Iván Enrique Rodríguez’s Transmutación Inerte to Receive UK Premiere at the London Festival of American Music
Puerto Rican composer Iván Enrique Rodríguez, D.M.A. work Transmutación Inerte (Inert Transmutation), a work for Pierrot ensemble and percussion that explores the evolving nature of identity, belonging, and the experience of being simultaneously shaped by more than one place, will receive it’s UK premiere this November 9th at 7:30 pm, UK time.
The work will be presented as part of Latinos in America, the opening program of the London Festival of American Music (LFAM), a five-day celebration of American music. The programme brings together six composers of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Mexican heritage whose music reflects the increasingly diverse cultural landscape of the United States.
For Rodríguez, Transmutación Inerte is deeply personal. As a Puerto Rican, and consequently a United States citizen by virtue of Puerto Rico's political status, he inhabits an identity shaped by a particularly complex intersection of histories, cultures, and national experiences. His eventual move to the continental United States brought another layer to that identity, as years of living in different parts of the country exposed him to new environments, experiences, and ways of understanding himself.
Transmutación Inerte emerges from that process of self-examination.
“We keep on being who we are but, while adapting to our new surroundings, we understand ourselves differently. Therefore, who we are, now is different.”
The paradox at the heart of the work is one of change without complete departure. Identity absorbs experience continuously: it becomes richer, more complex, and more difficult to define, while retaining traces of everything that came before. Rodríguez looks simultaneously toward his place of origin and toward the country that became his home, finding both familiarity and estrangement in each.
The musical language of Transmutación Inerte draws upon the rhythms and melodies of Puerto Rico, not as static representations of heritage, but as materials transformed through the composer's accumulated experience. Familiar musical gestures become newly perceived through the distance of migration and the passage of time. The resulting work inhabits the tension between recognition and unfamiliarity, belonging and displacement, continuity and transformation.
The title, Transmutación Inerte, evokes precisely this paradox: a process of transformation in which the essential substance remains, even as its nature becomes increasingly difficult to identify. It is an examination of what happens when a person continues to be who they are while becoming someone who can no longer understand that identity in quite the same way.
The UK premiere places Rodríguez's work within a broader contemporary conversation about Latin American identity in the United States. Latinos in America brings together composers whose music crosses cultural and geographic boundaries, drawing upon ancestral traditions, contemporary experience, and diverse musical languages to examine questions of identity, migration, memory, and belonging.
Alongside Rodríguez's Transmutación Inerte, the program features works by Johanny Navarro, Odaline de la Martínez, Luis Quintana, Jorge Andrés Ballesteros, and Sonia Morales. Together, their works present a multifaceted portrait of Latin American experience in the United States and offer a glimpse into the changing character of American classical music.
For Rodríguez, the London performance represents an important international presentation of a work rooted in his Puerto Rican identity while shaped by his life and experiences in the United States. It also marks an opportunity for audiences outside the Americas to encounter a distinctly Puerto Rican perspective on one of the most universal questions of human experience: how can we remain ourselves while continually becoming someone new?
Programme
Johanny Navarro — Belen
Odaline de la Martínez — Memorias
Iván Enrique Rodríguez — Transmutación inerte
Luis Quintana — Midnight Rumba
Jorge Andrés Ballesteros — Coyolxauhqui
Sonia Morales — Divertimento caribeño No. 7