Entrevista a Amílcar Vasques Dias / Interview with Amílcar Vasques Dias
2003/Jul/29
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INTERVIEW
WITH AMÍLCAR VASQUES DIAS (complete version)
Education
and first steps
My initial
instruction was at the seminary.
There I was able to learn piano and harmonium, an instrument used in the
services. Later – and I’m talking
about the time I spent studying philosophy, at 16, 18 years old, and later,
theology – I began to learn traditional harmony, and worked directly with Canon
Dr Manuel Faria (to whom I dedicated Pranto, even before returning from Holland). At 20 or 21 years old, in spite of some
hesitation, my life was already too linked to music for me to give it
up... And so I went to the
Conservatory in Oporto, where, before my military service, I did the first
years of the piano course.
Everything I knew up to that point was “unofficial”. Then I took the piano diploma, after
finishing my military service, in 1974, which also coincided with 25th April
1974 and with the desire for a certain freedom, that came from elsewhere. And then, with a grant from the
Gulbenkian Foundation, I went to Holland, where I was able to extend my stay
with another grant, from the Secretariat of State for Culture, until I was able
to establish myself on a more permanent basis. I stayed for fourteen years. I was at the conservatory even
after having begun working. I
taught at the Rotterdam School of Music for eight years. I lived in a number of cities in
Holland, in Nijmegen, on the Germany border, in The Hague, in Rotterdam and in
Amsterdam for the last two years, before coming back.
It was indeed a very stimulating
environment, with something going on everywhere. The fact of gradually becoming part of the commissioning
system was also a certain stimulus...
And as for the teachers I had, I was lucky that they were not
narrow-minded people. Everything
was possible, whether influenced by jazz, rock, serialism, street music,
protest music (as in the case of Louis Andriessen) or minimalism. Whatever it was, what was important was
that it have a force of expression thought out as an objective, and that it be
something with its feet on the ground, something solid. My teacher of electroacoustics was a
noted jazz musician in Holland, a saxophonist. When I arrived, in 1974, I was asked to orchestrate Grândola
Vila Morena. That was my first
orchestration project in Holland – and still today I received arranger’s
royalties as a result! A work that
came out of this process, and which was done recently – it’s not known in
Portugal because it isn’t easy to put on – is called Ser Rana. It’s a work for ten accordions, string
quartet and vibraphone. A composer
who at the time had a commissioning scheme suggested that I write for a group
of accordionists called D’Accord Ensemble. They were incredibly good players! I was enthused by the necessity to learn about the
accordion, of mixing it with a string quartet and a percussion instrument of my
choosing – I chose the vibraphone.
Meanwhile, I returned to Portugal. The title of the piece, Ser Rana, refers to the croaking
of thousands of frogs in the River Vouga and the River Águeda, between March
and July, 24 hours a day, right opposite the house where I lived at the
time. There are sounds that the
accordion makes which have similarities to that of the frogs – and my idea was
to blend the strings, the accordion, and allow the frog, the croak of the frog,
to direct me towards a piece with a great deal of energy, which gradually
stops. It’s a decrescendo... After some months of the continual
croaking of frogs, one requires silence... The silence I now have here, which
brings other influences to my way of composing, and also to my way of living
and appreciating things.
I had to study, and I had to impart
a certain swing to what I was doing, which wasn’t classical music. And the fact of hearing people play
also gave me the opportunity of discovering what I liked or disliked, or
internalizing it. After a certain
time, I began to feel that new elements had been absorbed and which had become
part of me and of my attitude towards the production of sound. And so, after six years, my way of
playing piano or composing has to do with a certain attitude which is no longer
a “classical” attitude, but a mixture of different attitudes related to
different musical genres. Indeed,
the whole thing is a progression – but the root, and this is what is
interesting, is always there. My
years at the seminary, studying the lines of plainchant, the simplicity, the
austerity of the unison, the non-polyphonic – all that’s present in my
music. And there’s also a part
that comes from my study of harmony, romantic harmony, rich and full, which I
tried to reconcile with the nakedness of the chant line. The tendency I had for rich harmony
gradually disappeared, and what I find today, especially during the last four
years – for example, in my project 12 Nocturnos em Teu Nome – is simplicity. It’s simplicity because I really live
in silence almost 24 hours a day, in the nakedness, the spareness of the
countryside.
