It’s quite difficult to find the concrete, visible,
nerve point of my education, unless you go to my childhood and my contact with
my own family heritage, because there are traditions in the family that have a
string connection with folk music, specifically the rural bands that went
around the country for decades and decades. This was the case in my family too.
I remember perfectly during my childhood hearing the Lisbon tradition of films,
Fado and so on, because early on people from my family, originally from the
Minho, moved to Lisbon. I came into contact with music very early, with uncles
who sang Fado, and my earliest memories have to do with the sound, the voice of
classical Fado, Amália and Marceneiro. Another curiosity is the fact that there
was, unusually for a village, a pipe organ. So I was very much connected to the
music of the country, to the music sung at harvest and during other kinds of
work in the village, but also to liturgical music, because I am from an
extremely religious background, even if it’s an ambiguous and hybrid religion,
between the sacred and the profane, the pagan and the religious. And this
dichotomy certainly affects psychology, humanism and so on. Things began there,
with my childhood points of orientation, when I was 5, 6 or 7 years old. There
were people in the family that participated very seriously in these ceremonies.
I remember that my brothers and sisters, and also aunts had perfectly luminous
voices, which are the most beautiful memories of my childhood and youth. This
is, as it were, my genetic and cultural side, to which I can make reference in
connection with my origins.
Then later we find what I call the archetypes (using
the term very loosely), water, the sea, all those symbols that influence a life
and have to do with my father, who was a sailor. I’m from a rural background,
but my father joined the Navy very early, and so I also got used to sea things,
especially the departures from Viana do Castelo.
Classical music began when I went, at an early age, to
the College Seminary. Very early and in secret, I began to be interested in
music. Even if I hadn’t wanted it, there was choir singing, in which I took
part. I’ve got some absolutely fantastic memories of when I was 12, 13 or 14
years old, seeing pieces by Lassus being sung by boys of 10 or 16 or 17 years
of age. This influenced me greatly, because though it was functional and
circumstantial and non-professional, it had that erudite element... liturgical
music and that whole mixture. And there were already these mixed repertoires.
For anyone who is musical by nature, from the family,
as was my case, it was natural to absorb all this naturally and unconsciously.
I was 14 or 15 when I began to get involved with the harmonium, and as I didn’t
have any money, I began to contact my brothers who had emigrated, and could
find particular books in France, in Paris. As I was beginning to become aware
of the role of music and books, I used to ask for what my older colleagues were
playing. In fact, I began to fall in love with Paris very early, and it’s a
passion I still have. I remember that the first music book that they brought
back for me was “Les Classiques Favoris”, which was a collection of
arrangements of piece by Mozart, Glück, Schubert, Beethoven, Bach, etc. Even
those that are not normally studied at the Conservatory were there.
At a certain point I began to play harmonium, and have
some success as an organist. Why did I become an organist? If you ask me, I
can’t answer. Probably so that people could see me playing. I was chosen to be
an organist. And it was in that year, when I was 15, that I asked the solfeggio
teacher (the one who wrote those religious songs) to start a harmony course.
Nobody told me to ask for harmony lessons, or composition lessons, as I suppose
they were called! I still have the sheet with the first parallel chords. But I
suppose that was the only lesson. He was not very used to teaching, and didn’t
know much about it. He’d never studied composition in academic terms. But
what’s odd is me asking at that age to have a composition course... which I did
again two years later, this time with the composer Manuel Faria. And it was at
the age of 15, when I was studying harmonium, that I began to play piano and
move into… There was almost an osmosis between the need to create, of adapting
myself and begin creating as such, and actually compose. If you ask me whether
there’s a separation between one thing and the other, I don’t think so.
