Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Peter Eötvös, Brad Lubman - Musica viva, Vol. 25: Jorge E. López (2017)

Jorge E. López was born in 1955 in Havana [Cuba] and grew up in New York City and Chicago beginning in 1960. From 1971 until 1976 López was a composition student of Leonard Stein and Morton Subotnick at the California Institute of the Arts. He designates himself as self-taught, with roots in Western art music but also in surrealism, science and in the experience of unspoilt nature. He moved to Europe in 1990 and was a guest artist at the KKM from 2000 until 2003. He has lived in Vienna since 2008. “I have never identified myself with the term ‘New Music’”, says López. “Rather, I was driven from the beginning by the idea of making the primordial present. I do not seek for the new, but seek rather for what is repressed. I do not believe in progress in art”. With the title Symphonie Fleuve, López points to the idea of a direct flow of thoughts or stream of consciousness more or less seismographically transferred into music; at the same time, he also points to the “liquefied sound” of the solo horn that is intended to appear flexible in a way similar to that of the human voice. “The horn cries out and calls mostly brief words of an unknown language”. The Third Symphony, Op. 24 is also in two movements and conceived by López as a “transformation of the morphology of Beethoven’s C-minor Piano Sonata, Op. 111”.