It’s difficult to answer, because most of the time one is not exactly
aware of how things began. Mainly, in my case, because although my mother
played piano well and gave home recitals which delighted me, I was not born
into a family of professional musicians. This was possibly something that,
from my earliest childhood, motivated me to develop my interest in music. But
very early on (not that early, because I was not a precocious child), I decided
that my life would be that of a composer, in the first place. And in some way
I subordinated everything to composition. I studied various instruments, but
did master any of them: I studied classical guitar, piano, oboe, cor anglais, a
bit of double bass… But all this was in relation to conducting an orchestra.
Indeed, at the beginning I was interested in keeping up both activities
professionally, conducting and composition. At a certain point, the scales
overbalanced, and I became much more interested in composition and in a way
conducting came to be a facet of composition. Let me explain a little better:
my real compositional learning was by means of the study of scores, the
analysis of scores by other composers. And conducting gave me an exceptional
means of being in contact with these works – and therefore analysing them,
studying them, and also conducting them. These days, my interest is in
composition, also because for some years I have been practically unable to
conduct because of the deterioration of my vision; I have very poor sight, and
find it difficult to read scores. I even had to cancel concerts –
unfortunately, important concerts that appeared more recently at this later
stage of my life, and that I had to cancel, because it was impossible – I don’t
mean that I can’t conduct the odd concert – but it has to be under two
conditions: either the programme has to be quite staid, let’s say, without the
problems of rhythmic and metrical complexity normally to be found in contemporary
works, or I have to be invited a long time before, which gives me the chance to
memorize as much as possible, because it’s impossible to work now just be
reading.
Because of this, lately I’ve been
concentrating much more on composition, which doesn’t mean that my sight
problems have not also affected my composition, because I have great difficulty
in copying scores, in writing them, and so on. In a sense I followed the path
I chose in music – I’m not saying that I reached the level I wanted, but that’s
another story: but I followed the path I wanted, and have no regrets.
I need to go back a bit further to
explain something about musical life in Portugal in my day, when I was young…
At that time, composition teaching at the Conservatory was extremely weak.
There was practically no teaching of composition, but compositional techniques
of the past. As you know, at the National Conservatory, which was the
establishment with which I had most to do, composition was taught at one point
by Armando José Fernandes and Croner de Vasconcelos.
Now in these classes, and with all
due respect to their memory, these teachers were not exactly adepts of the most
advanced methods of composition, and so we didn’t even talk about – or only
very little – the new trends. We’re talking about the 1950s, beginning of the
1960s. There was a certain lack of information… including that which these
teachers didn’t like, such as the Viennese School (in its entirety)… they
didn’t like it, but they also didn’t know it well. And this was a problem. In
terms of composition… there was classical baroque harmony; tonal counterpoint,
fugue, and then orchestration and sonata. This meant writing a kind of
standard or stereotype sonata, which of course the great composers never did.
The theorization of sonata form is very late, from the mid-19th
century.
I very often say, when I’m feeling
more caustic, that composition was time wasted. I wouldn’t say that it was
completely wasted, but it was in large measure. On the other hand, in the
market there was no easy access to scores, or discs of the most advanced music.
Of course, when one could, one travelled, bought a disc, a score… but the
information that we had was much less than today. In addition, and continuing
what I was saying, the teaching programme was very much atrophied in comparison
to what is taught today, especially following the establishment of the Higher
Schools in Oporto, Lisbon, Aveiro and so on.
So, access to more up-to-date information… it also couldn’t be had
really through concerts, because there was very little contemporary music in
concerts (or they were very timid about programming it)… only certain
neoclassical works, or pieces from the beginning of the century, from time to
time. But it’s obvious that there was not the practical knowledge of the more
interesting composers, of more open aesthetics than those of the musical life
of Portugal at the time. Today other things are possible, there are discs,
scores, a different kind of teaching, obviously. With these limitations, one
of the ways of getting to know more advanced music was indeed by studying
scores – those that one could find… and that’s what I did. And, in my case, as
a young orchestral conductor, what I did was to programme contemporary works
whenever possible, but even today it’s not that easy, because there are
problems in hiring parts, for example… it’s all very expensive. Apart from the
resistance of the orchestras, and of the principal players of the orchestras,
who are generally, with rare exceptions, quite conservative. Because within
conservatism they can simplify their work quite a lot: if next week they’re
going toplay Beethoven’s 8th Symphony, they’ve already played it
innumerable times, and know it practically by heart. Now… if they have to have
a new score, absorb the meaning of certain notations… all this is quite
complicated for conservative minds. This happens all over the world, and
Portugal is no exception. Of course there are orchestras more used to it than
others, such as the Gulbenkian Orchestra, which plays it quite regularly… it
could even play more, but then there’s the reaction of the audience: it’s not
contemporary music that’s going to fill the Large Auditorium of the Gulbenkian
Foundation. The Foundation’s annual contemporary music series proved that over
x
years; unless there’s a social element… If Boulez comes here… it looks bad if
you don’t go… or Xenakis or Stockhausen… but apart from that, people don’t go
to the concerts, and the small attendance justifies stopping them.