My education and the context in which I lived, in
which I was educated, not only family, but religious, institutional, academic,
was extremely dictatorial and sectarian in terms of taste and ideology. This
made a great impression on me because there was always that duality: this is
bad, this is good... There was that separation. And I’m very sure that between
the ages of 16 and 19 I thought that classical music was “that”! Everything
that wasn’t, was bad. I’m from the generation of the 1960s, and I remember
perfectly that the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all the rest were absolutely
proscribed. Years later, and still today, for some of my colleagues, it’s
absolutely unthinkable to listen normally to this music, as I’ve listened to it
for decades. So, I always had to deal with this barrier, not individually, but
in “confrontation” with it, and it impressed me that I managed to free myself
from it and gradually find a free space, of great freedom and above all of
great respect for others at all levels.
Even if I had kept this idea of separation between
cultures, European and non-European, with contact with Africa and other ways of
thinking, it would have disappeared. It seems that much of my music, especially
the melismatic aspect, the almost psalmodic quality, has to do with this
tradition and all this that I’ve just been talking about. Not only what I heard
during my childhood, from Gregorian chant, and so forth, but also the Arab and
Islamic music I heard in Africa.
But in the meantime there was an extraordinary leap,
which was my almost accidental period in the Faculty of Philosophy, and which
was vital.
When I came back from Guinea, I had been appointed
teacher of choral singing at the Sá de Miranda School, but as I arrived late,
they put in another teacher and I was excluded. I wrote letters to Marcelo
Caetano and was appointed in the following year. But while I was waiting, I
signed up to the Faculty of Philosophy. This influenced me for the whole of my
life, because I didn’t leave the following year, I did five years of
philosophy, and this is what impressed me: studying the great philosophers,
something I had already done but very superficially when I was 18, at school.
And the truth is that there were teachers who taught it properly. To study
Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and other great classics was, in principle, was to
agree with that which they were, though some tended to twist things and get
lost in the affinities there were with their own ideas. But I was also teaching
at the Conservatories of Braga and Oporto, and so studied freely, rather than
as a student who had to follow a course. I did it romantically like the
doctorates I did later in Paris
My music has an almost intuitive technique, not
exactly the techniques that are codified in the books, but a technique more
imbued with an almost mysterious and invisible thought. Essentially, it has to
do with intuition. It has to do with our own archetypes of self-organization.
And the origins are extremely varied, diverse, and at
times prolix. One of the things I most admire in composers such as Bach or
Beethoven is the unity. Even in the romantics, it’s unity, independent of
diversity.
In grand part, I agree with Pierre Boulez, whose works
indeed show an absolute connection... they’re works of steel: it’s absolutely
unthinkable in the work of Boulez that there be spurious elements, or foreign
elements in terms of vocabulary or language. I may have other reservations, but
it’s an extreme case of organicity, coherence and unity. For me, one of the
most interesting things in composition is diversity in unity, or rather, to
achieve unity from diversity. You can find this in my works. And there are axes
from which I try to attain this unification, this unity; I want the listener who
hears one of my works to have this notion of identity. For me, one of the most
important things in a work of art is that we may see through it the identity of
an individual. I don’t know if I achieve this, but I have things which I think
are very concrete and very palpable, and which come what I talked about just
now, my childhood... and of course, I’ve reflected on these things, because
they’re things I’ve been asked for years.
Questioning myself is a good vice that I have. Because
it’s also part of a clearly philosophical attitude... an almost childish thing.
Because children also spend their lives asking questions. This is the most
genuine part of the philosopher, and in that sense, I remain as I might have
been as a child. For me, the main point is having or not an identity in a work,
having or not some justification for the composer to take this into
consideration. Because you can see, in post-modernity, that people don’t take
this into account, but instead immediacy, the commercialization of art. For me
there’s an ethical problem with this: if I write a work, with full awareness
that is it almost a copy of A, B or C, then it’s theft, a kind of technician
copying a work of art. It’s like conferring legitimacy on the reproducers of
paintings by Da Vinci or Monet.
As to what regards to diversity, I think it’s
interesting that Pascal Dusapin, in a book that was published some months ago,
speaks of my music as a music of “mille couleurs”.
