2018 Alumnus Pepe Gavilondo recently spoke at length about his experience at OneBeat with Cuban music magazine AM-PM.
The Habana-based multi-instrumentalist said about the program:
“To give you an idea, tomorrow I’m going to tattoo the OneBeat logo on my left arm. My experience with OneBeat transcended the music; It was totally inspiring in every way: creative, interpretive, cultural. But the experience was first of all human. I shared my real life – which I had never done before – with 23 other human beings from all over the planet… [When] you sleep next to a person from Ukraine, from Mongolia, from Indonesia; you share their realities. You realize that we are all truly the same.”
Elsewhere in the article, writer Rafa Escalona recalls the impact that Pepe has had in the Cuban contemporary classical music scene, particularly as an organizer, saying “…we should be grateful that there are people like Pepe- anonymous superheroes bent on decoding and actualizing classical music that seems to live a long dream more than a century old.”
Read the full article here.