Living in England this year, we have green countryside all round us, and brilliant yellow fields of rape-seed, in spring, that are layered in history. Not far from Avebury Ring, its pre-Christian standing stones, and the 3600 to 5000 year old circle, Stonehenge, Roman towns and ancient ridge-top roads stretch across the gentle Salisbury plain. Great white horses created on the chalk hill-sides decorate the flanks of the Ridgeway path, 'Britain's oldest road', 100 or so miles of ridge crest along the north Wessex Downs and the wooded Chiltern Hills. Cycling over these hills one hears the hum of modern pastoral landscape that lives on top of this history.

What was the music of the ancients? If the rocks could sing we would know. The more recent past of the late 1600s-1700s with its industrial revolution and intellectual growth saw a new music. As physics and chemistry and geology drove engineering, railways, mining, button and buckle factories, textile mills, we see Bach’s music and Handel and Haydn entering from Europe. Benjamin Franklin, my favorite American colonial, had a ‘second life’ here and entranced the English with his mastery of electricity. Franklin loved music and learned to play the harp, violin and guitar! While he was at it Franklin invented the 'glass armonica', a fitting mechanized experience of rubbing your wetted finger round the rim of a crystal wine glass (there was a nested row of glasses all spinning, treadle driven, which you played as a keyboard: there was a working model at the Science Museum in South Kensington, London). Beethoven composed for it, yet it has fallen out of style. Franklin lived here for the ten years just before the American Revolution, and his complex role in alternately trying to patch the strained relations with the intransigent King George III and yet advocate the rights of the colonies is significant history.

By 1810 the country was criss-crossed with canals that made industry possible. You can cycle the 100 miles from Reading, where we live just outside London, west to Bristol and the sea along the magnificent Avon-Kennett canal and rarely see a car.

England is a very verbal place. The language is used as sport and recreation, and an American can feel rather dumb in its presence. But you learn and begin to thrust and parry in conversation that exercises language…and logic follows. I have this irreverent feeling that the English had their facial muscles removed at birth, as the flow of words comes without the kind of body language that is so endearing in southern Europe. Verbal ability seems also to give a distinctive music. Rhythm may too have been removed at birth. But being close to the music of Ralph Vaughn-Williams, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Percy Granger, and the current Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies of Orkney, is a great experience (you may have heard Michael Partington play Davies' Farewell to Stromness). This is accessible, often romantic, neo-classical music. For the guitarist there is Malcolm Arnold'’s wonderful concerto, again lyrical and romantic, and more modern pieces like his Fantasy Op. 107. Britten wrote some of the first major, modern English pieces for guitar, Nocturnal, a series of variations on the song Come Heavy Sleep from the First Book of Ayres, 1597, developing moods associated with night and sleep. The theme is placed at the end of the piece rather than the beginning! Much of this new music owes its existence to Julian Bream, who like Segovia, broke the trail before the depths of the instrument had been explored, or the musical public’s interest whetted. Many English compositions were created for him, with him (for example, the Britten and Arnold pieces).

England is all about society and community. There are amateur music clubs widely over the landscape, and Radio 3 of the BBC speaks to the community of music with live or recently recorded concerts from all over the country. This spring John Williams gave a series of half-hour radio lectures on the history of the classical guitar. BBC is a huge (though shrinking) organization which sponsors orchestras in Scotland, England and Wales. Guitar societies, while not plentiful, are active. This seems to be a quiet time for guitar concerts, and I sense that the audiences are not very large for solo recitals. Though, it is a smallish country and musical events are noticed and talked about widely. The up-and-down of public favor is a cyclic thing, and happening elsewhere. But the vitality of having new compositions, the growing popularity of the vast Latin-American guitar literature, and some fusion with the wildly popular jazz/rock/blues/folk guitar should surely help to bring audiences back in strength. England is also, in recent times all about multi-cultural diversity, with immigration giving both new vitality and new problems. America is not in good repute here since the Iraq war, but when she is being criticized I tend to reply, "Which America to you mean? The America that wanted to go to war or the majority who think it was a horrible mistake? The Irish and Italian Boston or Scandanavian and Asian Seattle or Latino and Asian Los Angeles or African-American America?" Despite our inequities, diversity is our strength. And the guitar expresses that diversity.

I felt the 'community' of England while at a concert by John Williams with the English Chamber Orchestra at the 'Hexagon' in Reading during the winter. Reading is a small city just 30 min from London by train, so you might not expect that concerts there could compete with London. Yet, the national lottery, by taking money from those who can’t afford to lose it, has under the Labour government funded a lot of arts, local orchestras and concert series (and also the reconstruction of the Avon-Kennett canal described above). This orchestra is very young and marvelously precise. Williams’ concert was magnificent, playing concertos by Rodrigo (Aranjuez) and Giuliani's’ Op. 30. The setting and the audience really is important to the quality of concerts. In Seattle, Williams is far away on the stage at the Big Benaroya Hall, amplified, and it has never been very exciting to me to hear him there. Here, in a venue the size of the ‘little’ Benaroya recital hall, he was relaxed, and talked at length to the audience about the music.