Concerning form... It’s interesting that many people
who talk about my works say that they have the feeling that, when a work is
finished, it had to finish at that point, which means that the form is very
precise. In other words, as I often say, there is a timing and a time of life
for things, even if it’s redundant to say timing and time of life... but the
truth is that the meaning of “timing” in English and “time of life” (tempo
de vida) in Portuguese is slightly different. This has to do
with perception. My works may seem informal, but in so far as the flow or flux
of sound is different from the music of Xenakis, for example, which is all very
much beaten, much of mine is very fluid. You could say that it brings together
something of Xenakis’s thought with that of Ligeti. It’s also a question of
what I said a few minutes ago... Arab music, Debussy, mediaeval music,
Gregorian chant and, of course renaissance polyphony, with all the implications
this has for texture. People consider this to be very important. Though I’ve
been very closely involved in and have taken part in, “gone into” African
drumming. There’s no flow, or rather, there is, but it’s micro-temporal, and
absolutely extraordinary things happen within it. People can’t imagine the
complete absence of predictability that there is in this drumming.
When people say that there’s a great diversity of
material in my music, it’s because there are axes that control this, and I’ve
been perfectly aware of this in recent years: it’s above all harmony that comes
from certain composers from certain traditions. If you look at my aggregates,
for orchestra or for solo instruments, you’ll find there a mixture of the
aggregates of Pérotin, of Machaut, of Stravinsky, of Debussy, of Xenakis.
There’s a kind of creation of a complex of intervals and aggregates that then
take their identity from others, which is what the others did. If you look at
Messiaen’s aggregates, and dissect them, you’ll find Debussy and Ravel. If you
look at certain of Boulez’s harmonies, you’ll find Skryabin there too. And I’m
not talking only about Répons, but about other works too.
Therefore, there’s an accumulation, a reservoir that allows everything that’s
going to be composed during the course of time impresses upon it a certain
organic strength. And it’s in this sense that one may have the feeling that
there is some unity, and even though there may seem to be a “polystylism”, it
is completely submerged in unity. A harmonic and melodic unity... Because
there’s an interval that gives rise to all this, the major second, and in some
cases there appear other intervals which have to do with the natural resonance
of the chords: the fourth, the octave, etc. in the end, all this music has to
do with techniques which I don’t explicitly use in a general way, except at the
time when I was passionately studying particular techniques, even mathematical
techniques.
All the work I did in my youth has to do with this.
Counterpoint, functional harmony, orchestral conducting and analysis with
Michel Tabachnik and Gilbert Amy, or the studies I did and the contact I had
with Pascal Dusapin and, above all, my reading. As well as this, during the
1970s, there was a radio programme called “Folclore do Mundo”, which I began to
listen to early on. They weren’t programmes of “world folk music”, but in fact
ethnomusicology, what today is called “world music”.
When I did television programmes, I used to bring to
them all my enthusiasm for the diversity of things. I did this, and at the same
time became even more enthused about what I was doing, about diversity. Not
only as regards European music, but also contemporary music. Throughout my work
as a teacher, my work in television and radio, I always took account of the big
contemporary aesthetic tendencies, from serialism to formalized music, the neo-classicists,
the postmodernists, and so on. I always took account of this even more marginal
music, or those that were on the border of classical and pop. Not just as a
public figure, because at that time I was talking to the general public, but I
did it with great conviction.
That was one thing. My work as a composer was another.
That’s why I say that as a pedagogue and cultural animateur
I am not free. As a composer, I am!
There’s something Pierre Boulez said in an interview
about the defining axes of a thought or a style; I asked him what exactly was
that axis, his great concern or great archetype, what he wanted to achieve in
his work: “I’d like my work to give the idea of a completely free but at the
same time completely structured work.” And this is what happens in his works;
they seem much more fluid and have nothing to do with Xenakis’s music, or with
Varèse or anyone else. Indeed, it’s an extremely structured music, in which
nothing is left to chance, but there is a fluctuation, you can say. And I asked
“And the form?” “The form is made by sweeping away, rubbing out and making
things reappear”. And in fact, it does seem that we are seeing the materials
appear and reappear. This happens somewhat in my music too.
