Poems in Loquillo’s Songs: Experimentation and Learning about the Musical Structure

Abstract

Loquillo’s music has been part of several generations since the beginning of the eighties. Apart from his vast musical production focus on rock, his approach to poetry has three high points, through the interpretation of musical adaptations in La vida por delante (1994), Con elegancia (1998) and Su nombre era el de todas las mujeres (2011). This meant a new conceptualization of the work flow around music, which would have to adapt, as other authors have done, to the conditioning factors of pre-existing poetry. This article proposes an approach to the songs that make up these works from the point of view of sound structure. In this way, an analysis of the musical form was carried out based on listening as an explanatory source, thus emphasizing its didactic nature. The blocks that derive from the study of each song illustrate the way in which Gabriel Sopeña’s work when setting music goes through various organizational models, from the most prototypical to others treated with greater freedom, parallel to the configuration of the selected texts. Consequently, not only through varied instrumentations or incursions into various styles, but through the repetitions and contrasts typical of the musical form, Loquillo penetrates into artistic dimensions that make him break away from predictable formal ties, thanks to the depth and complexity of literary references.