An Andalucian sun splashes the stone walls of Calle Romea and bathes in palpitating light the balconies and window boxes dripping with blood-red geraniums. I am in the southern Spanish town of Linares, where my grandmother and the legendary guitarist, Andrés Segovia, were born nine years apart. It is to these well-worn streets and houses that I have come with my husband to trace one of the sources of my passion for the guitar.
Last night we sat with my Spanish relatives discussing the twists of fate that brought my great-grandparents from Scotland and northern England to settle toward the end of the nineteenth century in Linares, where most of their descendants married Spaniards and established themselves in Bilbao, Seville, and Madrid. My father’s diverse family runs the gamut from an aunt who ran off to join the circus, an English teacher, a doctor, and a Baptist minister, to the president of one of the largest banks in Spain, who earlier on this trip had taken us to lunch in Madrid accompanied by armed bodyguards.
I had been welcomed into the home of an aging friend of Andrés Segovia who showed me the maestro’s guitar manuscripts and scrapbooks of the more than 4,500 concerts he had given during his lifetime. As a parting gift I was handed some of the strings he had used for one of his last concerts. Later in Paseo de Linarejos I placed a bouquet of flowers at the feet of a huge statue of Segovia commemorating his birth there in 1893 — another connecting thread in the tapestry of my life.
After motoring past hilly olive groves and the red poppy-stained fields of Andalucia, Jack and I had met up with my Cuban composer friend, Leo Brouwer, who invited us to hear the Córdoba Symphony Orchestra, which he conducts, and later we sat sharing sherry and guitar-world gossip. Within the historic city of Granada we lunched with Laura, the niece of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who took us on a tour of her uncle’s former house. In 1936 the fascists had executed, by firing squad, Spain’s most famous and vibrantly creative poet. After showing us his faded manuscripts, Laura bid my fingers bring life to the sweet and delicate guitar her uncle had immortalized in his drawings and poetry — “Oh guitar, heart deeply wounded by five swords.” The mayor of Granada, Gabriel Berbel, shared his box with us in the Manuel de Falla Theatre for an evening with the Orchestra of the City of Granada, then tempted me with the idea of performing in his city next summer. Inhaling air scented with cypress, myrtle, and rosemary, Jack and I wandered through the ornate rooms and gardens of the Moorish palace — the Alhambra — which had inspired Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain” and Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” Ten days earlier in a Madrid café we had nibbled tapas with Amalia Ramírez and reminisced about my pilgrimage to her father’s workshop thirty years ago, and about her family to whom I had dedicated my composition “Madrileña.”
As a moonchild with my sun in Cancer, born during the Chinese year of the Ox, it seems I had no choice but to be drawn to a career in the arts. Maybe, in the words of Hamlet, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” The classical guitar has provided me with a passport to the world and embroidered my life with richly contrasting experiences. As if flicking through television channels, I sometimes tune in to the varied images my mind has stored away: on tour with Bernie, the view from the engine room of a CN train spray-ploughing through the pristine, snow-quilted forests of British Columbia; a master class I gave one humid Havana afternoon, in which young Cubans smouldered with passion for the guitar; a candlelit recital in Tuscany at the sumptuous villa of friends, the Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt.
Only a month ago, in April 1998, before flying down to El Salvador for performances to benefit a theatre restoration, arranged by the composer Carlos Payet, who resurfaced, after twenty years, at my Guatemala concert, I was dancing to the rhythms of a samba band in the Brazilian jungle village of Parintíns. A few days earlier we had listened to Mozart in the fabled Manaus Opera House, played with baby crocodiles on a late night canoe ride up the steamy Amazon River, and explored the windswept former penal colony on French Guiana’s Devil’s Island. Last year we had picked our way through the marketplaces of Hanoi and Saigon, sipped Metaxa in smoky Greek tavernas after my concerts in Athens and Thessaloniki, and luxuriated for two weeks in the Palazzo Cini on Venice’s Grand Canal. Earlier that year I had orchestrated a Boyd family reunion in San Miguel de Allende in the rented home of skater and painter Toller Cranston. My concert there, at the Angela Peralta Theater, arranged by Jaime Fernández, my teenage boyfriend who was now the town’s mayor, had woven another circular pattern into the colourful tapestry.