There’s an example in a work of mine that’s recorded
in CD, Aquiris, which musicians from the Escola
Superior de Música de Lisboa, I think, told me they thought was improvised...
and it’s a work of 21 minutes’ duration! They thought it was improvised, and
every detail is worked out, note for note, from the beginning to the end, with
complex compositional techniques that cross with each other, or cross with the
thinking of some of the composers I’ve just mentioned
The creative process and communication with the
audience
One of the things that was also important, and that I
always liked in Xenakis, was the feeling that some works came about in a
disorderly way, but that little by little they would find their order. And
perhaps this influenced my works above all in the 1970s, which caused some
impact on listeners. It’s very likely that this happened (obviously) in an
intuitive way, through reading about and studying chance, not only on a
philosophical but a physical and mathematical level. There was even a time when
I thought it would be interesting to create confusion. At other times I wanted
above all to surprise.
It may even seem, and I sometimes tell myself, that
the audience doesn’t matter to me, but the truth is that I’m the first member
of the audience. But when I say this, I’m thinking of the audience, on the
principle that the work will be performed; but it may also not have to do with
the audience, it may be the idea itself. If there’s an audience, I’d like it to
be surprised by this. The idea at the beginning of Oceanos
was this one: as though a catastrophe had happened in the room.
I think that my music is slightly... I don’t want to
say sweetened, because it isn’t for most people, but I try to have this sensory
pleasure myself. I think that this pleasure has been transmitted to the audience.
But it’s not so that this perhaps sweeten the audience, that I write this kind
of music. I do it because it has to with a tradition and sensitivity; but when
I say tradition, I’m talking about the tradition of my education, and my own
sensoriality and sensitivity.
Indeed, there is a strong intention to communicate,
and I am split between what for me is essential, my inner freedom, my freedom tout
court, that which is intrinsic in me, and then social
reality. I know that, in principle, my piece will be played because if I’m
writing it its usually because somebody has asked for it. But many pieces I’ve
written not because somebody asked me to, but out of necessity. One of the
things I’ve tried to impress on my scores for many years is the involvement of
the public. There’s a freedom that I give to the audience, of not listening to
my music. And I have very little propensity for putting my own music forward,
because I don’t feel like it. I think that this should be something done by
other people. I have above all a feeling of respect for the freedom of others.
It’s that above all. I think it’s a very personal thing, very intimate. If the
work is done, I am happy, if it’s not, I’m happy anyway, there’s no problem. At
least I’m happy to know that I don’t hurt other people with a product that is
of no interest to them and that goes against their feelings, at least I’m saved
from that.
One presupposition, and one of the aesthetic, human
and psychological principles, is the involvement, the circularity of sound,
whatever the form it takes. So, there’s a need for empathy and sympathy with
the audience; this is a fact, and the first fundamental aspect of my music, but
it’s in the same hierarchical plan of my individual freedom. So when I write a
work, I think about this.
When I have to write a piece, it passes through my
brain in the form of ghosts. Real ghosts, written, visual filaments, sonic and
visual ones.
And that’s how things happen. Of course, many times
things happen at the piano, but not always. Yesterday, for example, I was in a
café writing on a white paper table cloth (I love white paper) and writing a
large part of the piece I’m working on now for bass clarinet. That is, things
happen in a chaotic way, but order from the point of view of the idea. Then
come the principles that are archived in my brain, that will control and manage
all the rest. The rest is the work of creating motives, intervals, harmonies,
and when (and this is in the explanatory text for the work), it’s a single work
for a solo instrument, there are problems of harmony, of orchestration, or
spatial distribution. Independent of whether there are or are not electronic
means, or electroacoustic or digital. But then these materials interweave,
either melodic or rhythmic fragments, or simple strips of sound, as it were,
like modelling or modulating the sound. And things happen in this way, as
though I were writing a symphony, had a motive and from this were generating
the rest. Here it’s not a motive that gives rise to the rest, but a harmonic,
melodic, aesthetic world, which is the composer’s background.
