Juan Sánchez

What does music mean to you personally?

To me music means different things. On a deep level, music is language for emotion. It allows us to express feelings that we can't quite express or feel with language. Music is also a feeling and story to me. When I was really little, my parents would turn on a cassette tape in the tape player in my room for me to fall asleep to. Only it didn't exactly help me fall asleep--I would stay awake listening it to it because I would imagine a story to go along with the music on the tape. The entire album was one big story with my own imagined characters. Music has been so integral to my life that I don't even realize it sometimes. From as far back as I can remember, I've always had a way to listen to music.

Do you agree that music is all about fantasy?

Yes, I think so. Music is something that comes out of nothing, it is like an emotion or story expressed by the composer using musical notes that make the listeners enter in a world of imagination and fantasy where they can disconnect from reality and drift away.

If you were not a professional musician, what would you have been?

Since I was a child, I knew I wanted to be a musician but another thing I love to do is practicing sport, who knows?, maybe I would have been doing a job related to sport.

The classical music audience is getting old, are you worried about the future?

I am not worried about the future as usually things are not as one expect they would be. I prefer to focus on the present. Also, I do not see myself as a classical musician, I create piano music but I do not really connect with the classical music standards. My audience is quite wide and I see that lots of young people are using some of my compositions as background music for their YouTube videos. I have been told that my piano music sounds more like Ambient music rather than classical music, it has a modern touch that attracts young people but also adults.

What do you envision the role of music to be in the 21st century? Do you see that there is a transformation of this role?

I think that music will always have the role of entertaining as always did but I am also seeing because of the internet and straming services, music is not seen as a commercial product anymore, instead, more and more people expect to get it for free or for a low suscription fee in services like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, etc… so the real transformation is in the way that now the music industry and artists have to adapt quickly to all of these changes.

Do you think that the musician today needs to be more creative? What is the role of creativity in the musical process for you?

Yes, and I think that nowadays artists have to be not only creative in the way they create the music but also in the way they market it as it‘s getting more and more difficult to stand out from the crowd and get people’s attention. This is something that I take very seriously as I see that some music marketing techniques that used to work in the past, nowadays they are not that effective so I am always thinking in different and creative ways of promoting my music.

Do you think we as musicians can do something to attract the younger generation to music concerts? How would you do this?

I see that a group of modern classical musicians such as Ludovico Einaudi and Joep Beving are already attracting younger people to their concerts. There is a classical music sensibility to their playing, but at the same time, they made this style of music more approachable for people out there including younger people. Also, now that musicians can do live streaming concerts, they will be able to attract more audiences and especially younger people as they are more technical minded and more used to watch these type of online events.

Tell us about your creative process. What is your favorite piece (written by you) and how did you start working on it?

I start by improvising on the piano until I find something that I like, it can be a chord progression or a melody. Then I start developing this idea until I get a complete composition. Perhaps my favorite piece is the piano piece “Rebirth” as I remember that it was composed just in a couple of hours and it came very easily, it was one of these moments that you are very inspired and everything flows effortlessly. Also, it is one of my audience most preferred compositions as they say that it is really dreamy and elegant. This is also in part because the piano sound was mixed with reverbs and delays by composer and producer Bruno Sanfilippo who is great at applying FX processing to the instruments. He made the piece sound really atmospheric.

Can you give some advice for young people who want to discover classical music for themselves?

They can go to streaming services like Spotify, YouTube Music, Soundcloud, etc… and search for classical music playlists as these playlists usually include the most popular classical music pieces and they are a good way to start getting introduced into the world of classical music.

Do you think about the audience when composing?

No, I create the music that I think I would listen myself and hopefully my audience will also connect with it.

What projects are coming up? Do you experiment in your projects?

Yes, I am now working on my third album that should be released in September 2021. I always experiment, for instance, with this third album, I am experimenting with syhthesizer sounds and ethereal female voices of different sopranos that are collaborating in this album, it will also include piano pieces but some of them they will be mixed with synthesizers and female voices.