Education

With regard to my education, there are many varied factors which were important for me. On the one hand, strictly concerning to my musical education, in the beginning I was self taught. I only began to study at the Conservatory when I was 19, when I went to Lisbon, and I also began to study electronic engineering at the same time. Up until then I had piano classes with a private teacher for a year or two – when I was 12, 13 years old – and then I continued in effect to learn by myself, only resuming serious studies when I went to the Conservatory. From then on I had a more normal education, more academic, although quite long in terms of time, because as I already had a certain background I didn’t start the Conservatory from zero,  and I compressed it – as happens with many people -, obviously. In parallel with this, besides my electronic engineering studies I was involved in loads of activities and everything was important in one way or another. For example, I played a lot of chess, I also began to paint when I was 11, more or less, because my father also used to paint, oil painting. When I was in Lisbon I also did lots of things, from theatre – I not only worked as an attendant in the Superior School of Theatre, in the Conservatory, as I also did theatre – in fact I had already started to do theatre before – in an amateur theatre group for a number of years. I also played in a rock group, I went to classes in the Jazz School of the Hot Club, so I had a very, very varied education. I also had, in the area of education, a variety of experiences, I taught in various different places at the same time and all of this contributed towards a very mixed education.

First, when I finished the course in the Conservatory, I went to Paris where I stayed for 3 years working with Emmanuel Nunes and to study with him, so I was a little time in Germany a little time in Paris, and then I went to Freiburg where I was studying in the school, in the Institute of Contemporary Music.

Work method and the process of composition

Effectively, the fact that I have a relatively small catalogue of works is mostly due to the fact that I need a lot of time before I begin to write a work. A lot of time for preparation – I won’t say only for reflection but also preparation of material, jotting down ideas, developing things. I normally take a long time before beginning to write the score. Obviously, even in the case of electronic music, a person has to begin to write. Somehow, there is the moment  which is the beginning of the score and this is a process which normally, in me, takes a long time. And on most occasions I even develop a lot of material which I end up by not using. Therefore, when I get to the moment of putting things down on the score and starting to realise the work itself, I end up by having to cut down drastically and choose amongst everything I produced up to that point. And then the writing process – which is always minimally long because a piece for orchestra, at times even for an ensemble, ends up by taking a long time to write - page by page to compose -, but, comparatively, this process is much quicker than everything that came before starting the piece itself, its realisation.

The process of composition depends on each work and finally ends up by being a mixture of many things. More general ideas may appear first - but ideas always come successively, some come more from the material, from concrete things, from specific musical material and at times there are also other more generalised ideas. But in each piece the process is slightly different. It depends on each piece and, effectively, in general the process begins perhaps more from the material, although there is also another type of idea. My process of composition is not like Nono’s, for example, – just to give an example here. He maps out the overall dramaturgy of the piece right away, he does the overall scheme straight off, it’s like this, then that happens, more or less like this and then he begins to realise each of these things. Therefore the overall form of the piece – although very often I have slightly more concrete ideas about the character of the piece and its dramaturgy (if this isn’t interpreted as dramatism) - ends up by always being the process of realisation, and the concrete form which the piece will have ends up by being the result of the process of realisation, this toing and froing between what you are effectively doing and what you see that works.

Composition inseparable from instrumentation

In general, the starting point for the composition of a piece implies, effectively, a relatively intimate relationship between the instrumentation – the instruments for which it will be written and the idea itself of the piece - not only the more global idea but later the very idea of the material. This is valid for almost all of my pieces. There are many examples - obviously Occasus, which has a relatively conventional formation, where we have violin/violoncello, flute/clarinet (obviously the flute also plays bass flute and the clarinet also plays bass clarinet, so it’s not quite so simple…) and, besides this, the piano, completely prepared, a marimba, bongos and a guitar. For all the other instruments I created a certain type of mode of interplay, but above all the way in which I composed the piece was intended to create a special sound for the whole piece, on the one hand using the prepared piano (which also, according to the preparation of the piano, obtained sounds which were similar to other modes of playing the other instruments, and gave a very special sound to the piece) – you can hear this – and this was part of the initial idea of the piece. In the case of the duo for euphonium and bass clarinet it was the same thing, because both instruments use during practically the whole piece – well except in rare exceptions – always voice and sound, sung, within the instrument. The sound of the instrument and the sound of singing which creates that mixture, that very special timbre, almost of ring modulation. So the process of composition of the piece had to do with this, this was therefore the starting point. In the case of the string quartet – although it is for a string quartet, which is in principle a conventional formation -  the idea of the piece was exactly to write a piece for strings (in this case string quartet, where I would use only the natural harmonic sounds – where I also did not go very far, I only went as far as the 6^th harmonic, the minor 3^rd harmonic) and loose strings, and each of the instruments also used a little scordatura. So they are mutually inseparable.