After writing Ncàãncôa and Il
tempo dell’Acqua or writing this work... Basically it’s a
kaleidoscope. There are various characters who speak the same language, but
each one speaks for a certain time, and each has his own autonomy. But it’s
true that there are links between them, or between them and the other
characters.
For me, the note doesn’t exist. And when I talk about
harmony, and melody, I never mean it as an end, as an objective but as a means.
Harmony was always used in accordance with certain principles and certain
historical and aesthetic precepts of the various periods. I still say that
nowadays, in my particular case, it’s essential to have a harmonic system or
harmonic systems, but never with the idea of using the harmony as an end in
itself, as an objective. For others it may be so, and one may hear the harmony
as such. But the truth is that to me it seems to avoid the question. When I
speak about rhythm, about melody, about timbre, when I speak about the melody
of the note, I always have as the basic objective the hedonism of sound. The
enjoyment of sound in itself. When I say the sound in itself, I also say the
individual in himself, his interior and my interior. So when I’m really writing
music, except circumstantially, harmony doesn’t interest me, but I think in
these terms. I can even say that in writing, my fascination is in obtaining a
sound, rich in itself, and harmony, melody and rhythm, whatever is the
operative dimension, which leads to the enjoyment of a sonority that, by
analogy, may be called timbre (though timbre is something else). It’s a
physical phenomenon, as we know. But indeed, in the last instance, what
concerns me in specifically musical terms is the sound in itself. It’s the
enjoyment of the sound itself, and the note has no meaning. I have to deal with
the note because I have to write it down and have to make use of it as a means,
but it is a means nevertheless. In this sense, I am in complete agreement with
what Varèse said: that musicians thought a great deal about notes and very
little about sound. But that’s already a prophetic vision of electroacoustics
and computer sound, etc. whatever happens, I’m interested in communicating with
the listener through sonority, through pleasure itself. Basically, it’s the
immediate pleasure of sound, and not by means of labels. For me, a piece has a
profile, or several profiles, or curves, about which I often speak. And the morphology
of a work, or the morphologies, or the parts that make it up, are important.
But always as a means, never as an end. Even if it’s difficult to disentangle
ourselves and set up boundaries between the note and the sound, or between
harmony and sonority, a chord and sonority, or an aggregate and a sonority, a
rhythm and a tempo. It is always difficult. But in a work of five or ten
minutes, in which everything is worked out efficiently, it is possible that, in
a synthetic way, the listener may capture these values, sound, sonority, the
supra-something and not the banality of the material.
But I think that when one is writing electronic
music... (and for this reason, one of the disciplines that I proposed to the
Escola Superior de Música was electroacoustic orchestration.. thinking of
orchestration a la Debussy or Mahler) all the archetypes are there... all these
cerebral ingredients, all that technique... that’s why I define it as the
technique of independence of entities. And this goes for Berio’s Sinfonia,
for an Ockeghem Mass, a symphony by Webern. So for me, what is important in the
midst of this proliferation of intentions and paths that a piece undergoes is
that, in the last instance, the sound in itself be the communicator, that it be
the link between the composer and the spectator.
There is some kind of integration, and I was always
concerned with this, not obsessively, but pacifically. I have, perhaps, a
concern with integrating everything, the whole. I’ve always been interested in
the visual side of things, especially with the plastic arts, with which I had
to do from early on... apart from talking to nature... I always had that
connection, and perhaps my origins are there. This is why I am sometimes afraid
when I speak in audiovisuals and multimedia, of how interesting all this is to
me. And to make it clear that the works that may include these means may be
less abstract works, less musical and more hybrid. I tried to make sure that
the works had their own value, even if they had ingredients or participation of
audiovisual means. This is a point of honour. Because there’s the danger of
being accused of not being a musician, or not being a good composer, and so I
try to defend myself and always wanted to maintain a certain distance from
this.
