An Interview with Antonio Rumenović

Coordinator of the EuroStrings Guitar Competition and Coordinator of the EuroStrings
Composition Contest
Speaking with Thérèse Wassily Saba and Tom Kerstens

Antonio Rumenović is also the main guitar teacher at the Bonar Music School (Glazbena škola Bonar) in Zagreb, which has a large number of guitar students.

Antonio Rumenović: I have been working as a guitar teacher since 2005. After I graduated from Music Academy, then I started to teach in one school, and then five years ago, I was invited to teach at the Bonar Music School in Zagreb. Along with piano, in Croatia, the most popular instrument is the guitar. In the Bonar Music School, we have five or six teachers and they all have full classes of students, with nine
students in each class, which means more or less 60 guitarists. In Croatia, many children and young people play the guitar; according to government sources, the numbers are very high indeed. As a
result, there are many competitions in a variety of age groups. I have often been invited to be a jury member over the years, which is how I have built my knowledge and experience. I saw
that there are many approaches to organising competitions and how rules are formulated and implemented. When I was invited by the Zagreb Guitar Festival to help them create the rules and guidelines for the Zagreb Festival Guitar competition, I had a good idea of what to do. I imagine what I did worked well because later I was also invited to be the Coordinator of the EuroStrings Guitar Competition.

As the Coordinator of the EuroStrings Competition, Antonio Rumenović also developed a digital application for use by juries in competitions, which also has a very efficient scoring system.

We created an application which is called Music Score because we wanted to make the processes involved in a competition much more simple and to produce the jury results much faster and, mostly importantly, we wanted to make everything in that process transparent. For EuroStrings, I created rules and systems that are result of the knowledge that I gained from being on the jury of many different competitions, and I developed it into an application that I am satisfied with. We wanted to create something that reflects the time that we live in by using the advanced technology that we have at our disposal in 2021. The Music Score application for scoring a competition is very simple and very easy to use. It has various options to choose from, depending on how you would like to score participants in the competition: you can score from 0–25 or 0–100, or vote who is the winner and the application will do the counting. The setting up of the system was more or less my idea but of course, developers were brought in to put my ideas into practice. It was a big job as the process of creating this application was complex in order to make it work in a simple way. We did test it in several competitions, using the demo version. Everything ran perfectly, however, with experience you always have little ideas on how things could be made even better and to run more smoothly, so that is what we are doing at the moment. We still have some little things that we want to improve but I am an optimist by nature, so I believe that the application will be finalised within a matter of months. In general, I would say the application is innovative and is a perfect system for use in competitions. The application was made by the Zagreb Guitar Festival and we are using it for the EuroStrings Competition but, in the future, we believe that the application will be useful for many festivals, that also might want to simplify the competition process. The application requires a lot of preparation before the competition because you can uploadall of the participants’ programmes and copies of the scores, pictures and biographies of the competitors, and all the necessary information for the jury, but once the competition starts, everything is set up there in the application and ready. There is a place where every jury member can add some remarks as well as the scores. Once you input your scores, the application adds it all up quickly, so you have the final scores immediately after the moderator closes the competition. It can immediately be printed out. It makes things so much simpler. In many competitions where I was on the jury, we had to wait for a few hours for the results, which is particularly difficult in a competition for young players, with impatient children and their parents waiting for the results. We have 17 platform members in EuroStrings and I believe they should all keep the autonomy of their judging system, including their scoring systems and choice of jury members. They are all doing excellent work. I always believe that there is room for improvement but my opinion is that they should continue working as they do now and then take the initiative to change things when they feel the need. At the same time, I do think that our Music Score application will have a use in the future throughout the world.

You are giving the EuroStrings Artists the opportunity to perform in very prestigious venues, and although EuroStrings is Europe-based, you are reaching out and making connections for the EuroStrings Artists beyond Europe, to America and the Far East, giving you a global outreach.

That is something that we are very proud of and I can tell you that all of the EuroStrings Artists have had success after being a part of the programme: one went on to get a teaching post at an American university, another won the Guitar Foundation of America International Competition, so they are presenting their work in many different countries and at many festivals and building connections throughout Europe. There are so many positive results from the EuroStrings project for young performers, we can conclude that it is working!