My name is Maximiliano Segura Sánchez. I graduated at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with a bachelor and master degree in violoncello and historical performance practice. Besides my career as a cellist and teacher, I am very passionate about music history and some specific periods, such as the XVII and XVIII centuries. I was already immersed into music history since my early teens while doing my high school and conservatory studies in Spain. My first contacts with early music were thanks to two CDs purchased by my parents: Jordi Savall’s Cantigas de Santa Maria and Anner Bylsma’s Boccherini cello concertos. I also started recording in cassette many of the radio programs from the Spanish national classical music radio station, building a considerable collection of a varied range of ensembles and repertoire, from Ambrosian plainchant to Hasse’s cantatas, with some “modern” exceptions!

 

It took me at least more than ten years until I had my first contact with a baroque instrument, or more accurate, a modern “imitation” of a baroque instrument. During my studies in Amsterdam I met Anner Bylsma, one of my childhood’s heroes. The relationship with Bylsma gave me an invaluable mark. I had lessons, advices, and conversations during ten years that made me grow as a better person and musician, building consciousness about the place of the performer in music, not only in baroque music and Bach, one of Bylsma’s idols, but just in music. How could I imagine at eleven years old to have the opportunity to meet Bylsma, the cellist that gave me the first impressions of the fantastic music of Boccherini?

 

Thanks to all these experiences during my learning process I got much more immersed in specific topics about music history, baroque period, the history of the cello and the musicological field. 

 

In my blog you can find different topics, all relate to aspects of music history. Sometimes it could be about specific topics, a book or a scholar’s article, always within my humble perspective and based on previous research. I intend to give you small hints of music research in a way that may not be as academic as scholar books.