The International Guitar Festival at West Dean College
by Julia Crowe

Last summer, as I was preparing to travel to the U.K. for the International Guitar Festival at West Dean College, my publisher at Classical Guitar Magazine made what turned out to be the fortuitous error of arranging my New York to London flight for a Friday instead of Thursday. The event began on a Saturday, leaving me little room to recover from jet lag from the ten-hour trip to the south of England. I got around the sleep issue by ramping back my sleep hours from 9 PM - 3 AM EST a week in advance. (Prime club-playing hours in New York but...)

By Thursday morning, I had come to relish the silence of the city, the view of the full moon shimmering over the East River and the productivity that comes with packing in a couple hours of work before sunrise. This reminds me of an amusing comment that writer George Dawes Green once shared with me on how society tacks on a rather lopsided morality to the hours most artists keep: Stay up late/sleep in late and the world makes you feel like a worthless sluggard. Shift those hours forward and your attitude miraculously takes on a newly improved vampiric glee--though sadly, no one else is awake to take notice and congratulate you for the effort.

At 4:30 AM, an email arrived from the magazine offices with an updated set of travel instructions: Bring your passport in a plastic baggie but no liquids or gels. I clicked onto CNN and saw the bold red banner announcing a foiled terror alert with a picture of Scotland Yard. I went anyway. If I had left on the previous Thursday, I would have been stuck at the airport amidst the delays and confusion that overwhelmed travelers to the U.K. Maurice Summerfield, the magazine's publisher, looked into arranging for me to borrow a guitar with the new flight restrictions.

The view of West Sussex near Chichester by train brought back memories of a stint I once did of sheepherding in Ireland. Not that I was very good at it. Being on the wrong side of three hundred sheep stampeding toward you from a high road is enough to make Grand Central at rush hour look like a cakewalk by comparison.

West Dean College is best described as a Masterpiece Theatre house combined with Los Angeles' Huntington Gardens, all sitting on a 6,000 acre estate overrun with sheep. Its last owner, Edward James, was a patron of artists of the surrealist movement and the estate itself had served as a retreat for King Edward VII, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Rene Magritte, Cecil Beaton and Aldous Huxley. As soon as the cab pulled into the grounds, I was transported back to a pastoral view of 1930 with the occasional hawk, seagull or biplane circling overhead. http://www.westdean.org.uk/virtual/2.htm.

The gardens are mythical in their beauty. Planted to replicate Edwardian tradition, they feature a pear arch and a 100-meter-long pergola covered in wisteria, a sunken garden and two hundred varieties of fruit trees; the estate is bordered by topiary sculptures and a croquet court. I at last understood with agonizing clarity Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden when faced with apple tree branches sloping under the weight of the most perfect-looking ripe fruit, still glistening after a brief rain shower.

I resisted the urge to pluck one off the branch, mainly because of the presence of the modern-day equivalent of a scare crow: video monitors in the garden. Guests who stay here receive all-organic meals prepared on the premises, using produce grown in these same gardens. So while I might not have had the chance to sink my teeth into an apple, we did get to try the greengage plums-a thrill for a New Yorker accustomed to buying fruit sealed in plastic on a Styrofoam tray.

The guitar program, directed by John Mills, featured five full days of master classes, private instruction, ensemble classes, and evening concerts. This year's performers, instructors and guest lecturers included: David Russell, Joseph Urshalmi, Máximo Diego Pujol, Gerald Garcia, Catherine Liolios, Andrew Gough, the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet--and David Caswell, who filled in at the last second for Karin Schaupp. In the Tudor-style Oak Hall, British Luthiers Paul Fischer and Earl Marsh and Dutch luthier Bert Kwakkel displayed their wares along with the Spanish Guitar Centre's extensive selection of CDs and sheet music.

Instructor Gerald Garcia leads the ensemble workshop.

This year's concerts were held in a beautifully remodeled barn a mile away from the house on the other side of the gardens. We gathered in group expeditions and tramped our way there and back, sweeping a flashlight over the pathway to illuminate and avoid clods of sheep dung and fallen apples. If daylight brought guitar music trickling out the open casement windows, the darker hours saw midnight revelers racing up and down the Dali-designed wallpapered staircase in their annual tradition, tracing the once-wet footprints of James' wife, the dancer Tilly Losch. (The story has it that she emerged from the bath, leaving behind a trail of damp footprints as she ascended the staircase and, as a token of his love for her, James traced the footprints and had their silvery outline woven into the carpet.)

Left: Classical Guitar Magazine editor Colin Cooper, right: Maurice Summerfield.

I wound up making several new friends and coming home with a new guitar piece called Bats & Umbrellas. We seemed to be having our share of umbrella jokes that week, starting with Classical Guitar Magazine editor Colin Cooper's feisty and quick-witted response after taking an accidental spill from a step.

"I broke one rib, it was nothing."

"What do you mean it was nothing?"

"Oh, my umbrella was no good anyway. It has seen better days."

Appropriately enough, in the estate music room, there is also a dark and nightmarish surrealist painting of a tattered, open silk parasol.

Two nights later, I left the pub inside the main house to head up the road to the house where I was staying and discovered it was raining, and I had left my compact umbrella behind. I turned around to go back to the pub and found the night watchman had thrown open the massive front doors of the house to let in some of the cool evening air.

I spotted my umbrella hanging on a hook near the tapestry and reached for it, silently thanking the thoughtful stranger who placed it there. It flew away and joined another bat swooping through the grand marble hallway...an appropriate scene for a house owned by the patron of the 1930s surrealists!

The 2007 West Dean College International Classical Guitar Festival and Summer School will take place 18-24 August and feature guest artist recitals by David Russell, Tilman Hoppstock, Xuefei Yang, the Modern Guitar Trio, and a duo performance by Director John Mills and Cobie Smit. The programme is aimed at all levels, including a beginner's course.

For further information and applications, please contact:

The College Office West Dean College
West Dean, Chichester West Sussex
PO18 0QZ
T: 0123 811301 F: 0123 811343
(9 AM to 5 PM, 7 days a week)
Email: short.courses@westdean.org.uk

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About the Author
To learn more about Julia Crowe's activities as a guitarist, composer and journalist please see her website at: http://www.juliacrowe.com/index.htm

An in-depth article of her "West Dean" story can be found in the January 2007 issue of Classical Guitar Magazine. www.classicalguitarmagazine.com