Totoyo Millares

Luis Millares Sall ("Totoyo") (* 1935 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria , Canary Islands , Spain ) is a Spanish musician.

Totoyo Millares is the son of Juan Millares Carló, a poet, and Dolores Sall y Bravo de Laguna. He is the founder of modern timple music and has taught around 45,000 residents of the Canary Islands to play timple. In 2006, after a 30-year hiatus from public appearances, he was back on stage with one of his best students, José Antonio Ramos . In the concert Las manos del maestro they offered an overview of the musical work of Totoyo Millares.

As a teenager he made it to the early championship.

development

• At the age of 5 he surprised his family with his self-taught guitar and timple game. He had copied it from his brothers when they made music.
• At the age of 7 he was already plucking the timple as a solo instrument and composed the mazurca and the polka majorerá, inspired by popular melodies.
• At the age of 8 he developed the compositions Punteada de Folías, Malagueñas and Isas .
• At the age of 9, he started giving Timple lessons to relatives and friends. He himself received training in singing, piano and violin.
• At the age of 10 he developed a school for Timple with notes and numerals and already laid the foundation stone for his Academy for Timple.
• At age 13, he participated for the first time a Timple- Rasgueado and - Punteado on magnetic tape and was thus precursor and propagator of this variety.
• When he was 15 years old, his teaching method with the Timple was introduced in schools.

In Canarian folk music, the timple is used as an accompanying instrument in the fourth row, after guitars, lutes and bandurrias. Totoyo Millares introduced the timple as a solo instrument in melody ( punteado ) and chord play ( rasgueado ). He showed that the possibilities of this small instrument are plentiful and not yet exhausted.

Totoyo played Timple in front of such well-known personalities as Rafael Alberti, Pablo Picasso, Martín Chirino, Alfredo Kraus, Alicia de la Rocha, María Dolores Pradera, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Jorge Cafrune, Saulo Torón, María Callas, Winston Churchill, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck and Paul Newman.

successes

• 1942 first compositions
• 1945 Development of a teaching method for timple play and establishment of an academy for timple
• 1959 tour through Portugal and Spain
• In 1969 he was one of the founding members of the group "Los Gofiones".
• 1979 after more than 80 records recordings his is Antología del timple appeared on three vinyl records
• In 1983 he composed the first concerto for timple and symphonic orchestra
• from 1945 to the present day, around 45,000 students have been trained in all of the Canary Islands

Discography (selection)

• 1979 Antología del timple, Vol. 1, 2, 3
• 1987 Antología del timple, Vol. 2
• 1998 Clásicos Canarios
• 2006 Las Manos del Maestro

Web links

• Report on the concert "Las manos del maestro" (Spanish)