MY DREAM OF CHANGE
Can anyone help to make this reality?
Dr Sokol Saraci, Professor of Trumpet, University of the Arts, Tirana, Albania
As a professional trumpet player I
would describe the brass (especially trumpet) situation in Albania as follows:
The Albanian brass school has shown good progress, after enduring a poor and isolated political and
economic history in Albania during the 1990s. Looking back, I can remember how hard
it was for us. After graduating we had to build step by step a professional
background, seeking out information that could help to make us well educated,
so we could feel comfortable facing the world.
Contact with Western musical
traditions and expanding our knowledge and exchanging artistic experiences with
our American colleagues developed a complete different level in the Albanian
brass school. It also gave professional players access to quality pedagogical
sources, so of course most things are definitely getting better.
However, as a professional player, and
professor and teaching every day in the University of Arts in Albania, I am
concerned about many unresolved issues, in particular the diversity of
trumpets. All Albanian trumpet players - orchestral performers, professionals
and students - only have a Bb trumpet. This creates not only difficulties in
performing original orchestrations in various music styles, but it also makes
gives us huge problems with transpositions. However at present funds are not available for these additional instruments.
My desire is to create a real trumpet
laboratory in the University to give the students the chance to play all types
of instruments: flugelhorn, cornet, trumpets
in C, D and Eb, natural trumpet and piccolo trumpet. It would be amazing for
them to feel all those sounds and to have the possibility to discover all the
tone colours of each instrument, to experience a wide trumpet repertoire, and raise
their playing to another level.
Being a teacher and guide to my students
has always been my dream, and that is what I hope for the future – to open a
new window for the next generation.. I will always search for improvement, which
means sometimes dreaming of a different reality. As the great Richard Wagner
said: ‘Imagination creates Reality’.
Dr. Sokol Saraci
Professor of Trumpet, University of the Arts, Tirana, Albania 2018
....................
Sokol Saraci
is professor of trumpet and director of the chamber music and wind instrument
department in the University of Arts in Albania. His
education started with a degree from the University of Tirana and continued
with a master’s degree from the University of Tetovo, Macedonia. After that he won
a Fulbright Scholarship to the Truman State University in Missouri USA. On
returning to Albania he gained a PhD with his research into wind orchestras in
Albania. His publication Trumpet and the
Trumpet Player is a guide to daily practice. He is well known as a
successful teacher, bringing inspiration, brightness and wisdom to his trumpet
classes.
He has been principal trumpet in the National Opera in Tirana for many
years. He also plays chamber music and appears as a concerto soloist in Albania
and around Europe.