A little while ago, while I was in the car, I looked
at S. Miguel de Machede from the left side. Now, it’s all burnt and dry, but up there on the hill,
there’s a tree, a holm-oak – that made me think about what counterpoint is. Counterpoint is that holm-oak in
relation to that huge, dry stretch.
And all this has to do with my past, with the simplicity of a line, with
a great strength and expressiveness, with Gregorian chant. Also mirrored in the past is my
tendency to write for choirs: I always sang in choral groups, in the seminary,
from the age of 12. For many
of the scores by my teacher, Dr Manuel Faria, I copied out the choir parts,
which was also a way of learning outside the classes. All this, gradually, and after my time in Holland, came to
be reflected in which I’m involved in now. I make use of that which is simplest, approaching in a less
traditional, less classical fashion the traditional concepts of composition,
melody and harmony, which are also sonic planes, which are counterpoint –
internalized and seen in the context of my life now, especially from the time
when I came to live here in the Alentejo.
That’s from 1996 to now – more than eight years have passed.
When one lives in the Alentejo, 24
hours a day, the first thing one feels is the silence – which contains
sounds. The sounds of the silence
here are completely different from the sounds of any probable silence in
Lisbon, for example. Here sound is
felt as sound, but I know there are distant or less distant sounds of a barking
dog, or a bell belonging to a sheep that’s struck somewhere a few metres away,
on that hill, or the sound of the crickets, which is a constant sound, or a
more distant one, of the frogs or toads: all this is part of a constant silence.
I endeavour to make the idea of
silence present, so that it can be internalized by the listener. I usually move between the computer and
the piano, whether I’m working on a piece for orchestra or for piano. And there are almost no sketches.
Imagine that I choose an
arpeggiated chord (E-G-B), and a gesture, a little note, C – I’m referring to
the first chord of the 1st Nocturne, called Geografia de Rebeldes. How do I get anything out of such
banal, simple, tonal material? And
the point is not to do with its being tonal or not, whether it has an
expressive presence so that the development of this chord can be
interesting... It may develop
itself in terms of dynamics, for example, of the register in which it is
played. All these are ways I find
to make something out of something simple, something stripped of other
associations. The main thing is
not listening and thinking “I hear something minor”, the main thing is managing
to attribute the expressive force which I try to give to the chord. In the same way that in an atmosphere
in which nothing is happening, in the midst of silence, which, if it happens,
is incredibly strong, because one hears the sound of that silence. Sometimes, one or two sounds that appear
as fulcral points in a piece, if they’re interesting, should appear and be
heard repeatedly. And they’re not
alone, they are enveloped in other sounds that appear, by virtue of their
strength, in order to create counterpoint. In the same way that, if you look up there, what you see are
stretches of land, most of them dry, burnt, yellow. It’s the golden Alentejo, for three or four months,
until the end of September. But
that image we see now, everything that exists there, is that stretch which
dominates, which is dry, without any visual interest. Everything else that occurs, in this case the holm-oaks, has
an incredible strength. And then
there’s all that has to do with the actual geography of the land, which suggest
to me counterpoints, polyphonies and inclinations. I see and compare this evolution during the course of the
whole year.
