Mladen Krstic Wins Guca's Young Trumpeter Title Again

Outside the Culture Center in Guca, on the evening of August 8, a fifteen year old in an embroidered white shirt held up a board wider than his own shoulders, while the trumpet that earned it stayed pressed against his side, almost as if it were in his way at that moment. Written on the board, in Cyrillic, was that he is the best young trumpeter in Guca. It said so for the second time in two years, in the same letters, about the same person. His name is Mladen Krstic, he comes from Zaguzanje near Surdulica, and this August he defended the title he won last year.

The final of the youth competition at the 65th Dragacevo Trumpet Festival played out on that same stage in front of the Culture Center, in a slot that does not draw the biggest crowd, with four orchestras competing for the two most prestigious youth awards. The order in the orchestra competition looked like this:

• first place, Veljko Vasiljkovic’s orchestra from Lepenica
• second place, Mladen Krstic’s orchestra from Zaguzanje
• third place, Albert Ametovic’s orchestra from Bojnik

The same names took the stage in the individual competition, but in a different order: Krstic finished first, Ametovic second, Vasiljkovic third. After the announcement, Krstic said the orchestra had been preparing for the competition for about a month.

Tonight we played ‘A sto ti je Stano, mori’ and ‘Mladenovo kolo’. We rehearsed for about a month and gave it everything we had. My uncle is Sasa Krstic and I’m following in his footsteps. I’ll keep working and trying hard, and we’ll see what kind of career comes of it.

The line about his uncle is not decoration in a fifteen year old’s statement, it explains how this craft gets passed down. Sasa Krstic is a trumpeter, and the surname is already part of the local repertoire in that area. A child who picks up the instrument at ten or eleven, in a house where it is already being played, gets a head start of several years over a peer who first meets it in music school.

Why Did the Soloists’ Ranking Diverge From the Orchestras’?

Lay the two lists side by side and a detail emerges that the festival itself never explains, though it is easy enough to read: the best young trumpeter of the night led an orchestra that finished second, while the winning orchestra was fronted by a trumpeter who placed third individually. That is not a scoring error, it reflects the fact that Guca judges two different things. The solo award goes to tone, breath, and what one person does with a theme. The orchestra award goes to the ensemble’s ear, the evenness of the backing, and whether eight musicians are breathing on the same beat.

That is what makes the youth competition more interesting than the final that follows it. The adult orchestras arrive in Guca as a finished product, with a repertoire already worn in from weddings and festivals, so the contest measures who is better at something everyone there has done for years. Among the younger players, the seams still show: how much each one taught himself at home, how much came from school, and how much from an orchestra pieced together by neighbors and relatives.

Four Orchestras, and What Guca Is Really Defending

The fact that only four orchestras competed for the two most prestigious youth awards should not be read as a verdict on the state of trumpet playing, but it is a number that fits in a single sentence. Guca has spent years billing itself as the largest celebration of the trumpet in this part of Europe, and that reputation raises the expectation of a deeper bench than one final actually showed. When we reported on the opening of this year’s festival and noted that Marko Keselj was hosting it, the headline number was attendance. What decides whether there will still be a festival in twenty years happened last night, in front of a smaller crowd, without a broadcast and without a line in front of the stage.

Krstic won the award for best young trumpeter last year too, and he has also been recognized at a competition in Surdulica. Two consecutive titles in the same category mark the point where a young player’s success stops being a story about a talented child and becomes a question of what happens with that child next. Southern Serbia and Dragacevo are the two trumpet schools that meet in Guca every August, and Zaguzanje has now sent a boy who has twice been better than every peer on that stage.

The anniversary 65th Dragacevo Trumpet Festival runs from August 7 to 9, so the grand final and the awarding of the golden trumpet are still to come. The prizes handed out last night will not make headlines as the winners of the main competition do, yet they are the ones that show who will be standing on the big stage in ten years.