Ahead await recording sessions where I will blend my guitar with the poetry of Lorca and Neruda for a new album, Whispers of Love, then a few recitals in Ontario, an interview for a CBC Life and Times documentary, and a quick trip to perform in Hong Kong City Hall’s concert series. Bernie Fiedler, whom I consider a personal friend, continues to manage my career, which has now spanned three decades, while his resourceful former associate, Elisa Amsterdam, carries on assisting with international bookings. Music and travel interweave throughout my days.
New designs are formed in the fabric as old relationships emerge in different configurations: not so long ago Pierre Trudeau visited our house for lunch and attended my concert with the McGill Chamber Orchestra at Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal; Costa Pilavachi, my former agent at Haber Artists, has become president of the international division of Philips Music Group and is discussing new projects with my producer and U.S. manager, David Thomas. Last year Edgar Kaiser played me some of the new songs he has composed, and Prince Philip continues to delight me with his letters from Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle. I still wait for more doors to open so that I might record Richard Fortin’s orchestration of My Land of Hiawatha and Concerto of the Andes, which I recently performed with the symphony orchestra in Bogotá, Colombia.
I am no longer on tour for weeks on end, and believe I have struck a perfect balance between my home and professional life. My relationship with Jack grows closer each year, and although it took some adjustments at first, he has become accustomed to my itinerant ways and the time demands imposed by my career. Sometimes he chooses to accompany me on tours, enjoying the Salt Spring Island home of my artist friend Robert Bateman; getting to know my dear elderly “cat ladies” in Medicine Hat, Alberta; and meeting the eccentric little Quebecker Jean-Jacques, who makes paper mobiles and pedals hundreds of miles on his bicycle to surprise me at concerts.
Jack is the most generous and loving of husbands — kind-hearted, philanthropic, and filled with a sense of appreciation for each day we share. Although our seven years together have mostly been filled with contentment, there have been times when shadows obscured even California’s golden sun. Some family health problems and the loss of a number of friends, including guitarist Laurindo Almeida, have caused darkened clouds and grey skies.
A constant source of happiness for Jack, Dervin (our houseman), and me is our playful, jewel-eyed cat, Muffin. One of my life’s most intense moments of pure joy occurred when he bashfully returned to my tear-stained pillow in the early morning hours after creeping through an unlocked screen door and venturing into the coyote-threatened world beyond our garden. The three of us have grown to love our furry little companion who hides his toy mice in our suitcases to guarantee we feel pangs of guilt when travelling.
Life in L.A. has spawned many new relationships with creative people from the worlds of music, art, science, and film. Working with Maurice Jarre, the French composer who wrote the music for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, to record A Walk in the Clouds, which took the Golden Globe for best film score, was a thrill. The city has on occasion coughed up some singular experiences: Judge Lance Ito’s invitation to serenade, in his courtroom, the sequestered O.J. Simpson jury who rose in a standing ovation, then a few months later stunned the world with their controversial verdict; a request from a dynamic couple who are fond of my music, Charlton Heston and Lydia Clarke, to play for their family and friends. How could I possibly turn down “Moses”? When I find myself chatting with “Rocky” — Sylvester Stallone — at the frozen yogurt counter, or dancing with a kilted Rod Stewart at a Malibu Christmas costume party, I am just as starstruck as some of my guitar fans seem to be with me.
