“One of the most important voices to follow in Latin American music today.” – Scherzo Magazine
Composer in residence at the Center Henri Pousseur (2014), IRCAM (2015), Cité Internationale des Arts (2015), Academy of France in Madrid – Casa de Velazquez (2016), Art Zoyd Music Creation Center (2017), Académie of France in Rome – Villa Médicis (2017), Juan Arroyo is actually the guest composer of the National Orchestra of Peru, artistic director and conductor of the Regards ensemble, artistic director of the Sonomundo festival (Paris), artistic director of the Experimenta festival (Lima), professor at the Jean-Baptiste Lully conservatory and The National University of Music of Peru. His catalog is composed of a large selection of works ranging from solo pieces to orchestral music, from instrumental and vocal music to more experimental forms of electronic music.
Juan Arroyo was born in Lima, Peru. He studied composition at the Conservatories of Lima, Bordeaux and at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris. He deepens his musical knowledge in formations like Voix Nouvelles and the IRCAM. He has been guided by eminent composers such as Allain Gaussin, Brian Ferneyhough, Heinz Holliger, Henri Pousseur, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Luis Naón, Mauricio Kagel, Michael Levinas, and Stefano Gervasoni.
His music is rewarded with numerous awards such as the prize of the Salabert Foundation (2013), the prize of the Academy of Fine Arts of France (2015) and the Ibermusicas composition award (2022). He receives prestigious commissions from the French Ministry of Culture, Radio France, Centre Henri Pousseur, SACEM and Donaueschinguen Musiktage. His works are performed by eminent musicians such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, 2e2m, L’Itinéraire, Linea, LAPS, L’Arsenale, Proxima Centauri, Sonido Extremo, National Orchestra of Peru, Vertixe Sonora and Tana Quartet. His music is performed at great festivals such as Ars Musica, Présences, Cervantino, La Chaise-Dieu, Ensems and ¡Viva Villa!
His compositional work revolves around sound hybridization. Indeed, in 2014, he began a fundamental stage of his artistic work with the construction of new instruments capable of transmuting their sound, the TanaInstruments. This allowed him to hybridize the perceptual cues of sounds in order to reveal the evocative and irrational nature of their substance, sometimes making them enigmatic.
“Juan Arroyo has synthesized his work on hybridization around three fundamental areas concerning perceptual indices: gesture, space and timbre. Hybridization is at the heart of the scrambling of these indices. The expression “causal listening” encompasses different listening situations.
On the subject of his hybrid string quartet, SMAQRA, although the original musical object is part of a percussive timbre, the listening codes refer us to stringed instruments. The singularity and the interest of this work are these games of displacement, of movement between a causal listening and a reduced listening passing by many intermediate states of perception. Juan Arroyo explores different degrees by gradually blurring sound sources like a photographer or a cameraman making us travel from the concrete to the abstract, from materiality to immateriality by the game of the development of its objective.
Thus, the search for the development of reduced listening, favored in a general way by the electronics, constitutes a trajectory towards the unheard-of which the border between sound reality and unrealism is in total correlation with the literary inclinations of Juan Arroyo on the realism Magic.”
FABIEN HOULÈS
Profesor Agregado de la Universidad Jean Monnet de Saint Étienne. Le premier quatuor à cordes hybride, l’exemple de Smaqra de Juan Arroyo, publicado en la primavera de 2017 por la editorial L’Harmattan.