them on the very first chord.”
“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.”
“I was mostly self-taught on guitar and that had its benefits. It's a great thing to work through problems on your own.”
“I've had a lovely life. I've had a great life.”
“My father played one of the first electric guitars in England. He built his own in 1940, because you couldn't buy them in those days. He used three telephone pickups under the strings, which gave chronic distortion on chords but was quite good on single notes.”
“A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.”
“I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.”