My world is often filled with amusing diversions, but my days are always punctuated by the constant discipline imposed by my relentless taskmaster, the guitar. Andrés Segovia religiously practised five hours a day into his nineties, proof that even for a master such as he, “if you miss a day you know it, if you miss two days your instrument knows it, and if you miss three days your audience knows it!” There are still times when after a substandard concert I feel a wretched inadequate failure, but after an exceptional performance I am filled with pride for my accomplishments — the agony and ecstasy of a concert performer. Chopin once said, “There is no more beautiful sound in the world than a classical guitar, save perhaps two guitars!” For all its charms, however, it is an exasperatingly difficult instrument to play on the concert stage. I was delighted to be given a place in Guitar Player magazine’s “Gallery of Greats” after winning their “best classical guitarist” international poll for five years, and I am very grateful for the five Juno awards I have received in Canada. It is particularly gratifying to know that some of my fellow guitarists are now including in their own repertoire selections from Classically Yours, the album for which I composed all of the music. It is pleasing to think that one day my pieces might outlive me in the hands of future guitar players.
Learning to play my role as a Beverly Hills hostess, I enjoy organizing dinner parties for our international group of friends, such as author Nathaniel Branden, actor Michael York, former prime minister Kim Campbell, solar energy pioneer Ishaq Shahryar, film directors Barry Spikings and Ken Annakin, fitness mavens Gilda Marx and Jack LaLanne, and producer Loreen Arbus. Oil painting, overseeing my website, and participating in various family and charity events enrich my home life with Jack.
We have become involved with many different animal organizations and have tremendous respect for the dedicated people who work to help educate the public about the atrocities inflicted upon animals by the chemical and cosmetic industries, and the military and science research laboratories. I respect Mahatma Gandhi, who repeatedly spoke out against vivisection and said it was one of the blackest crimes committed by man. Of course everywhere in the world there has always been cruelty to animals — the meat industry, fur trapping, bullfighting, and the slaughter of marine mammals. I am repulsed by it all, yet none seems so abhorrent to me as the systematic, widespread abuse of living creatures in labs. The numbers of animals killed (100 million each year in the U.S. alone) and the barbaric experiments are so shocking that most people would never believe what goes on behind locked doors. Several large charities have finally stopped supporting animal research, and in Britain medical schools have banned vivisection with no apparent lowering of surgical skills. Not so very long ago child labour and slavery were acceptable to our society; it is my hope that as we become more enlightened toward our fellow human beings, so might we also toward other species. I am grateful to the many groups, both in Canada and the U.S., that have through their books, pamphlets, lectures, and videos taught me more than I ever wanted to know about the rapacious vivisection industry, and the existence of criminal rings that routinely sell stolen pets to laboratories. In recent years I have tried to lend my voice and talent to help the selfless people who little by little are making progress toward changing some of the laws and teaching people that more clinical human studies are what we should focus on. An enormous number of chemicals tested on animals have been approved for human consumption but years later are found to be toxic to us as we are biologically and biochemically different from animals. These mistakes inevitably take their toll on human health and our planet’s environment. The world will be a much more humane place when we learn to live in harmony with each other and with nature.
My father pursues his ongoing interests in ecovillages and sustainable ecology, while my mother manages my company and is breathing a sigh of relief that this book is finally finished, as she has been offering editorial advice and typing and retyping my manuscript into a word-processor for the past eight years — an invaluable contribution as my fingering skills have never been applied to a keyboard. My brother, Damien, is the manager of a biotechnical pharmaceutical company, and my sister, Vivien, who has just built a new dental office in Cambridge, Ontario, spends time with her partner, Jim, her teenage son, Colin, from a previous marriage, and their latest golden retriever.
I suppose that I have been the adventurer of the family, pursuing a performing career that demands so much concentration and travel. It is a career that continues to challenge, punish, frustrate, and delight me. I would not trade it for any other. To those of you who have been tangled in the web of my destiny, I wish you well; to all of you around the world who have attended my concerts, and enjoyed my recordings, I offer my heartfelt gratitude. Over the years I have enjoyed sharing my music with you, and now this has been my attempt to tie together the warps and wefts of my personal tapestry — the threads that constitute my “Flax of Dream.”
But, of course, this chapter is not really a coda at all. Its final chords are already starting to play the prelude to the rest of my life.
1998