So when I’m writing a piece, it’s important to know,
even if it’s conceived around some visual dimension, that it stands up
musically as well.
Even Polígonos em Som e Azul…
which was done at the Gulbenkian Encontros de Música Contemporânea. I have
another piece that’s interesting, and was also done there, and has the
peculiarity of having spaces in the actual score in which the slides are
inserted; this was something new. The slides actually appear in the score...
the slides are not yet there, but it’s a technical question. And there’s a very
extreme case, which I can’t claim as the starting
point for all these other experiments, Toiles I for 48
strings, if I;m not mstaken; what is curious is that I wrote it thinking of Portuguese
orchestras, something playable, but it was never done. After I returned from
Paris, all the Portuguese orchestras began to die out, and the number of
musicians decreases a few months or a year later... through retirement, or
death. Well...
It was conceived as a sound work, as a sound space and
plastic space. It has a series of rolls in the form of parchments with a number
of scores, linear, in three dimensions, with five colours in order to separate
the five families of strings, etc. So this work was conceived and written in
traditional score. It recalls somewhat Ligeti’s Lontano,
or Atmosphères or Xenakis’s Metastasis.
In terms of the sound mass, the thinking is completely different. The principle
is a cluster that in fact isn’t, because it was worked upon. But it was
conceived, in fact, as though I could be at the same time writing on the staves
and at the same time drawing it and coming up with something like Kansinsky or
Mondrian or somebody else. It’s a kind of white panel from which illuminations
are made on the score...
But the work is extreme in that, as it wasn’t possible
to write in two completely different notations, I did it so that another person
could do so later and obtain a visually interesting result, which would always
be arguable. And the idea was that in performing the work, it could appear on
canvas. So I did it as though on canvas and my collaborator wrote the plastic
score of Toiles I. Essentially it’s a graphic score.
There are three works, as it were, in the same score: the orchestral score, the
visual score; and then the computer score written on the basis of that roll, of
those transparent pages that the UPIC system allowed. So this is an extreme
case of the intimate and organic relationship between sound and image, musical
gesture and plastic gesture.
All this has to do with a taste for the theatrical
element of it. Even if it’s a theatrical element that’s intimate or intimist, I
need to project outside and create, shall we say, characters. One day, I gave Oceanos
in the open air, in the old cavalry battalion in Viana do Castelo, and there
was indeed theatre in the music, the characters were the audience. The
characters were the images that we created with projectors on the trees, and so
on. There’s an internal need... I’ve never been asked, but if one day I were
asked for an opera, I don’t know what I’d write. Would it be a traditional
opera? Would it be a show that was partly an opera? And there’s something else
that’s very important: the text, the word. The word always had a primordial
importance in my music. The voice appears very frequently.
In some cases there is not even any text. But there
are others in which I deconstructed the text or the words; both Tapisserie I
and Tapisserie II are based on this. On another
occasion I used, on the basis of the words, Sol-oeils,
which are also deconstructed in Momentos-Memórias I.
There are certainly situations in which I use the text as an instrument. As is
the case in other composers, such as Luigi Nono... But here it’s yet in another
way. And if you ask me what function it has, the voice functions obviously as
though it were a second clarinet. There are some very interesting
experiences... One day I thought that I was hearing a voice, and I looked more
than once... it wasn’t the voice, it was the clarinet that was playing. I mean,
it was the clarinet that was playing its own part, but I was hearing the voice
as well. This has to do with the construction. It has to do, shall we say, with
something very concrete, which I call monads. For a long time I called these
intervals monads. They’re abstract things, but in this case they are not
abstract things but intervals, which pass intentionally from instrument to
instrument, one voice to another in different situations, and this creates illusions.
These threads that connect, even in terms of space, the clarinet or the flute,
the flute and the voice, intentionally... create this link, and above all this
“dis-identification” of the instrument. It can happen. Often I hear my works
and it seems as though I’m hearing a viola and I’m hearing a trombone and it’s
not. We have these illusions very often, and this happens in my works. It has
to do with one of the ideas I’ve always loved: visual and auditory paradoxes.
