Javier Alvarez, composer who forged a powerful hybrid of Mexican and European music - obituary
Story by Telegraph Obituaries • Friday
Javier Alvarez
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Javier Alvarez, who has died aged 67, was an electroacoustic composer who fused music from his Mexican homeland with the European tradition to create exciting works that were pulsating, stimulating and invigorating. “I’m interested in dance,” he told Radio 3. “I’m interested in things that move you, and not only emotionally, but things that make you get out of your seat.”
Many of his best-known works were written in London, where his music was commissioned and performed by the London Sinfonietta, the BBC Concert Orchestra and the London Chamber Choir. These included Temazcal (1984), which was heard at the 1989 Proms and sets a pair of maracas against a recording of a traditional Mexican song that has been transformed using electronic techniques.
Although his one British orchestral commission, Grammar for Two (1991), filled with busy textures, was not well received, he won accolades for electroacoustic music including Papalotl (1987), a work of exuberant physicality for piano and tape, Mannam (1990), which juxtaposes the traditional Korean harp with electronic sounds, and Imaginary Skulls (1994), a dramatic choral setting of texts related to death by Spanish poets.
Javier Alvarez Fuentes was born in Mexico City on May 8 1956, the youngest of four sons of Augusto Alvarez, a leading Modernist architect, and Delfina (née Fuentes), an English teacher, both of who were aficionados of Afro-Cuban music. He recalled them purchasing a Japanese cassette recorder to make copies of their 78 rpm records. The machine, which could record on two separate tracks, became his “first musical instrument”, enabling him to experiment with electronic techniques.
Alvarez and a colleague in 1992
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