Jesús Villa Rojo

Jesús Villa Rojo, born in Brihuega (Guadalajara) on 24 February 1940, is a Spanish composer and clarinettist associated with the musical avant-garde in his country from the late 1960s onwards. His significance lies in combining, within a single career, performance, the direction of ensembles and theoretical reflection on notation and contemporary creation.

He trained at the Madrid Conservatory, where he studied composition with Cristóbal Halffter. In 1965 he won a scholarship to study with Jesús Bal y Gay and, after completing his degree in 1967, spent a year teaching clarinet. He then furthered his studies with Boris Porena at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena in 1969, and with Franco Evangelisti and Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome between 1970 and 1972. From the early 1970s he performed with ensembles such as Nuova Consonanza, the Forum Players and Nuove Forme Sonore, and in 1975 he founded the Laboratorio de Interpretación Musical (LIM).

At the helm of the LIM, he broke with the static aesthetic that had dominated performance in Spanish musical life, and in his dual role as performer and director he consistently sought to facilitate communication between the work and the audience. His early compositions, such as Cuatro movimientos para quinteto de viento (1967) and the Sonata para clarinete y piano (1968), show a tendency to strip away the superfluous and to experiment with sound, without entirely abandoning his traditional training. During his years in Siena and Rome he wrote works such as Música para obtener equis resultados (1969) and Variations (1970), which anticipate the series Juegos gráfico-musicales. In the 1980s he composed multimedia works and, later, the electroacoustic piece Caminando por el sonido (1991).

In 1994 he received the National Music Prize in the composition category. Between 1995 and 1997 he directed the Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea, from where he promoted experimental music by Spanish and foreign composers. As a writer, he published El clarinete y sus posibilidades (1975) and Juegos gráfico-musicales (1982). His legacy is associated above all with the application of theoretical and conceptual principles to interpretative practice and with the exploration of new techniques and sonic possibilities across different media.