The writing of the senses and the wherefores of
existence
I think that the work is always a metaphor of verbal
language. And therefore, everything that happens, even in musical vocabulary in
a general way, is used as analogy, always stealing terminology from the other
arts. When we say that something has light, we can say it metaphorically, when
we speak of the city of lights, whether it be ancient Athens or modern Paris,
it is a metaphor. So, if I consider a work to be luminous, if there are
passages of Ravel, Debussy and Mozart and we say they’re luminous, it means
that they have light, but it’s still a metaphor. How is this linked to sound,
colour, timbre? I think that there is always an intimate relationship between
them, but always metaphorical. Real light is something that is made up of waves
or twilight or something like that... and sound is the same. But then, if I use
light in my work, in a show, it may be redundant, it may be a tautology...
In the score we can find these references, even though
they be provisional and subjective, but the intention is there. Always. It may
not be the whole work, but if I’m creating a sound, if I’m working... During
the last few days, I’ve been working on the sound of the bass clarinet: I don’t
like them because of the colour, and the piano destroys me completely, destroys
the sound of the clarinet, so I try to absorb it. And I can call this timbre,
sonority, colour, taste, sensoriality, degree, exactly, the texture... I speak
very often of the tactile. I mean, the continuum of my sound, the continuum of
my discourse, has to do with this making tactile, this sensitivity, this
property which sound has, of being tactile, but it’s a metaphor. If it’s
tactile it’s because people taste it, or feel it or touch it or enjoy it. But
it’s still a metaphor, there’s always in the end that concern with being
involved, the totalization of music in the individual. And people have felt
this... Essentially, there’s an almost hypnotic intent; and if I want to say
that hypnotic means magic, it has to do with African and non-European music
that stuns me sensorialy and mentally.
It’s this hypnotic aspect that’s always fascinated
me... the magic side of things. Not exactly the occult or speculative side...
that never interested me much, though I have read about it and there are many
things in my works that also have an occult side, of symbology, numerology and
so on. This also happens. But more as a joke than as something that means
anything to me. It’s more a question of feeling that there’s a rule, that there
are internal norms which give a different consistency and other readings,
because I like the polysemic side of History, the multiplicity of meanings.
Basically, I’ve always been interested in the work as a challenge and as a
possibility of questioning things and people and myself, and not as a work
(unless of circumstance) which has any philosophical concerns, or without any
human or whatever concern, simply to please the audience of festival X or Y.
If I chased a Utopia, I’d be a disillusioned man as
regards the world in which I’ve lived for decades. I don’t chase anything! I
live simply with pleasure, with people I like and who like me, and I make
music. Whether they ask me, whether they pay me or not. If they ask me for a
piece and say there’s no money, but I think it justified me writing the music,
then I write the music. If they pay a little bit, I write the music... In fact,
much of the music I’ve written was unpaid. If I feel like writing a piece of
music, even if I have other things to do, I’ll do it. And very often I’ve done
things from which I have earned absolutely nothing, and have left to one side
other things which were commissioned, for other reasons, not material, or
because it was more important to do the things that had a more pressing
deadline. And I could put it to one side and work on the other thing. So music
for me is a kind of investment in my own existence. And my existence is made up
of the pleasures of books, of people, of the daily round, of conviviality, and
fulfilling my internal obligations, independent of any institutional
obligations I may have.
Why do I exist? That I don’t know, but here I am. I’m
an inevitability of the universe... a probability in billions in infinity. I’m
a musician, which I think is also fate... a fate of the family, because my
whole life was anti-music. I mean, even when I studied as an adolescent and
young man... I was persecuted as a student... I failed my sixth year because I
was a musician and people thought I spent a lot of time on music. Now, in that
system, especially in the sixth year, I couldn’t play for more than 20 minutes
a day. So it was impossible, there was something else, an intuition and
something innate.
