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José Río-Pareja (Barcelona, 1973) is one of the most solid figures on the contemporary Spanish music scene. His career is long and rich. After obtaining various advanced degrees in composition at Barcelona's Conservatorio Superior Municipal de Música, José Río-Pareja persisted in his fertile artistic research, exploring all the limits of sound to define himself today as a composer of exquisite language and unsettling sensitivity. Between 2002 and 2007, he completed his doctorate at Stanford, USA, under the tutelage of Brian Ferneyhough, with whom he personalized his personal style. Having received several awards, including the Premier Prix de la SGAE in 2000 and the Prix INAEM in 2008, José Río-Pareja is today a composer to be reckoned with, and continues to be - as he explains in this interview - that excited child who imagined the universe of sound by watching the sun's rays fragment in the waves of the sea. Today, he teaches composition at the Escola Superieure de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC).
We spoke to him about his career, his style and his works, including Nomada S5a work commissioned by the Mixtur and Hémisphère son festivals.
José Río-Pareja, what keeps you going?
My passion for composition. In fact, I think that, aesthetic differences aside, if there's one thing that most of us composers dedicated to contemporary music have in common, it's a passion and love for sound creation, for our craft. And in my case, I'd say it's the basis of everything.
And your perseverance to investigate and explore?
Yes, to move forward and experiment in each work and find interesting sonic elements to develop in the next piece, even elements that could perhaps mean a leap into the void, an abyss into the unknown. Perhaps this is what makes composition so interesting, the fact that something as alive as sound is just waiting to be discovered. Undoubtedly, music-making makes this exploration possible.
You'll be giving a talk at the MIXTUR festival on October 1. What would you like to share at this event?
I'd like to talk about my music. I'll be focusing on the work that the Mixtur Festival and Hémisphère son have commissioned from me, Nomada S5a creation for Ensemble ULYSSES that is clearly linked to some of my earlier works. I'll be talking about and reflecting on those musical elements and parameters that I've been developing for many years; pieces that, in one way or another, have been linked to analogies between sound and light effects.
Like in the play Parhelia (2018)?
Yes, among other things. On the one hand, I was interested in the optical effects of the sun - as in Parhelia or another of my works entitled Ein Rausch im Sonnenglanz (2013-2014), which could be translated as "Intoxication of the sun". On the other hand, those stellar luminous phenomena linked to variations in luminosity found, for example, in binary star types, such as variable stars. My work Lumisosa azul (2016) and Estrellas Variables (2015) play with these analogies. I'm looking for these kinds of sonic analogies with the light effects found in celestial bodies.
And how are these analogies configured?
I'm interested in creating minimal changes in the spectrum, controlling sound structures that can be manipulated at a microscopic level, working at very small levels of variation related to frequency and amplitude. Previously, my works were born of this desire. However, I have done so by basing myself more on the music of ancient and traditional songs, a cappella songs present throughout the Iberian Peninsula, such as the primitive saetas, harvest and threshing songs or the alalás from the north of A Coruña (in Galicia). The various folk songs are very interesting because they are also profoundly complex in terms of the elasticity and fluctuation of the frequencies they present, going beyond the twelve-half-tone or equal-tempered system used in most musical aesthetics.
But now you're concentrating more on abstract issues ?
Exactly. I've been looking for more abstract analogies, like lighting effects.
How do you usually approach a composition: is the process the same in all your works, or do you create according to each one?
It depends a little on the commission, although my works are linked to each other. I try to follow an evolution, to explore my interests, to advance step by step, to go from piece to piece, developing the different constructive aspects that motivate me. For example, the work Los incensarios (2018) commissioned by the Spanish National Orchestra, I linked it to a certain folk music in which I was already interested. In fact, I combined these two ideas, this imaginary of analogies between sounds and light effects, by incorporating material based on melodies from my childhood, such as the primitive saetas sung in southern Spain.
Your career as a composer is vast and fruitful. In perspective, and with the experience of the years, what would you say to the young José Río-Pareja of the early days?
That's a good question, and a very complicated one to answer. (José Río-Pareja smiles, thinking for a few seconds before answering). I'd need more time to answer, but now that we're talking, I'll tell you that, as a child, I remember floating in the sea while playing dead and immersing my ears in this liquid acoustic environment: it was an exciting and different sensation that fascinated me. Perhaps this search for certain accumulations of spectral harmonics that interest me has something to do with that strange and curious sensation of being in a non-gaseous atmosphere, so different from our usual atmosphere. In salt water, your ears perceive these differences in sound, and you even feel the compression of your eardrums. Then there's the visual. As a child, I was hypnotized by observing the different reflections of the sun on the waves of the sea, which seemed to light up chaotically and freely.