Coming back to conducting, of both symphonic orchestras and chamber
groups, with which I could perform contemporary music… it gave me a lot of
pleasure to leave the well-trodden paths, and, secondly, to have access to
works that I found it interesting as a composer to study, analyse and see how
others did things.
I think that my compositional
training was this. Analysis was, moreover, my great compositional discipline,
and I learned a great deal like this. And that was also the opinion of Olivier
Messiaen.
One might almost say that it’s a whim, saying that there are no pieces.
I’ll explain: as for my early works, my first attempts as a composer: I
destroyed them all! I’m talking about pieces that were played in public (so
it’s not just my imagination), were withdrawn from the catalogue and destroyed.
Some were actually destroyed physically, others in the sense that nobody was
allowed to play them, and I don’t show them to anybody, and are mixed up with
old papers to be thrown away one day.
This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make
use of some of these works – the Palimpsestos series, for example, is based on,
or informed by, we could say, here and there by fragments, of “quotations” of
earlier works. But in fact, in 1965 I destroyed all the works that had been
performed until then. And afterwards, I started from zero.
Palimpsestos II, which is for solo flute
and dates from 1965… and there’s a fragment of Palimpsestos I which was for solo
piano, dating from 1962, and only that one was played in public. The others
are not from that period, but date from after 1965.
So, I destroyed, began again and
took some time to perform anything in public for a very simple reason: my
output was so small that I wouldn’t not have felt that I had made my debut as a
composer with a little piece for solo flute or a short piece for one
instrument, unless they had had been of larger dimensions and of more grandiose
aims than they were. Then came all those things that we all, or many of us,
from my generation went through – military service, four years of military
service in my case, problems of that kind – and indeed, only afterwards did I
begin to perform things more systematically.
I’m very demanding… As an
orchestral conductor, for example, I never conduct my own works. This for a
very simple reason: I don’t feel able to demand as much of an orchestra in a
work of mine in rehearsals as I do in a work by another composer. I’d feel
badly about this at times, and unfortunately it’s necessary, being somewhat
sharp, somewhat rough, a little too demanding, to ask to hear a certain passage
many times… With a piece by another composer I don’t have the slightest
problem – and I do it – but with my own music, I wouldn’t like to do this, I
don’t feel able.
As for chamber and solo music, I
founded Oficina Musical in 1978, and during the first years I didn’t want to
perform my own pieces – I didn’t want to fall into the trap of transforming
Oficina Musical in some way into a group for my own professional promotion.
For example, the publication of scores, which is still not very frequent with
Oficina Musical, has not included any of my works, because I thought that only
after publishing many Portuguese composers would I have the moral right to put
out a piece of mine as well. And this is indeed now going to happen with
Oficina Musical.
As for the works I destroyed, and
because this is important, I destroyed them for a simple reason: because they
were incipient attempts at composition, technically and aesthetically, for the
reasons I mentioned earlier, on account of the delay we felt here in relation
to what was going on in Europe, the USA and other parts of the world.
Let me just add that perhaps my
works don’t exist… and it’s not a joke… for one reason: I decided, some two
years ago, that only the works published under my supervision will survive (and
I hope that he family respects my wishes). All the others are pieces I’d like
to rework here or there, or at least revise and check to see if they need these
corrections or not. This means that what is not published does not exist.
We were living in a time warp, as you know, and in some ways it was the
generation that I call “the generation of the 1960s”, and which includes the
composers whose works began to be known in the late 1950s – early 1960s, such
as Jorge Peixinho, myself, Constança Capdeville, etc. who, whatever else they
may have done, causes a break in Portuguese music. Quite apart from the value
and the musicality of certain composers, which is not the point here, the fact
is that, until that point, Portuguese music was several decades behind what was
going on outside. In fact, that was always a problem of Portuguese music in
other centuries, with very rare or very occasional exceptions.
And so, I was aware not only of the primitive technical quality of these
works (perhaps it’s going too far to call them works), but also of their
aesthetic inadequacy.