And for about five years, between about 17 and 21 or
22, or 16 and 20, 21, I worked intensively not as a pianist but as an
organist... and I also did my own internal research, always in hiding. Later,
on military service, always outside the timetable set down. In the army, in
Guinea, I could only study piano outside service hours. And one day I was caught,
and a Major threatened to send me to the bush. And he wasn’t even from my unit,
had no direct command over me. So, I did everything possible to do mad things,
because while I was subject to military command, I also managed in spite of
everything to be undisciplined and provoke the order of things, even in Africa.
So it was fate: I’m a musician by fate. And I’m pleased to be so, because I
think some people have pleasure in having me as a friend and musician.
Things have moved from nothing to everything, and
inside from everything to nothing; during decades there was a complete
insensitivity to culture and music. if there are composers who are part of the
history of music, even the classics of the first half of the 20th
century, it’s because they were survivors, those who were fated. Or because
they came from families that justified their existence. That’s not my case,
because coming from the rural provinces... somebody with no financial
possibilities at all; it’s something of a mystery that I’m here. One day they
asked me this on the radio... if that’s the path I followed, how come I’m a
contemporary musician!? And how did I come to Xenakis. There are bizarre things
that would perhaps benefit from a deeper analysis... I’m thinking of Armando
José Fernandes, Luís de Freitas Branco, etc. In spite of everything, they were
part of a context. The truth is that in overall terms, and in terms of the
overall culture of the country, they were barely given any recognition. And in
such a fashion that they are known but their works are not published, with some
exceptions, known in restricted circles, such as the radio. With Joly Braga
Santos, who was at the radio; at least there he had a centre that he could, if
not develop, then maintain. And in spite of everything, he was from the later
generation, and received more attention.
Today things have changed greatly in terms of
quantity. Especially in the 1970s, with the reforms of the schools, and then
the Revolution of 25th April, there was a huge proliferation of
contradictory and paradoxical forces and today there are many practitioners of
music and many schools. The truth is that very often they confound us in terms
of quality. What I mean is that there are, indeed, many musicians being
supported, and many people who are perfectly integrated.... this also has much
to do with integration in certain circles, in certain centres of power:
political, economic, religious. Normally one doesn’t hear much about geography,
but it’s one of the things I place first. From the Douro upwards it’s one
thing, and from the Douro downwards it’s another. And there are other barriers:
from the Mondego downwards is one thing, and from the Mondego upwards it’s
another. In reality, this kind of thing makes opening up difficult, but the
opening up over the years has been huge. Now, mutatis mutandis,
it’s a little like what happened before, especially if we look at individuals,
entities, at figures who want to get on and can’t do it. But we have to fight.
I think that things changed in a fantastic way, during the last twenty years.
There were periods of chaos, periods of greed, periods of injustice, periods of
asymmetry, but I think there always were.
Ethics, a word to which I attribute great importance,
don’t exist very much. Deontology also doesn’t exist very much. And so there’s
a kind of terrorism in many situations, a kind of jungle, of
“sauve-qui-peut”... it’s something like that... and anyone who says otherwise,
should prove it!
This is part of the archetype of the Portuguese
spirit... it is the Portuguese spirit! What’s interesting is that when we look
at old texts, especially writers from the 19th century, which we
often see even in today’s press cuttings... people are melancholy, they’re sad,
they’re pessimistic. I’m not! I want to see things optimistically. I know that
the country is pessimistic by nature, unless when we reach the madness and the
extremes as happened now in the Euro 2004 football finals. I didn’t suffer from
it much, because in spite of all I’m a realist, I like football a lot, but
there were sufficient numbers of disagreeable cases that I avoided it. But
everything that happened is symptomatic of a spirit that’s completely
contradictory and unbalanced, that’s clear. And so, I have, by nature, a strong
component of optimism, but the way in which I react to adversities or to these
things in relation to the arts, as I’ve said before, is very natural, and I
don’t worry excessively; either it’s congenital optimism, internal, or it’s an
optimism and a realism, perhaps a realism acquired through life.