Speaking of Williams, a 'must' for the visiting guitarist is the Spanish Guitar Centre in central London, now more pedestrian friendly thanks to the imposition of an eight-pound charge for cars to enter this region. This is Barry Mason's shop, which was founded as a teaching establishment by Len Williams, John’s father, in 1952 . The Williams family had just moved from Australia so as to give John the resources of musical London. The shop is small and plain, amidst the bustle of Leicester Square, but it is fun to talk with Barry about anything to do with guitars and music. And, my archive of English guitar music is vastly increased thanks to the Centre. David Russell, one of our favorite visitors to Seattle, is a local hero here too, despite being a Scot displaced to northwest Spain. Last visit to the shop, Barry Mason had just returned from a party in Spain that David threw to celebrate his Grammy award for the Telarc CD Aire Latino. By the way the Grammy is a big deal, a recognition of the growing stature of the classical guitar: David beat out Vladimir Ashkenazy and many others in this 'best instrumental soloist performance' award, which was a cliff-hanger (Russell went to L.A. for the ceremony without knowing who the winner would be (read more).

Wigmore Hall is the classic site for high-quality recital music in London. Built in 1901 by the Bechstein company to show off their grand pianos, and recently renovated, it is a beautiful venue. There are venerable photographs in the foyer of performers, for example its debut concert from 1901 with virtuoso pianist and composer Feruccio Busoni and violinist Eugen Ysaye. This was the site of a recital of the May 2005 concert by Xuefei Yang, a formidable new talent from China. China has produced many impressive string players on the international stage, but not many guitarists. Yang was playing a high-tech Smallman guitar. Apparently John Williams was visiting China, heard her play, and was so impressed that he gave her his own Smallman! Not surprisingly, as I turned around in my seat, there were both John Williams and John Mills a few rows back. Yang played an impressive program of Albeniz, Domenicone, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland, Op.70, J.S. Bach'’s Chaconne, Tarrega and Turina. Joaquin Roderigo attended her debut concert in Madrid, given at age 14. Yang has a CD on the GSP label, with a second one emphasizing music of Chinese composers, ‘Si Ji’ soon to be released.

Lennox Berkeley (1902-1989) was from the generation of William Walton and Michael Tippett, and was close to Benjamin Britten. He composed for orchestra, piano and voice. Late in his career he wrote for guitar the famous Sonatina, Op. 52 nr. 1 (1957) and his Guitar Concerto Op.88 (1974) for Julian Bream, Songs of the half-light Op. 65 (1964) for the great English tenor Peter Pears and Bream and Theme and Variations Op. 77 (1970) for Angelo Gilardino. Finally, when Gilardino was going through the late Andres Segovia’s papers in 2001 he discovered an early (~1926) piece that Berkeley wrote for him: Quatre Pieces Pour la Guitare. However he apparently never played it! Berkeley was in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger, at the time of Segovia’s debut there. Segovia's loss is our gain! A great way to get to know these pieces is from Graham Anthony Devine’s CD British Guitar Music. Devine is wonderfully expressive performer living in London.

Perhaps this signals the best way to build one’s understanding of the guitar: live in another country and see at close hand the performers, composers, audiences and the historic (possibly folk-) origins of the music. Some of the music just has to be heard here: choral music in a stone church or cathedral is quite different from the same music in the average concert hall filled with carpets and sound-absorbing people. And despite the economically impossible numbers (I heard Haydn'’s Mass in Time of War in a small Norman church, with the two choruses well outnumbering the audience), it does happen.

Some of the guitar music described above is rather complex. Hearing it played in its native country can give great depth to one’s own playing. And...playing duets, say with a native flautist, can work wonders too.

So we celebrate the diversity of guitar music, perhaps the most international of instruments. At the same time I cannot disguise the anguish that we felt living a few miles from the London Underground, where I and my family and friends had passed just hours-to-days before the terrorist attack of July 7 2005. Is there not some way our music could heal this wounded world? Bob Geldof, rock-musician turned articulate activist for poverty relief, spurred a huge outpouring of music and protest just in advance of the G8 meeting in Scotland (try to see his BBC tv-series/book on poverty in Africa, and his earlier Band-Aid movement or just the outrageous gossip) ). The G8 heads of state were being pressed by Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to double international aid to Africa, and attend to global warming. Or were they mostly making the world safe for multi-national corporations? The huge Hyde Park concert, and its siblings across the world, were a statement meant to make poverty in Africa ‘history’, yet we were dismayed that there were few African musicians there. Huge demonstrations followed in Edinburgh and outside Gleneagles, where the heads of state relaxed under heavy guard. Then, on the eve of the G8, four suicide bombers made their statement by killing a large number of Londoners. The London ‘tube’ is indeed a tube, and the narrow tunnels aggravated the explosions and blocked the victims’ escape. As I write a second attack has just occurred in London, and another in Egypt.

If music is a direct link to the soul, may its power be felt. Without it, can we survive the global-everything that is being thrust upon us by the rush to an international economy, masquerading as the spread of democracy?

"Music and love were hovering in the air, intertwined."

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing.