Jose Manuel López López. Works for soloist and ensemble

“There are “heavy” musics that anchor us to the earth, that tie us to the ground, that procure us a delicious sensation of paralysis even while animating us: one can think of the virile energy of rock, of the chronic masses of a Xenakis, more conducive to the sublime (in the Kantian sense of the term) and to emotion, that tend to fade away, to escape towards the heights, and that touch the chord of the poetic, the mysterious or the spiritual.

If we were forced to classify the music of José Manuel López López by resorting to this simple dichotomy -a musicologist is always expected to dispense labels- we would easily place it on the side of lightness. In many aspects his music unfolds as an art of sound manifestation, an art of the dissolution of matter, of its softening, of its flexibility: in it there are no solid objects, and if they appear it is to fluidify immediately; in the same way, in the manner of spectralism, its formal construction is often resolved in the processual unfolding, in progressive evolutions where matter seems to slip into our hands. In this sense, we discover another quality: the extreme refinement of his writing, and especially the work on the timbres, a refinement that refers directly to impressionist music – another musical art of the blurring of the scroll, of the fugitive -; a refinement that goes hand in hand with that awareness of multiplicity that the composer has made his own […].”

Makis Solomos