S1 Ep 3: The Noble Profession, Part 2

THEMEI 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 BeerCandice 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 CountryWe’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 EconomyThomas 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.CODAWell, 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. 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