About Me

At the age of three, I asked for a guitar. I’m not entirely sure why—no one had suggested it, and no one had taken me to a concert. I finally received one when I was five: a small guitar with strings set far too high. My father taught me my first melody: the theme from The Godfather. He was self-taught as a guitarist, and he also painted and wrote.

I grew up in Arica, Chile, attended the School of the Arts, trained as a classical guitarist at the Conservatory of the University of Chile, and later earned my degree as a music teacher at the University of La Serena. For many years I taught music, formed ensembles of every kind—folk, rock, and classical—and directed school music projects. Over time, I realized that my students needed to talk more than they needed to learn chords, and to play more than they needed to perform. That realization left me with questions I could not answer.

One day, while preparing lessons, I heard a radio interview about psychomotricity. They spoke about free play, spontaneous movement, and a space where children could become the authors of their own developmental process. I called the phone number they provided. Soon afterward, together with my wife and our two eldest children, I began traveling every month to Mendoza, Argentina, to study at the National University of Cuyo. There I finally found a name for something I had already been practicing without realizing it: that the gesture no one asks for is the most authentic one, and that the therapist’s role is to create the conditions that allow such a gesture to emerge.

My projects have always been family projects. In 2014, I took distance-learning orchestral conducting lessons and eventually performed the Concierto de Aranjuez with an orchestra in Huelva—home of Joaquín Rodrigo, the concerto’s composer—using a guitar that had unexpectedly found its way back to me just in time, only to be stolen shortly afterward. Back in Arica, I founded an orchestra in a socially vulnerable school and later created a community orchestra that performed in hospitals and residential care centers. The project culminated in a Concerto for Soprano and Orchestra, with my daughter as the soloist and the rest of our family contributing in different roles, each offering what they could.

Using the recording of that concert, my daughter applied to the Maderna-Lettimi Conservatory of Music in Cesena. We moved to Italy together—my wife and our two youngest children. At that same conservatory, I studied music therapy and earned the Diploma Accademico di II Livello, the highest academic qualification in music therapy awarded within the Italian higher education system. For a period of time, my daughter and I were classmates at the conservatory—one of those remarkable coincidences that only a family journey can create.

Today I live in Senigallia and work exclusively as a music therapist across a variety of clinical and therapeutic settings in the Province of Ancona. My youngest son is responsible for live sound for the OltrelaMusica Orchestra, while my eldest son contributes to this website and provides technological support. Sharing has always been the driving force behind everything I do.

I serve on the Board of ACHIM, the Chilean Association of Music Therapy, a member organization of the World Federation of Music Therapy (WFMT), which brings together music therapy associations from around the world.

The path had already been written. I simply kept discovering it.