What did you learn from Professor Brian Ferneyhough?
Courage and creative freedom. I really appreciate his esteem for the advancement of my aesthetic language. Right from the start, I understood that he would encourage this path. His music explores extreme details, offers the performer the possibility of going beyond a spontaneous interpretation, and allows us to reflect on how far we can go in reading a score. In fact, his attention to exploring the performer's space is one of the reasons I went to Stanford to study with him. I'm referring to the control of vibrato, micro-interval fluctuations, timbre and noise, all those elements that personalize the performer and that, in reality, we can also use as elements to build discourse and deepen the expressive capacity of sound. As composers, we can experiment with this additional expressiveness offered by the performer, working with this ornamentation.
Some of the titles of your works are suggestive: Red threads of desire (2003), La rivière sans socle (2009) or Tempus fluidum. They suggest emptiness, impermanence and transience. They allude to hollows, cavities and recesses.
These are titles that attempt to describe my music. I'm drawn to shifting sounds that are constantly circulating, yet controlled by harmonic structures and tones. I'm interested in construction. An example would be Red threads of desirewhere I allude to Ariadne's red thread that helped Theseus out of the labyrinth, and where there are always lines that remain perpetual, but evolving, linked to a monocolor. Another example could be Nomada S5where I worked a great deal with harmonic groups made up of fairly complex multiphonics, but selected in such a way as to create a sound environment which, by analogy with painting, would tend towards a specific range of colors, seeking coherence at the harmonic level.
Lluís Nacenta emphasizes your extreme attention to timbral dimension, your persistence in overcoming the dilemma between structure and ornamentation. Do you agree with this assessment?
Totally. Where do we draw the line between what we consider structural and what we consider ornamental?
Is this the crossroads you're trying to explore, the root of your musical universe?
Yes, I'm wondering how far you can go in ornamentation of elements and still have those same elements be considered structural. As in Gaudí's Pedrera, where the ornamental element itself is already considered a structure. Beyond the limits of our hearing and our instruments, we can work on the basis of parameters which, historically, have been considered ornamental, but which, in reality, can constitute the main part of the work, considering them already structural.
Almost as if it were a self-referential progression?
Yes, it's also the beauty of symmetry and fractality, in which every element reflects the essence of the whole; and in this minimal element, the totality can be constructed and reflected. I like to play with this ambiguity between what is ornamentation and what is structure, in order to elaborate a discourse.
But how do you overcome this stumbling block, this ambiguity?
Through experimentation, which involves a lot of hard work. I record many hours of sound material that interests me. For Nomada S5I worked with multiphonics on oboe, clarinet and bassoon, accumulating over 200 sound files to see what spectra were generated and to be able to control them at a minimum level, albeit sensorially. I analyze them with a program that visualizes the spectrum to see what's going on analytically. Once I've understood how it's composed, I imagine and create the speech and form.
A slow and laborious process.
Yes, and it allows me to have enormous control over what I construct, over the study and potentialities that these sound materials have for developing a form of musical interest.
And can this material be written in the form of a score?
There's a certain limit. I have to understand and analyze these materials. That's the limit. I try to capture the essence of these materials and allow them to express themselves through the writing of the work.
It's been said that your music is not "through" the instruments, but "in" the instruments.
Yes, I think that's a beautiful description, as if any white noise concealed an infinite number of possibilities for constructing music from the selection and filtering of that same white noise. Every instrument has infinite possibilities for sound expression, and exploring and experimenting with them is part of the interest of so many contemporary composers.
Finally, I'd like to know your opinion on the proposals of the MIXTUR festival and the ULYSSES network to promote contemporary music.
It's spectacular work on the part of both organizations. They make contemporary music visible. It's a luxury to have the space generated by the MIXTUR festival, where composers from all over the world come together for a few days and where you can find out what's being done in the world in terms of contemporary music. Also the ULYSSES network, which brings together this diversity of contemporary music. These are fantastic and necessary initiatives.
Hopefully, the pandemic will soon pass and we'll be able to enjoy the contemporary music scene.
COVID has taken a break, but I'm still positive and think we'll get back to normal. Let's get on with it.
Interview by Txema Seglers.