Yes, tonal language. The song on Manuel Alegre’s poem - “Ir
a Évora descobrir o branco” – does not have a greater expressive load on account of
being or not being tonal. The
whole connotation of tonality is of another kind, and that connotation is right
there. I believe that it is
possible to do different things with tonal elements – even in this, Louis
Andriessen’s influence reassured me, calmed me down. I mean, in 1974, if had been here in Portugal, in the
atmosphere and the mentality which surrounded the official teaching of music in
Portugal, I would not have had the courage to make an arrangement of Grândola
Vila Morena, or of Canto Alentejano... In order for somebody to do it, it would be necessary to
have a background, as was the case with Lopes-Graça. But unfortunately, I had not been educated for that. Therefore, it was only in Holland that
I discovered the melodic and harmonic richness of some traditional Portuguese
music, influenced by the open, creative and inventive attitude of some of my
teachers and atmosphere... During
the eight years in which I taught in Rotterdam, I had pupils from the most
varied cultural backgrounds: children of Portuguese parents (emigrants),
children of Cape Verdian parents (Portuguese speaking), children of
ex-colonials from Indonesia, people of different religions, different social
layers, different cultures. This
taught me to place our culture in context somewhat. The experience with these people, the observation of their
cultural conscience, gave me courage to do the same. When I returned to Portugal, fortunately I had already lost
many of these scruples as to whether I should or should not make arrangements
of write music for José Afonso’s poems.
It was a chance to grow in various directions.
How does your thinking as
a composer work? Which techniques
do you use?
I listen a great deal to what I
want to do. I work a great deal at
the piano, and try out a great deal of material in constant interaction with my
desire to organize something in order to express something. For example, if I take three notes,
which are, or are not, more or less interesting for being played successively
or because they make an interval of a minor third... I’m at the piano and I’m testing the strength that these
three notes have, ascending or descending, and it’s of no interest to me to say
that it’s a minor third, since I’m making tonal music. No, what interests me are those notes,
because it’s they that have fallen under my fingers. Probably I’ve been thinking about them for several days,
while I’m watering, while I’m checking to see how the fruits are doing, while
I’m feeding my dogs, or while I’m simply looking out over there – I’m always
digesting small, simple materials.
When I come to the piano, I take those three little notes up again, and
I position them in different octaves.
What interests me is that these three notes, with their timbre and all
the resonance that the piano has and that the performer will confer upon them,
bring out certain specific pitches, intensities, registers and timbres, within
a movement and a certain speed, within a certain rhythm or a certain
duration. I am making a line which
is already outside the canons of a traditional melodic line, because it works
with other parameters of composition, and I know that now I need a
counterpoint. But I’m not going to
make a counterpoint that will be obvious in the sense of these three notes – my
counterpoint will perhaps be of the same kind if I repeated these three notes
in three different octaves, ascending or descending (I prefer descending). I’ve already decided that the note I
will choose for make this counterpoint will have characteristics different from
these in terms of register, of intensity and of timbre and duration. And this is the note that I will
gradually justify to myself, because I found it almost intuitively.
It’s perhaps the mixture between
what’s intuitive and what’s exploratory that gives me the material, but perhaps
not all of it, for my pieces. I
was never one to compose long pieces – the longest is about thirteen minutes,
for electroacoustics, piano and flute.
One can say that the ideal is somewhere between six and ten minutes –
the pieces of about two or three minutes’ duration make up cycles. If you look, for example, at the piece
about plants, of which Tojo, Glicínia, and Cardos are part, and a number
of other pieces, they are about five minutes long. Longer projects, such as the 12 Nocturnos, make up about thirty
minutes of music. Lume de Chão is made up of
twenty-four memories – or moments, or preludes, or nocturnes. I tend to call them nocturnes, because
I do actually prefer to work at night, and that’s real – perhaps because
there’s more silence still. But
they’re pieces of short duration, in which I have an idea to get out in that
time, and it’s of no interest to say anything further.
The expression of something appears
after weeks and weeks of doubt, of insisting and changing. I have to conclude that the piece is
expressing the logic that I found in it.
In Geografia de Rebeldes, the harmony ends up
being tonal and functional – but not tonally. It ends up being functional from the point of view of timbre
– of contrast, of counterpoint, from the point of view of another sound, after
the whole introduction, built practically on one chord. The idea here was also connected to an
image, or to a text which makes one associate images...