Obviously, for example, in the case of Ode, I tend to give a somewhat personal character to the orchestra, not only in the way in which I write – which is already a very important factor – but also in relation to the way the instruments are set out and how the instruments are chosen for the orchestra. And the orchestra, to be effective, there is a certain standard but in my case, for example, I had 4 clarinets and 4 trumpets – which is unusual because all the rest of the wind instruments amounted practically to just 2 – which immediately lends a special character to the piece. Then it also has to do with the way in which the piece was written, in relation to these 4 clarinets and 4 trumpets, and, with regard to the strings, which is also one of the interesting aspects these days in writing for orchestra because, if we consider the part for the wind instruments, both woodwind and horns, in an orchestra which is not very big, in the wind instruments we have practically the same thing that we have in a large ensemble. So, in principle there is, from the point of view of the size of the instrumentation, there is no great difference between a large orchestra and a large ensemble.

There is a big difference with the strings, however, where in a large ensemble we have 3 violins, or 4, or 2; 2 or 3 violas, and in an orchestra we have 12 violins, well 12+12 for example. Therefore, it is in the treatment of the strings that we see the big difference between writing for a large ensemble and writing for orchestra. In my case, what I did was not only to separate the groups of strings somewhat in terms of space, but I organised the strings into groups of 4, for example, for 12 violins I had 3 groups of 4 and I separated them spatially, so I did not put the 4+4+4 together, and the same thing for the violas, the cellos, etc.

Even Transitions, which is a piece, you may say, for solo clarinet, you can always adapt it for another 3 or 4 or 5 different instruments. But when I composed the piece it was specifically conceived for the clarinet, based on the sound of the clarinet. The very title of the piece Transitions which can be understood in many different ways, has, amongst other meanings, also to do with the way in which the clarinet makes the transition from one note to another and which has the specifically sui generis sound of the clarinet which is different from the flute or the oboe. This may possibly have to do with the acoustic viewpoint, from the fact that the clarinet only has the odd numbered harmonics, well, mainly, and for being a tube which behaves as if it were a closed tube, but which for me had to do with the type of sound. If I had thought about writing for the oboe I couldn’t have written like that, I won’t say only from the technical point of view, the fingerings and so on, but from the point of view purely of the sound. Of course I also did the version for bass clarinet, but the bass clarinet is still a clarinet and I would like to do a version also for saxophone which is an instrument, in spite of everything, which is quite similar, but in any case the conception was really for clarinet.

