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An Exchange with
Jimmy López
During the summer of 2015, writer Maia
Morgan and Lyric audience education
manager Jesse Gram sent
Bel Canto
composer Jimmy López a series of
questions. Here are the results.
MM:
What music did you hear growing up? What were
your early experiences with music? What are your
biggest musical, cultural, or literary influences as a
composer?
JL:
One could say that, in my case, there’s before Bach
and after Bach. My first encounter with Bach’s music
was in 1991, when I listened to a music teacher playing
his two-part invention No. 13 in A minor at my school.
Until then I was only listening to regular mainstream pop
music, but after that I started listening almost exclusively
to classical music. I started playing the piano when I
was five but I was not really serious about it; my sister
was taking lessons and I liked it so I decided to do it as
well, but it was only after my encounter with Bach that I
started to consider dedicating my life to music.
I’ve had several influences at different stages of my
career. After Bach, from whom I learned polyphony,
I started to discover Mozart’s melodic genius. I then
went on to admire Beethoven’s motivic discipline, and
in my late teens, I discovered Stravinsky’s revolutionary
rhythmical structures. His orchestral music in particular
struck a chord with me because, at about the same
time I discovered his music, the Lima Philharmonic
Orchestra (which used to rehearse at my high school’s
auditorium) was founded. You can imagine what a
luxury it was for a young, aspiring composer to be able
to listen to three-hour-long orchestra rehearsals almost
every single night.
Also around that time, I cemented my knowledge of
harmony with Peruvian composer Enrique Iturriaga,
who taught me all about it using Schoenberg’s
Harmonielehre
. Later on, when I moved to Finland, I
studied Debussy’s refined orchestrations and Sibelius’s
architectural formal thinking. In my early and mid-
twenties I was truly fascinated by Gérard Grisey’s
monumental
Les Espaces Acoustiques
and with
Krzysztof Penderecki’s early period. The list goes on, with
composers such as John Adams, Georg Friedrich Haas,
John Corigliano, Magnus Lindberg, Anders Hillborg, and
several others making a deep impression on me.
JG:
Are there other opera composers who’ve inspired
you?
JL:
It’s interesting how we tend to categorize composers
as “opera composers,” “film composers,” “concert
music composers,” etc. Even though those categories
make total sense, I don’t listen to music that way. It
is true that certain composers specialize in a specific
genre and are invariably associated with it, such as
Rossini (opera), Chopin (piano), and Herrmann (film),
but I tend to prefer composers who have transcended
those labels, like Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, or
Stravinsky. They wrote in practically every genre
available to them and were mostly successful at it, so
I’d like to follow their steps. But let me explain what I
mean when I say that I don’t listen to music that way.
A composer like Wagner can be justly categorized as
an opera composer, but within his operas there is so
much great symphonic music that when I listen to him,
I just hear great music, regardless of whether there are
words involved or not. Sibelius never wrote an opera
and he is mostly known for his symphonies, but he
Photo: Todd Rosenberg