6 / 22
6
The Architecture of Music:
Jimmy López
Jimmy López remembers sitting at the piano
with his
father every night after dinner. “He didn’t only listen to me play,” López
says, “He…gave his opinions about this or that composer and gave me
suggestions on how to improve my own little compositions. He did all of
this without having any idea of what he was talking about, by the way,
but what’s funny is that he was actually right a lot of the time…. He used
to say that architecture and music had a lot in common, and now I see
what he meant.”
López was born in Lima, Peru, in 1978 to an architect and a teacher. He
grew up listening to “Top 40” until he discovered classical music at age
twelve. When that happened, he says, “I couldn’t let it go.” He decided he
wanted to be a composer. In 1994, the newly founded Lima Philharmonic
held rehearsals in López’s school auditorium. López’s father convinced
conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the orchestra’s founding music director
and conductor, to take the teen on as an assistant librarian. The young
composer made copies, delivered flowers, and most importantly, attended
rehearsals and performances. At age sixteen he wrote his first orchestra
piece “without having studied harmony, counterpoint or orchestration—
working solely…on my intuition.” At twenty, he entered the National
Conservatory of Music in Lima, followed by the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki,
where he earned a Masters in Music. López completed his Ph.D. at the
University of California-Berkeley.
Eager for his work to be heard, López co-founded kohoBeat, a Finnish non-
profit dedicated to promoting the music of new composers by organizing
classical and contemporary music concerts in Finland and abroad. “Music
is written to be listened to,” he says. “So one must always make an effort,
especially when young, to have one’s music played.”
In 2010, López was sitting in a Thai restaurant with his partner (now husband)
Heleno when Harth-Bedoya called, asking López to post all the vocal music
he had on his YouTube channel. Renée Fleming was looking for a composer
for a new project. Several months after that, López found himself in Fleming’s
Manhattan apartment. When Fleming mentioned the source material,
López felt “the stars were aligning.” He remembered firsthand the events
that inspired the novel. “Ann Patchett never says it takes place in Lima, but
she makes several references that any Peruvian would understand…I told
Renée…I had a very personal connection with the material, even without
having read the book.” López was eighteen when the hostage crisis began
and remembers, “The whole country was glued to their TVs.”
In terms of the technical aspects of composing his first opera, López
draws a comparison to his father’s profession. “My father is an architect—I
understand how they think. You have to plan the whole structure first, make
sure the base is solid and strong enough to support weight equally, make
sure the ground is stable…I never write chronologically,” he says, “If you want
a solid foundation, you have to go back and forth. The first thing I did was
write the most important arias, which are the pillars of the story.”
The past few years have been a whirlwind for López. His works have been
performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra,
the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the
Helsinki Philharmonic, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Peru,
among many others. He recalls a late-night work session last year spent
revising orchestrations with Harth-Bedoya in preparation for recording
the first album dedicated entirely to López’s orchestral works. At a table
cluttered with pencils, erasers, and sheet music, López was struck by the
memory of a similar scene 18 years before, when he was working at the Lima
Philharmonic. “At that moment,” he says, “I felt as if a whole episode of my
life had come full circle. Here I was, no longer a teenager but a composer
in his mid-thirties, sitting with Miguel and working together on my own music
for a recording with a top orchestra in Norway…One never knows what the
future has in store for us, and sometimes it surpasses our expectations.”
Photo: Andrew Cioffi
Jimmy López in the Civic Opera House for tech rehearsals, July, 2015.