duo Lallement Marques

"Mar sin fondo, In Memoriam Francisco Iovino" for two guitars, commissioned by Radio France for the programme Création Mondiale "Alla Breve" is a tribute to my dear friend Francisco, a composer with whom I collaborated for many years; first in Paris on a daily basis and then at a distance between Paris and New York when Iovino moved to New York to do his doctorate at Columbia University, long musical and vital moments, which arose after our meeting in 1991 at IRCAM (Paris); he as a researcher and music computer programmer and I as a composer, who applied the technology developed in this centre to the works I composed there: Lituus (1991) for brass quartet and electronics and Sottovoce (1995) for vocal quartet and electronics.

In this homage to Francisco Iovino I wanted to show the interest that both he and I have always had in entering into the interior of sound, and from there to build the rest of the work. The guitar, an instrument very close to me since childhood, has been on this occasion the vehicle in this journey to the "centre of sound".

Each of the 5 movements that make up the work, two-minute movements expressly requested by Anne Montaron, director of the programme Alla Breve on Radio France, will be broadcast the week of 7 June 2021 in an original radio format consisting of broadcasting one of these movements each day of the week (morning and afternoon), which will finally be broadcast in its entirety on the Sunday of that week in a one-hour monographic programme dedicated to the guest composer in each case.

This format obliges the composer to develop a formal strategy that allows him on the one hand to write independent movements with their corresponding coherence, contrast, energy, gesturality and own interest, and at the same time to plan the global form of the work, as a sum of these independent movements, bringing together in a global whole the characteristics mentioned above for each movement: coherence, contrast, energy, gesturality, etc.

Elements that I consider interesting to mention, as they highlight the aforementioned will to deepen and investigate the timbre and to have access to marvellous unforeseen corners of the infinite colours of the guitar, are for example the use of mobile capos that allow the obtaining of unusual harmonic superimpositions, even impossible to achieve without them. Also the use of bottlenecks which, when rubbing against the metal frets of both guitars, produce percussive-granular textures that are new in the guitar repertoire, reminiscent of the croaking of storks and which place us in an interesting bio-musical territory due to the connection between nature and music. Likewise the constant presence, with the exception of the first movement, of particle textures with trajectories, densities and rhizomes of energy that bring us closer to and connect us with the micro world of quantum physics and its particular characteristics, in the sense of particles, completely removed from rhythm in the traditional sense of the latter, but which expand and complement the polyphonic superimpositions in a remarkable way.

The work is dedicated to the extraordinary duo Estelle Lallement and Filipe Marqués to whom I am deeply grateful for the fantastic work they have done to bring to life this work composed in memory of a very dear friend."

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José Manuel López López

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http://www.josemanuel-lopezlopez.com/fr/biographie