Beginnings of reiteration in the compositional process

So the aspect of the reiteration of recognisable elements – whether it be pitch, rhythmic or more complex – is something which, for me, is very important although this doesn’t appear as the most important aspect in all pieces, but it does in many pieces. For me, reiteration does not mean repetition but rather the recurrence of a certain type of element, and this is something which lends form to the musical discourse. It’s the same thing in classical music - not only the motifs but also the harmony, the quicker or slower development of the musical discourse not only has to do with the rhythms, it not only has to do with the tempo and what is happening at the time. If you stay one bar on the tonic or if it is 10 bars on the tonic and then change to the dominant for 2 bars and to the sub-dominant… - the so-called harmonic rhythm - this also lends form to the temporal development even if they are not rhythms, so there are many parameters just in classical music which also have obviously to do with the formation of the musical discourse. In contemporary music this obviously continues to be important. It is not only the rapid output of rhythms and of notes, or the slow output, which changes the velocity of the discourse. It can even create paradoxical situations which result in the contrary and the recurrence of more or less recognisable elements effectively grants it great importance. And the very variation of this type of recurrence – closer together, further apart, much more repetition, no repetition -  depending on the pieces, this can be one of the main elements which give shape to the development of the temporal discourse of the piece. For example, in Octeto this is something which is inside the construction of the piece and, in Octeto, there is little recognition of things which happen more than once, whether it be the appearance of notes or of timbres. But in a slightly more global way, there are always parts in the piece where there is a much greater recurrence and repetition of elements, and parts in which there is much less, in which there is a renewal of the material or the permanent development of the material – there is therefore something of a game with this. In other pieces the game is always done in a different way, for example in Transitions, in the first part of the piece there is, you could say even the repetition of a melody which has 24 notes but which is not 12+12. This very melody has a construction in which there are pitches which appear more often, pitches which appear less often, but this depends on the way in which the melody is constructed, and this melody appears successively with very different forms but which has to do with the development processes of other parameters, like the very position of the notes in the register, like the very rhythmic elements which have another type of development and therefore there is an in-depth exploration, or almost as far as possible, of a certain type of dimension which, in this case, is the repetition and reformulation of the melody (which you don’t hear, but if you see the score you can see where it is that this occurs). Based on the principle that we have already heard this melody many times, – even when the notes leap around a lot in the register, in one way or another, after a while you can recognise that there is something which is similar –  in the second part of the piece I develop other elements, other characteristics of the melody, other than the pitch but rather each figure of intervals. If you had a minor second, a major third, a minor second, I came to consider that this is what was important, that this, after hearing everything that had come before, was already an element which somehow had a function or had a certain force, and I then began to develop these small groups of intervallic figures, irrespective of pitch. Therefore, in each part of the piece there is a different dimension which is developed, but which always has to do with the recurrence of these elements.

Like, for example, in the very construction of the melody in which there was what I called symmetrical groups – so groups of intervals, as in this case of a minor second, a major third, a minor second, so 4 notes 3 intervals – which reappear 2 or 3 or 4 times throughout this melody of 24 notes, with other different pitches. So this is also related, although in other pitches – in the 24 note melody there is a recurrence of each pitch, of each note, and at the same time a recurrence of this symmetrical intervallic model, which no longer has anything to do with the pitches, which appears here, then there and then there. Various figures appear far apart, closer… so all this is important to insinuate in the musical construction and in dodecaphonism itself, in serialism itself -  the construction of the piece, therefore the forms, the structures which are inside the series were always important.

The question of musical perception

The problem of perception is important, but it is always a two edged knife. It is always a somewhat delicate and fragile problem the way you consider the piece and the way it will be perceived by the listener. As you know, it is a very tricky problem because you can easily slip into the realms of light music, where you do things with a certain dimension only for them to be easily understood by the public, or accepted by the public. Whichever way you look at it, a piece has to do with certain musical elements which exist, which live and which develop in a certain type of mode. And the overall development of the discourse, in a certain way, has to do with the way in which you more or less portray these elements, so there are moments – this is the same thing which in classical music, for example Wagner or Mahler – has such density that a person is only impressed by the whole, but if we take a look at it, it is a mixture of many elements and the superimposition of the interaction of various elements. In the case of Wagner - leitmotif, and then there are other moments when there is much greater clarity and when you understand which the other elements are better.

In the case of contemporary music it is a little more complex, most of the time, but it ends up by having this same type of game of recognition or non-recognition. For example, in the case of Transitions from the rhythmic perspective, there is the overlaying of 2 rhythmic developments which are both based on a kind of rhythmic ritardando - this had to do with the conception of the piece and with the character of the piece in itself, so it is not only a question of writing numeric proportions and then applying them – there are therefore rhythmic ritardandos which are repeated, and placed out of phase with each other. And it is obvious that if you hear one, you recognise it, but when they begin to overlap you don’t recognise them but there is an immanence and, in a way, this is felt, sometimes more and sometimes less,  - it depends also on the way it is done - but you always feel this burst of rhythms which then thins out. Even when they are superimposed and last for a long time, you won’t perceive it to be long because meanwhile something else has appeared in the middle, but this has to do with the piece and you also hear it.

