Title: Gen
Type: Sound
Year: 2003
Genre: Orchestra
Instruments: 3.3.3.3_4.3.3.1_Timp_3per_P_16.14.12.10.8
Duration: 16m
Commission: Spanish National Youth Orchestra
Premiere: 19 September 2005
Location: Otoño Musical Soriano - Palacio De La Audencia / Soria
Premiere: 20 September 2005
Location: Madrid Concert Season - National Auditorium / Madrid
Premiere: 22 September 2005
Location: International Festival of Alicante - Teatro Principal / Alicante
Performer: Spanish National Youth Orchestra
Conductor: Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano
Title: JONDE (Spanish National Youth Orchestra)
Exhibition: Group
Date: 19 September 2005
Location: Palacio De La Audencia. Soria
Date: 20 September 2005
Location: National Auditorium. Madrid
Date: 22 September 2005
Location: Teatro Principal. Alicante
In 2003 Roberto López was composer-in-residence at the Spanish National Youth Orchestra and during this period he created two commissioned works, Gen for symphony orchestra and Duo for piano and cello.
During this period in residence at the JONDE, Roberto López made several lectures to young performers where were analyzed some of the prejudices that had been established in society, about the contemporaneity in music, and by extension to the arts, and therefore find ways to dispel these prejudices to have a more open vision about contemporary artistic expression.
About this intention of unprejudiced rapprochement to contemporary proposals, Roberto López creates, from this pedagogical viewpoint, these two works, Gen and Duo, and gives them an antagonistic character respect to the pre-established canons contemporaries, as an example of freedom of aesthetic expression according to postmodernity and diversity that actually exists in the field of arts, compared with the unidirectional and unique aesthetic thought which clings to prejudices.
This work titled Gen, is written for symphony orchestra and is based, conceptually and structurally, in elementary biological unit of storage of the information in living organisms, the gene. Roberto López uses this idea of biological unit, which contains the hereditary information, and therefore, characters and qualities which are transmitted from generation to generation, creating the inevitable formation of diversity in living beings and therefore in the aesthetic expression of individuals, and he transfers this idea to the sound as an exercise of exact representation of a gene extracted from a DNA molecule.
The work is structured from the double helix structure of DNA, where the sound discourse goes through different clusters or blocks of sonorous information, as a large fragment without any concessions in the unity of its parts, as segments of independent sonorous information, whose only purpose is the exhibition of diverse contents. Is in this systematic extrapolation of the structure of the double helix and in its linear and ordered arrangement of the contents, where Roberto López defines its range of action on the score and leaves no doubt of his structural, aesthetic and conceptual intentions in the sonorous proposal.
Therefore, under this context of the prejudices in the contemporaneity in its whole, and the analogous representation to the gene as a generator of the diversity of forms and contents, this is a work which, as Roberto López said: "...tries to dispel the masturbatory prejudices of puritanism strictly analytical and accommodated in his mental ejaculation."
