Presentation by José Manuel López López and Andrés Gomis (soloist SIGMA Project).

Concert: Simog/Civitella (2011). Videocreation by Pascal Auger (France)

Conversation between José Manuel López López López (composer) and Pascal Auger (video-creator).

Musical Tip: La casa de las cigüeñas. Andrés Gomis (soloist SIGMA Project)

Simog/Civitella (2011) for saxophone quartet.
Commissioned work SIGMA Project with the financing of the Comunidad de Madrid-Consejería de Cultura
World premiere: 13/08/2011, XXIV Festival Clásicos en Verano (Cercedilla-Madrid)

Simog/Civitella (2011) arises from a recurrent philosophical concern in López López’s instrumental production: the meditated and conscious reflection between what the composer would like to do, what he actually does and how he does it. “The composition of an instrumental work at the present time places the composer in a position, if not difficult, at least delicate” López López expounds. “On the one hand, he is forced to accept the limitations imposed by the instrumental medium and to forget the possibilities of making changes, hybridizations and genetic transformations within the sound that musical computing allows; on the other hand, the knowledge available today about the microscopic aspects of sound matter forces him to review the concepts of form, articulation, harmony, timbre, spatialization, movement, etcetera. Composition: the back and forth between limitations and knowledge subject to the flow and influence of personal poetics, and that of theoretical and scientific knowledge, transforming all this into a form of artistic expression“.

Simog/Civitella, dedicated to SIGMA Project, is composed from ideas and harmonic and temporal processes that transcend both fields, and are situated in the realm of timbre and in that of micrometry and granulation, that is, in structures that are built from sound units of great brevity. Such an accumulation of temporal particles brushes the limits of instrumental speed and places our perception between the instrumental and the electronic, in a 14 hybrid zone between electronic synthesis and granular synthesis. “A key aspect in the writing of this quartet,” explains the composer, “is the circulation through time thanks to metric modulations, which like tunnels or walkways allow us to become impregnated with the characteristics and energies of temporal states extremely close or extremely distant from each other. Modulations and granulation merge, generating what I call “Metric Granulation” which gives character and gesturality to the work, which also passes through processes of superposition and chaining of multiphonic sounds, that is to say, of multiple sounds produced in instruments in principle monophonic as saxophones. All this goes through a sonorous poetics, my sonorous poetics, difficult to describe in words“.

+ info: José Manuel López López