Accueil Born in 1956, José Manuel López López has, ever since 1985, rooted his output in theoretical bases as refined by technical developments.
Rules created by the composer for such and such a piece are a synthesis of "external" indeed eternal laws, and also laws uniquely adapted to his sensitivity and to his cultural background ("internal" laws). These laws as a whole adapte our modes of perception of the sound phenomenon, of the unstable musical flux, and they actualise our perception of time.
His musical material is brought into play through particular notions of the perceptual tendencies of partials, of harmonic or inharmonic relationships, of the density of event, of the homogeneity and coherence of a cell, of a structure, or of a form. All these notions obey laws of evolution, as does our perception. They are therefore directly founded on the organisation of time.
At the boundary between fusion and segregation, between the dimension of rhythm and that of melody, or between the dimension of tone-colour and that of harmony, José-Manuel López López mixes different ways of perceiving, in which musical colour is enriched with new attributes. In such a work, the internal and external laws give rise to a musical conscience by virtue of the superposing of modes of temporal organisation : each sound mass has its own colour. López López above all makes use of technology for founding intuition through an almost genetic approach to the heart of sound matter.
He generally uses rich tone-colours, for example brass sounds ( Lituus [1991]), or the voice ( Sottovoce, [1995]). These enable him to reflect the relationships between partials within the work's harmonic conception. The construction of these perceptive functions establishes certain correspondences between the synchronic and the diachronic, between the microform and the macroform.
In this way the spirit of López López's works reveals a time construction in the course of the listening process. A very brief sequential flux is built up, through accumulation or decomposition, into a group of structures that, situated in between tone-colour and harmony, occupy highly different functions in accordance with their position in the vertical register. This musical gesture amplifies the data that are to hand and directs the music towards emotional instability, towards an intuitive appreciation of the overall balance and harmony.
Luc Rondeleux. Paris, 1999