Education and influences

My family influenced me a lot, without a doubt. When I was really young my friends influenced me, but mostly my family, and the fact that I entered and started to attend the Conservatory very early on, when I was five years old or about that age, was also very important. At the time, the Regional Conservatory of Ponta Delgada had close or very good ties with the National Conservatory. The fact is that we enrolled in the National Conservatory and then the exams were taken with teachers from the National Conservatory who travelled to Ponta Delgada to examine the students there.

My father’s family also played (my grandmother used to play) but my mother’s family influenced me more. My uncles liked to play music a lot and they played naturally together, although they played light music. They played in fact with great pleasure and this contaminated their nephews and nieces in a way and, well, all the children who were around them. When I was 8 I remember playing as a group with my cousins, as it was something we did quite naturally.

My instrument was always the piano, although in the Azores I played viola da terra, an instrument which is like a guitar, with pairs of strings and which is typical of São Miguel.

After this I entered the Conservatory, which I went to all the time I was in Ponta Delgada, in São Miguel. I did all my musical education there: Acoustics, History of Music and part of Piano. Then I came to Lisbon when I was 22 and then completed my education here. I studied piano with Miguel Henriques right from the start and I studied a lot; or rather, if I play piano, I owe it largely to him. It was in his class that I really dedicated myself fully to the piano, with a very organised and very disciplined approach to study. This allowed me to effectively learn to play piano properly, shall we say. In parallel with my piano studies, I began studying at the Superior School of Music, in Professor Bochmann’s class, and with Álvaro Salazar and Constança Capdeville, whose classes influenced me very much and which would complete my education in an area which I liked a lot and was very interested in: the area of composition. And at that time, as now, it was difficult to disassociate what led me towards composition, what led me towards the piano or what led me towards music in general.

It was always difficult for me to detail or distinguish what made me sit at the piano and play, what made me sit at the piano and compose, at least when I was a kid. You could say that for me it was the same pull or the same desire, maybe. And so, there I was studying composition in the most natural way possible, in the same way as I could be studying piano as if it were something I always had done and which was always a part of my life.

In the Superior School of Music there was one person who made an impact on me right from the start: Margarida Magalhães de Sousa. She was my Harmony teacher and a wonderful pianist, who taught piano and harmony with absolutely contagious and natural ease. Her Harmony classes were a delight! The way she explained a choral work by Bach, how she established analogies, how she even sometimes would make jokes using word play, it was all very contagious with the ease with which she transmitted her knowledge. And I remember seeing her prepare recitals and she read and played very well, which is not common. Generally, those who read easily and prepare and set up pieces very quickly do not always then perform as well as the soloists. But not her! She managed to do this all very well and do it with great ease. She infected me with this and taught me how to deal with music in a simple, carefree and intimate manner, how to treat music as if it were something which was absolutely familiar to us, without too much anxiety or drama.

There were three people who influenced me, without a shadow of a doubt. On the one hand, Professor Bochmann, for his classes, Analysis mainly – or rather, what I learned in terms of composition and compositional technique. If there was a teacher with whom I learned technique it was certainly with Professor Bochmann during the years I was with him. Álvaro Salazar also, who studied in Paris with Pierre Schaeffer. After the Course, I was in Álvaro Salazar’s electroacoustic class, and this was a discipline they taught in the Superior School of Music at the time. After I finished the Escola Superior de Música he was in fact a person who gave me various opportunities, including through the “Musical Workshop”. He commissioned two works from me and if I have had any projection as a composer in recent years, I owe it to him.

To Miguel Henriques, I owe the fact that I managed to play the piano, to have played well at all, as it were, but to have seriously played piano, shall we say, in a normal way, as it should be played, competently.