Treatment and composition of timbre

In the case of the mixed pieces, with instruments and electronics, what interests me most at the moment are the aspects of the spatialisation of sound and also the treatment of timbre, although these are very delicate elements as we know, and this has been in fact what I have used until now. I still haven’t used very sophisticated processes for the treatment of timbre or complex processing in terms of timbre to any great degree, in the same way that, in the purely electronic pieces, I still haven’t got to the point of seriously working on sonic synthesis. For example, Ombres Croisées which is a purely electronic piece and which you could say has a very special timbre – the reality is that all the musical parameters are interconnected with each other and, in the case of Ombres Croisées it is the same thing. Although I didn’t work on synthesis from the classic point of view, you could say, with synthesis programs like C-Sound, or any other where you can even work on the spectrums, only to work on and model the timbre, the situation is that the special timbre of the piece comes from the way in which it is constructed. The timbres themselves, which obviously also have a certain construction of partial elements, which have to do with the very structure of the piece on other levels – on a rhythmic level, on a melodic level, even on the spatial level. So, on the one hand, the very treatment of timbre, which is not very advanced in the case of Ombres Croisées, is associated mostly to the treatment of pitch and pitch structures, which is the organisation of micro-intervallic scales, i.e. not tempered – you could almost speak of modes, but well, it is more complex than this - and the way this is used is what gives this very special timbre to the piece. For me, in general, I don’t think that in order to achieve a special dimension within a parameter you can only work on that parameter to get there. As in the case of Occasus, which also has a very special timbre and way of playing, besides having a certain treatment of timbre – it is not only the treatment of timbre which gives it this – it is the way I wrote it, inter-relating the various instruments from the point of view of pitch and rhythm, it is this which then lends it the overall timbre. Therefore the overall result of a piece, within a certain parameter, is the result of the way the various parameters are constructed.

For example, L’air de l’air, also tape, so it is a purely electronic piece – again it is a little difficult to describe the sound of this piece - but effectively it has a very special sonority, a very special, purely acoustic form of life and, from the point of view of the electronics, the processes are technically simple. What I wanted to say with this is that it is not that fact of it being simple or complex which gives simple or complex results, it depends of the way in which it is worked. For example, in the case of L’air de l’air you can say that the processes used are processes that date from the fifties, Várese could practically have written this piece – with a lot of work, but he could have – because, although it was written in the nineties or the end of the eighties, it makes no use of any new sound treatment or sound synthesis programs. In this case, it uses exclusively recorded sounds, which I recorded myself, sounds of percussion instruments and somewhat unusual sounds. And, through pure transposition, – as in the case of a magnetic tape, in which the transposition implies changing the tempo -, the way I constructed the piece, in terms of the organisation of durations and the organisation of pitch, meant that there was a very special relationship between each sound and the way it exists in time, because what I wanted was to use sounds which had life – so to speak – natural. When a person plays a sound, the sound, provided that it begins and ends, is natural (if you can say this, I don’t want to say ecological but well, it is a process which is not artificial) and if I transpose this sound to a lower pitch it will have a longer duration, I will have a lower frequency, but the way in which this sound exists continues to be – in a microscopic vision of the sound – an existence as sound really is. This was what I wanted to do in this piece, and all the sounds which are there were not manipulated in any other way than this.

Spatialisation

The aspect of spatialisation is another aspect which is intimately linked to each piece. Each piece also has a way of working the spatial aspect within the various pieces which use this dimension. Effectively, you have to distinguish between two elements – spatialisation with electronics, pure or mixed, and only purely instrumental spatialisation. Obviously, given their results they are completely different worlds. On the other hand, the type of writing also in relation to space allows, or requires, a greater or lesser virtuosity in its treatment. Therefore, obviously electronics allows you, as we know, much more. In the case of using a spatialisation of acoustic instruments, this allows much less, depending on the space and depending on other parameters. This conditions the musical writing straight away. When a person conceives a piece he or she has to already think of what situation it is for, it is not just that this external conditioning factor affects the writing of the music but the piece has to be conceived for this, obviously. This has to be part of the conception.

In the case of the pieces with electronics -  for example the case of Ombres Croisées – it has a spatial treatment which is completely different from Schattenspiel, for example, or from L’air de l’air. For example, in the case of Ombres Croisées it is purely occasional, in each of the 8 points of the 8 speakers which are placed around the audience, there is no coherent treatment of the sound, between one speaker and another. Each of the 8 points is completely separate and there is a very intimate relationship between the rhythmic material of pitch and micro-intervals and each point in space. This is clearly heard when you hear the piece in the space, so there is a very intimate relationship between the material in its various dimensions. In the case of L’air de l’air this is completely different, and in the case of Schattenspiel also, because here we have the spatialisation of the instruments and the durations and the form of the movements is, shall we say, constructed – it is not only a purely intuitive question of doing this like this now and then like that. So there is a construction to all of this.