And from then on, from the beginning of the 1960s, I was fully aware of
this time lag and of this technical deficiency. Then there was a period of
trying to acquire large amounts of information. I read many scores, I listened
to a lot of music… In 1965 it wasn’t possible to put it off any more, and I
spent almost four years doing military service.
Only after that, and after a period
outside music in order to earn a living, could I make use of a grant from the
Gulbenkian Foundation and to Paris and soon, where it was indeed possible to
find far more information and work more seriously on analysis, concentrating
particularly on certain phases of music or particular composers.
I was able, for example, to analyse
the whole of the Viennese School with Gilbert Amy, who’s only slightly older
than I (two years), but who was at another stage of development and who was an
extremely generous person, making himself available to give me these classes
free of charge: and I learned a great deal from this analysis with Gilbert Amy.
In addition, and making full use of the fact of being in Paris, I also took
the conducting course. I had already had conducting classes in Vienna with
Swarowsky, also in the 1960s, but for a short time, because military service
interrupted my stay in Vienna.
But I took my Licence de Concert at the Ecole Normale de
Paris with Pierre Dervaux, and was in Pierre Schaeffer’s studio at the GRM
(Groupe de Recherches Musicales), which was a centre dedicated to musique
concrète.
It was really an important time for me, and I subsequently returned to
Portugal and continued at the Conservatory, where I had already begun before,
as a teacher.
Influences,
languages and technical and aesthetic perspectives
Sometimes, finding out about
something relatively late has its advantages. For example, in my catalogue
there is not a single dodecaphonic work – even though many people think I’m a
kind of Portuguese dodecaphonist. I know the Vienna School rather well, I
analysed the main works, but I have no dodecaphonic or total serial work in my
catalogue. If I had begun a little earlier, I would have, certainly. The
Vienna School was absolutely the first opening out for me. There’s also
another composers who still means a great deal to me: Varèse. I think that
critics never mention the presence of Varèse in my pieces, for the simple
reason that they don’t know Varèse, but that’s their problem!
And then certain tendencies appear
quite early, from this period on. And I believe that the fact that they
appeared early, and at the same time my near-obsession with going back to
earlier works, correcting them and re-writing them, meant that what I wrote had
a certain unity. Perhaps somewhat pretentiously I could say that I have a
style in that when you hear a piece, you can recognize it as mine. Of course,
this does not negate the influence of other composers! There are readings,
literature, essays, philosophy and so on. There are readings which impress us
profoundly, and very often we are unaware of how this comes out in our own
work, but there are composers to whom I always like to refer, because even if
you don’t notice traces of them in my works, they can have had a great
influence on me, in perhaps less audible, less visual ways.
Of the Viennese School… Webern,
obviously, through his economy of means, his strictness, influenced me, or
perhaps my temperament is already Webernian… It was more this constructional
strictness, the rigorousness of his thought, the use of silence, to which I
will return because silence has a very important role in what I do… If silence
in fact exists… (if Cage were here, he would say it didn’t).
Varèse… I think he was vital above all in the exploitation of the
extreme registers of instrumental groups. I mention instrumental groups because
Varèse’s works that mean most to me are not his orchestral works, but rather
his pieces for smaller groups - Integrales, Octandre, Hyperprism… And there, for
example, the use of brass in a very high register, in a very low register – we
know very well that the note there doesn’t come out precisely, whether in terms
of tuning, whether in terms of emission, but that was of his own choosing…
This also affected me quite a lot, apart from the dynamic polyphonies.
At the beginning of the 1970s I was much impressed by the Italian
composer Donatoni. I attended a number of festivals at Royan, where I heard
some things that interested me and still do, on account of their ornamental
texture, their sonic ping-pong. Also in Italy, the later works of Luigi Nono
interested me, and influenced me, though later on.
Returning to silence and to
something important: non-tempered space or micro-chromaticism generalized into
non-tempered space… silence affects me very much… There is, curiously, a
composer who affected me greatly and strangely still does, Morton Feldman. He,
in a way, inverts the functions of sound and silence. Silence sculpts the
sound. I’m very interested in the poetics, the compositional gesture of some
of Feldman’s works. Then there are those more recent influences… or more
recent loves. Composers such as Lutoslawski are very interesting, and even
Lutoslawski’s technical-theoretical approach interests me.
I suppose that certain traits may come form this… the liking for not
very dense textures, the use of silence… And a number of things which would be
unthinkable for me without the influence of electroacoustic music. There are
certain things which came about from my study of electroacoustic music. I’ll
give an example of a technical feature which I use frequently – and whose
parallel may be found in electroacoustic music when we add the attack of a
sound to the resonance of another, and which in my day of electroacoustic
prehistory we obtained by cutting the tape with scissors and splicing two
centimentres (at the most) – which is the attack of a tam-tam with the
resonance of a trumpet, for example.