Composer vs Interpreter

Regarding the interpretation and the study of an instrument, the study of an instrument has a physical component of training and discipline, of the mechanisation of reflexes, which you don’t get in composition, you don’t have that there. On the other hand, composition has an intellectual and a speculation component, which I think does not exist in interpretation or, at least, not with the same intensity, although there is obviously a speculative aspect when one interprets someone’s else’s piece, even when we interpret within a certain style and our freedom is relatively limited. But the attitude of the interpreter should be as subliminal as possible, in order to serve the composer’s intentions in the best way possible, in terms of the musical idea. An interpreter who wants to rise above the composer and tries to say “No sir, I think that here this is like this and like that and you shouldn’t have written it like that.” is an interpreter who, in my opinion, runs the risk of ruining the work and possibly looking ridiculous. Because effectively, it is not up to the interpreter to judge the composer, but rather to interpret; if an interpreter has this kind of attitude in relation to a given composer, or in relation to all composers in general, he or she will lend a constant attitude to their interpretation of different works, of diverse composers, of diverse styles, which will standardise the works of these composers through the perspective of the interpreter; or rather, composers end up by being reduced to the common denominator which is the interpreter’s perspective, which is a major problem.

My activity as a pianist has been practically zero, more or less since 1999. At the moment, I am pianist on “stand by”, shall we say... but that is my own doing. In fact, I have not had the time to dedicate to the piano with the assiduity which would be necessary in order to maintain regular work as a pianist because it requires a lot of work and I don’t have that kind of time on my hands; I have channelled my energies into other activities. So I am more involved in composition. I have debuted works practically every year, I have debuted or composed, it depends, but I have been permanently involved in composition. It is something that I can do after hours, for example, I don’t need, necessarily, to make a lot of noise, or, well, to have a piano in front of me in order to be able to compose.

There are composers who compose 30 or 40 pieces per year. I am not that prolific… I compose little, in fact, as I’m only composing for a limited time; or rather, I seclude myself and let us suppose that I am 15 days or a month writing a piece. I do it intensively and normally I can’t have a regime like that, because I really have to work. But also I just can’t compose homoeopathically, or rather, I can’t take a half hour a day to look at my papers and get on with it. I don’t have enough discipline to do that. I just can’t, not in half an hour, nor in two or three hours. I can’t reserve part of the day to do it and say: “now, from three until five, before tea, I’ll compose.”

Works

These two pieces with tape support are part of a group of around four other studies of electro-acoustic music; these two are part of a stage when I was very involved in electro-acoustic music and so I practically only composed in the studio. I became interested in the sonic universe of electro-acoustic music, by what you could achieve by combining synthesis with sound treatment with samplers. After this, and not including those pieces which we all do to practice certain techniques, the most important variations are of a piece which up to a point delineate what I wouldn’t call my language but rather a type of technique I use to organise pitch and which I used later on, a number of consecutive times, practically up to the Quintet. It is music which culminates with techniques derived from a certain serialism, if you like, with techniques linked to speculation over intervals or rather music which perhaps could find its origins in Varèse.

The Quintet breaks with or definitively ends with this phase; it is a piece of music which tends to eliminate all processes which I have used up to that point. Now we’re going to finish it, we’re going to break the tabula rasa, we’re going to clean the slate and start off in another direction. There had already been some attempts to recreate melodies in the Orchestra. In the Quintet I turned back… I finished with that. Not only for Orchestra, with Divertimento para Orquestra, but also in the two Insulares, in the two Octets, but I decided to stop using this. Later on, I again used what I did in the Orchestra, in the music I did for the film Terra Longe; this is much more descriptive music in the sense that I try to illustrate what is going on in the film, which is perfectly natural because there are moments of anguish, abandonment, and so on.

The trumpet octet (Games with Trumpets) is a work which sets out to explore, above all, spatialisation: what you can do with 8 trumpets set out in a half-moon shape and to what point it is possible to contaminate regions; or rather, if this crescent is divided into sections, to what point can you contaminate these various sections with the music which is created in adjacent sections. Therefore there are circular movements, movements of confluence, of dispersion, well...