Episode #18: Miro Petkov

I read that you also like to play folk music, and I think I saw a video too, and that you add some jazz elements to that.

How did this come about?

Folk music is very kind of ingrained, is very strong in my culture in Bulgaria.

So although my parents were non-musicians, they music, I mean...

They were very musical, let's say, and music is like in the everyday life.

People dance and listen.

You go to a restaurant, very often there is live music there, like all this kind of stuff.

So music is very strong and folk music.

So I played since a kid, I played a lot of folk music on the trumpet.

and then the older i got the more i got exposed to different i mean the older i got i i listened to a lot of different music also as a kid let's say and that the exposure to different kinds of styles makes you kind of have interest in that style or different things and yeah i listened to a lot of jazz i listened to i played in a kind of car band i played in a house music band with uh i that's how i earned my money as a student you know and all this kind of stuff then i started to mess up with electronics and ableton and all this so basically what i'm saying is like it's like a big melting pot of things that one likes and then you try to make sense artistically to what can, how can you combine the different things, you know? Um, yeah.

So, but if, uh, how do I put that in a frame?

Yeah.

I do play folklore music and I love jazz and I, yeah, I, yeah.

So.

Awesome.

It's, it's nice to have like an outlet to like that and just keep things interesting, have a variety for sure.

yeah for me i i find it kind of important to switch between things because when i play orchestra for long when i have a like tour on a few weeks and uh it's nice but i start to to i feel like i start to get a little bit maybe stiff for my own head you know like i lose a bit of not lose but like sometimes i need like a creative some project which can free my mind a bit, then come back to the orchestra.

These two things, they help each other a lot, in my case, for

me.

I also read that you play a post horn.

What is this like, and how often do you play this instrument?

Yeah, post horn, that's basically a flugelhorn.

You know, it's like, if you play Mahler's Third Symphony...

Mm-hmm.

mean that's the modern post horn let's say but uh yeah that's just a flugelhorn which looks like um as you say like a like a horn a tiny horn but it plays kind of like a flugelhorn um depends on the instrument um yeah but i i do like different like a bit of weird instruments i'm learning now the cornetto the renaissance instrument that's beautiful and it has so many much amazing music written for it uh of natural trumpet as many of us play i mean nothing too crazy but actually the natural instruments i find it very inspiring to play especially playing you know in orchestra where we play sometimes classical musicals on everything on modern instruments sometimes it can get boring because it lacks the uh the bite of the you know real instruments that the music was written for so i think that's also good as a reference to keep knowledge even if you don't do it on a super high level as some people that only do that it's good to have the reference how things actually sound and should sound and also to be able to relate to certain music different music so in that sense I mean I went away from the post horn but the post horn is not just sounds more interesting than it's a flugelhorn