Guillem Toró Senent, Spain Fellow

Play Bach as if you were playing Ricky Martin.

Last June 2019 I finished my Bachelors degree in classical trumpet interpretation. A dream and also a little obsession that I had since I tried a friend's trumpet 10 years ago. The trumpet and I became one from the first moment, and I listened to all the concerts for trumpet, symphonies, works, soloists ...

The Bachelors degree finished and in this I learned a lot of good things, as well as some not so good. The teaching of classical music is in many cases classist and biased. I played the most important concertos that have been written for trumpet, the ones I had heard almost 10,000 times and did not feel joy, excitement or enjoyment. All he could feel was fear and anxiety.

My Bachelor's final recital ended and I went home with a strange feeling, "I didn't fail many notes" - "I made dynamics" ... A week later I talked with my colleagues about the matter and everyone had gone through that kind of sensation in their concerts, and some said "try to enjoy it."

One day in the first weeks of July the phone rang, I was lucky to be hired to tour 18 concerts with an orchestra of Latin and pop music. I thought it might be fine, something new. It was not the Berlin Philharmonic or Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but it was perfect for me.

The miracle happened when the music started playing at the first concert. Where were those nerves? Why was I enjoying this like never before, playing a type of music that was totally new to me? How is it possible that playing this music (Ricky Martin, Juan Luis Guerra, Chayanne ...) that for some years had considered it second division, could I enjoy it so much?

I saw my teacher again after the tour, and I told him how much fun I had playing this music, something that didn't happen to me with the music I had studied for 10 years! The answer was clear, "Guillem, playing without fear of failure, having fun and thinking that people who are in the public just want to enjoy a good time, is how great musicians play."
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Today I am still working hard on this aspect, although I remember perfectly how this new way of seeing music began, the day that after speaking for a while on the subject my teacher told me, “Come Guillem, play Bach as if you were playing Ricky Martin"