I’ve used some poetry about the
Alentejo, by poets such as Manuel Alegre, Manuel da Fonseca and José
Saramago. I think that I currently
feel close to the realities transmitted by this poetry, by this organization of
words and sounds. If I think of
the verse “irei a Évora descobrir o branco” (“I will go to Évora to discover
white”), I know what it means, I’ve lived it. I don’t mean that when I wrote Demain, dès l’Aube, on a poem by Victor
Hugo, I was not honest and sincere.
But with Gabriela Llansol, there was a tremendous involvement with this
place and with the other participants in the projects – the pianist and the
actor. Though they are twelve
excerpts from twelve different books, we had the same experience, aligning Gabriela
Llansol’s idea of 12 Nocturnos em Teu Nome (12 Nocturnes in Your Name) – a title she herself
devised – with the musical framework I proposed for a project conceived in
twelve segments. I read books of
this kind, of strong prose, intimate, cryptic, autobiographical – poetry or prose,
I really don’t know, but it’s always very difficult to fathom. And there’s always an idea, which is
the first, and that often derives from the title itself... Rebellion, for me, was to take
something extremely simple and make of it a piece of music that would be interesting
to listen to.
What purpose does intuition have in the music of
Iannis Xenakis? It has a fundamental purpose, because, in spite of all his
calculations, it’s precisely through intuition that he decides what is or is
not interesting. This attitude,
about which he spoke in one of his workshops which I attended, made me think
that I don’t have to search for very much if I know that my intuition has a lot
to give. And one of the things
that’s connected to my intuition is the way I work when composing, which is
basically visual. I visualize many
things that I hear. One of my
teachers used to say that I had a filmic way of composing, that I composed like
somebody making a film. I believe
that, for me, the fact of composing makes me work normally, intuitively and
instinctively, with images – and this image is linked to a memory of an
enthusiasm or to the expression of something. It may be the expression of tenderness, of surprise, of
peace, of fear... I have here
behind me a photograph of a scalaris, a very
common snake in these parts. In
fact, I wrote a piece called Elaphe scalaris. I consider these scalaris
to be musical monuments, because I know they have music. That organization of scales suggests
lines to me, in the same way that, looking at the hill over there, in eight
months’ time, when lines or bands of mauve lilies, I will begin to see that the
hill also has music. I still don’t
know how I’ll transmit this, how I will organize these images in music. And so the fact that I like to make this
connection with words helps me to enrich my musical expression. The fact of connecting myself to an
image fulfils the same function.
I know the next thing I do will be
connected to the cycle of trees and fruits, and will be a multimedia
piece. I’ve been photographing all
the fruit trees here on the hill, from the end of August to the end of
November. I’d like to share this
observation with someone who will never have the opportunity to see how an
apple tree blooms or blossoms in March or April. And, the way the blossom comes, which will give rise to the
fruit. Similar to a piece which
has to do with the first rains of September and with the activity of
amphibians, using dozens of oak-apples, painted green and yellow, which are the
colours of the toads and frogs. I
put them all inside the piano, and play with the projection of hundreds of
images – images which deal with respect for life, and are therefore
educational. The interest here is
also in the display of energy of the performer, at the piano, for example. Thinking about music has to do with all
this, with energy and learning based on observation.
It always takes me a long time to
digest things. I have doubts for a
long time, and so I compose in short stretches, always closely connected and
interacting with my space here. I
never spend more than an hour composing, at night. I’m always going out, coming back in, picking up a leaf and looking
at its structure... and seeing that it contains music! Why? Because it’s different. And feeling things, the touch of things. All this is constantly swirling round,
it has to do with sensitivity, tenderness, gratitude – gratitude in the
broadest sense, gratitude for what’s around us, the trees, which only ask for
water to live. This process is
part of my way of doing things, of my sensitivity...