In the case of Kreuzgang, which I obviously did not write for instruments - and this is why they now go over here…-  but in each moment I was writing it I already knew that the instruments, at that moment, would be over here and over there. The composition had to do exactly with space, in fact because the most important part of Kreuzgang is the ensemble, so it is the instruments which are placed around and not the orchestra.

At some moments, possibly, the process of spatialisation is a little more intuitive, in other parts it is more constructed and there can be very different processes or “movement” – it would have to be slow, obviously – of sounds in space, which could be related with each pitch or to the harmony, to the timbres. There is a whole very wide range of compositional processes of construction.

Réitérations

With regard to the piece for piano, in reality it was – you could say – the first piece I composed. I never composed for solo piano again and at the moment I also wouldn’t know what to do for solo piano, because as you know, due to all its history, it is in fact difficult – at least I think it is – to write, these days, for piano. At the time, in spite of everything, there were two essential things which interested me, on the one hand – and this is also where the name of the piece Réitérations comes from – to create a process of pitch development which was in some way related with the serial processes – only with pitch, not of the rest – but which was turned upside down in its very construction shall we say, in the construction of the base elements. That already contained inside itself exactly the contrary of that which are the dodecaphonic or serial principles, which is the principle of renewal and of permanent variation. On the other hand, I used a group of notes, a group of pitches which already contained repetition within itself – they weren’t 12 notes, they were for example 7, sometimes they were 5, at times they were 4, which already contained a repetition right inside this group - and the repetition of one of the pitches and then the process, as I developed and transposed it, I created even more repetitions. So not only did it not have a process of permanent renewal, but it had a process of very close reiteration, in terms of pitch, and not only one plus one and then the next would appear soon after but also always in different contexts. There was, therefore, a mixture of processes which were serial to a small degree in the development of pitch but with a result which has nothing to do with serialism.

This was one of the first essential ideas for the piano piece, this treatment of pitch. As the piece went on I wanted always a greater or lesser densification of close reiterations which, as I say, is a thing which, in terms of its result, has nothing to do with serialism. Perhaps in Webern, sometimes, there may be something similar but, at the end of the day, it is very different. But there you have it, Webern, effectively, was already looking to play around a bit with these proximities between recognisable elements.

Then, on the other hand, I was also interested, in the piece for piano, in working with resonances. I used many different types of resonance, from the more normal and grosser resonance, shall we say, which is the right pedal – everything resounding, until it dies down to zero - and, between these two things, I created many types of situations like having only some prolonged notes with the fingers, while others are played staccato or, on the other hand, only some notes are prolonged with a pedal sostenuto. Whether these notes are played or not, it also gives that type of special resonance – if these notes are actually played then it is these notes that sound, simultaneously with others which sound dry, therefore with no resonance. This mixed with maintaining the notes – again with the fingers – keeping certain notes held, but only for a certain type of tempo, there begins to be a certain interplay of notes which are held for longer, other for less time and others not at all. I therefore created a whole scale of different types of sonority of resonances.

Kreuzgang

The case of Kreuzgang, for example, from the point of view of the purely musical construction, is one of the examples where I sought to develop, and take much further, a certain type of idea which had already appeared, for example in Transitions, which was the development of symmetrical figures. Symmetrical figures of intervals which was developed in the second part of Transitions, but which was limited to the material itself. It had to do with that melody which acted as the basis for the piece and not straight away with these symmetrical figures - this was a dimension of the melody which was later developed, concretely, in a certain place. In the case of Kreuzgang, I took this as a starting point. It no longer had anything to do with the notes of Transitions, nor with the 24 note melody, where I tried to develop, in a systematic and extreme way, all the possible types of symmetrical figures of 3 intervals so 1-2-1, or whatever the interval. This was one of the starting points for Kreuzgang and which, obviously, has absolutely nothing to do with Transitions. It was only a process of composition, which was set off somehow by something I had done in a piece. Then I took only this to be developed more in another piece, with completely different objectives.