MANSFIELD – Music was not a passion that Octavio Más-Arocas chose in his life. He was born into it.
Growing up in the town of Buñol, Spain – a town of less than 10,000 people – Más-Arocas always knew he would be in a band. Specifically, one of the two bands that originated in Buñol, each with at least 160 musicians. Half the town belonged to one band, and half to the other, and the rivalry was fierce.
As such, it was always the expectation of Más-Arocas that he would be in the band of his father’s.
“When I grew up, I knew I was going to be a musician,” he said. “My father was like yeah, you belong to this band. So for me no one would ask me what I was going to be when I grew up, they would ask me what instrument I was going to play.”
Listen to Más-Arocas tell the story of his introduction to music in his own words:
The first time Más-Arocas received his instrument was at the age of eight, bestowed upon him by the band’s conductor.
“You go into this room with the conductor and he sees you and says ‘Okay, I think you have the lips for the trumpet,’ and that’s a lie because they just need trumpets in the band,” Más-Arocas said. “And you’re like eight years old in awe that they’re going to give you a trumpet.”
Más-Arocas still remembers the day he first saw his trumpet, shiny and new inside its case. By the time he walked home, a crowd of people had gathered to celebrate his new trumpet, and his grandmother cried tears of joy and pride.
“To me, being in this town was so unique, and it was only when I left and started talking about it that I realized how special it was,” Más-Arocas said. “I was playing really challenging and amazing music since I was a kid.”
But it wasn’t until high school that Más-Arocas first experienced the joy of conducting, which put him on the path that eventually led to him becoming an award-winning conductor and the new music director of the Mansfield Symphony. As an overly-confident 16-year-old trumpet player, Más-Arocas volunteered one day to fill in for the conductor who had come down with an illness.
“I didn’t know what I was doing, I was 16 years old,” Más-Arocas remembered. “I put the score in the stand and I picked up the baton, and all that sound came to me. My breath was taken away, and I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
From that moment, Más-Arocas has been conducting ever since. Before coming to Mansfield, he served as Principal Conductor of the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra, Wisconsin, and he is currently the Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Conducting at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music.
In the last few years Más-Arocas has conducted orchestra across North and South America and Europe including the Leipziger Symphonieorchester in Germany, the Orquestra Sinfônica da Unicamp in Brazil, the Green Bay, Traverse City, Fort Worth, Spokane, Toledo, Phoenix, Memphis, Kansas City, and San Antonio Symphonies, the National Repertory Orchestra, the Manhattan School of Music Symphony, the orchestras of Viana do Castelo and Artave in Portugal, the Interlochen Philharmonic, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Philharmonic, the Rosario Symphony in Argentina, Kharkov Symphony in Ukraine, the National Youth Orchestras of Portugal and Spain, the Pescara Symphony in Italy, the Amsterdam Brass in the Netherlands, and the Ciudad Alcala de Henares Symphony.
Even after conducting all over the globe, something about Mansfield caught Más-Arocas’ attention.
“There are great things going on here in Mansfield and I feel the arts in Mansfield are picking up, something very special is growing and it’s coming from the Renaissance,” Más-Arocas said. “The relationship of the orchestra with the Renaissance is very special, and to me being part of something bigger than just the orchestra is something that is very important to me. The possibilities in here are greater than if you have the orchestra just living on its own.”
The growing arts scene in Mansfield was one draw, but the people of the Mansfield Symphony was what really sealed the deal for Más-Arocas.
“When you go in front of the orchestra and they’re making the music, the instruments are always played the same way,” he said. “Some people, they become workers; you go to the orchestra and it’s just like a shop. Sometimes you need to get to their heart and remind them why they became musicians in the first place, that was part of who they are.
“When you’re a kid and you see yourself play in an orchestra or be part of a production, you’re really enthusiastic about it and dream about it,” he continued. “When you get into it and do it over and over again, sometimes they lose that sense of wonder. Sometimes you just need to remind them. I think here, you don’t have to do that because people feel that.”
Más-Arocas felt the passion for the arts community outside of just the Mansfield Symphony. He also expressed excitement to work with the administrative staff of the Renaissance Theatre in involving the community with the arts.
“While we are a small community, I think everybody feels how special this is. It’s because of the love for the music, the love for the art, that people come here,” he said.
“They don’t come here because they’re going to get rich, they come here because they love the community and love the theatre. They love the feeling of everybody supporting art and inspiring goodness, and that feeling of being one.”
Más-Arocas hopes to foster that feeling through the six concerts of the 2017-2017 season from the Mansfield Symphony, with three pops and three masterworks concerts highlighting local talent and music.
“One of the things I’m going to do with the orchestra is for every concert, I want to not just say “masterworks” because it scares away some part of the audience,” he said. “We want to involve and welcome everybody to every concert. Even the masterwork concerts are going to have elements that are attractive to other people.”
The OhioHealth Symphony Series includes an exciting opening Masterworks concert in September, a Halloween-themed Family Pops concert in October, the annual Holiday Pops concert in December, a collaboration with the Mansfield Symphony Youth Orchestra to perform Gustav Holst’s The Planets in February, a Bach to Rock Pops concert in March, and a concert version of Renaissance Artistic Director Michael Thomas’ original production “Sentimental Journey” along with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the May concert.
The “Bach to Rock” pops concert in March will also include a new element never before seen at the Renaissance: a singing contest integrated with the Mansfield Symphony. The Symphony will invite people to submit videos of themselves singing a rock song, the audience will choose the top 10 videos, and the Renaissance will choose the top three finalists to sing with the Symphony in March.
“We will do like an ‘America’s Got Talent’ thing and the winner will perform some songs with us next season again,” Más-Arocas said.
It’s in this way that Más-Arocas hopes to achieve his ultimate goal of the Mansfield Symphony working in sync with the Renaissance Theatre and the community. Maybe not to the point of city-wide bands in friendly competition with each other, but close.
“The collaboration between us and the rest of the things, it’s so obvious that it needs to happen,” he said. “Not doing it is not only a mistake, it’s not natural. So I think the natural thing for the orchestra is to collaborate with all the things going on at the Renaissance.
“Over time I want to actually extend that to the city and other things that are around, and explore other organizations and other artists around the town to collaborate with them,” he continued. “I think it’s in the DNA of the theatre to expand our relationship with the artists in the area.”