What I often do is to use a technique harmonically: if you can imagine
the attack of a particular chord played forte, fortissimo or staccatissimo and
at the same time other instruments play a harmony tenuto and pianissimo. What
we hear is in fact a harmony and the resonance of another – not that one… I
use this a lot. It has implications beyond the merely acoustic aspects, it has
implications as well in the formal field of micro-form, which is of considerable
interest.
The
Palimpsestos,
Ludi Officinales and Intermezzi cycles
Well, “cycles” may be overstating
the case for these three groups of works…
A palimpsest is a parchment in which
a text was written and erased, and over which is written a second text,
normally in order to save material (in the middle ages, even a third text could
be written); today, through scientific means, it is possible to discover the
previous texts. I called these three works Palimpsestos because, though I did
not use scientific or analytic processes, I now (as any composer) at which
points are to be found fragments underneath the text… these fragments have to
do with some of those works I removed from the catalogue or destroyed, which
appear as a kind of “self-quotation”, of which only I am aware. The material
is taken from different works, and the three Palimpsestos have almost nothing in
common.
Nothing is carried over,
thematically or in terms of material, from one Palimpsesto to another… they are
totally different and independent from each other.
The series of Ludi Officinales is a work for a chamber
group in which there are three possible routes: a route for three strings, a
route for piano and percussion, and a route for flute and clarinet. And there
the material for each one of these routes is indeed entirely taken from the
mother-work, though with different developments; it’s not a copy, and here we
can speak of a cycle.
The Intermezzi, which number five to
date, are works that were written with the intention either of exploring
technical aspects which were new to me, which I was able or intended to use
later (in some cases I could, in others I only had the intention) in other
kinds of works, or else because they are, so to speak, intellectual ruminations
on things I’d already done in other works. In reality, the Intermezzi are independent from
each other, and the idea of arranging them in a group of I, II, III, IV, V,
came about only because they have something in common.
Glosa e Fanfarra sobre uma
Fantasia de António Carreira
There’s an orchestral work which is
particularly important to me, and that is Glosa e Fanfarra sobre uma
Fantasia de António Carreira. It’s a work with an eventful history. It was written in
1975, but only premièred in the 21th century, in 2002 or 2003 and,
if I’m not mistaken, it was premièred in Madrid. It had already been played in
part in Romania, bu the complete version… the first performance was in Madrid.
Then, in the following year (or in the same year, I’m not sure), the Gulbenkian
Foundation programmed the work in two concerts. It was a kind of child that
took ages t be born… the nine months were over, eighteen months, ten years and
it still hadn’t been born. Finally it was born and was well received.
As regards composition, it’s a work
that has a quotation taken from a work by António Carreira, and this caused me
some problems: the problem of large scale form! Because it’s a work that lasts
23 minutes without pause, and because it’s written for large orchestra! In
addition, it was a paradigmatic work in that it showed the vicissitudes of
Portuguese music. It was written in 1975 for much percussion and many
percussionists and much brass.
Of course, almost as soon as I’d
written it, I became aware (as I should have been before) that a work of this
kind could never be played in Portugal. At that time there were neither the
percussionists nor the percussion instruments for a work such as this, and
there was also no brass players, unless one got them all together…
The piece remained in the drawer…
And then I felt the need to introduce other instruments into the work, and felt
the lack of strings as an aesthetic necessity. In certain situations the brass
were unsuccessful in particular passages where strings were successful. And it
turned into a work for large orchestra. If we look at the past – which is no
longer so recent – we see that this coincides with the time of the degradation
of the orchestras at that time in Portugal.
One day, in conversation with a Spanish friend who’s known n Portugal,
Ramón Encinar, who was conducting the National Orchestra in Lisbon, said to me:
“I wanted to do something of yours; what have you got for orchestra?” “Well,
there’s a piece I did years ago… it may need a quick revision, but it’s done,
it’s ready, and has been for twenty-odd years.” And he said: “Bring me the
piece.” I did, and he was looking through it… the manuscript was practically
illegible, because I’d never done a clean copy; and of course, there were no
orchestral parts. And he said to me: “Right, get it ready!” This was in
1999. I revised it during this period, and then gave the score to the copyist
so that he could typeset it on computer and make the parts, which was a
relatively lengthy process, because there are many unconventional signs; it
required intensive work with the computer and the available software.
Meanwhile, Encinar left Lisbon. But he’s a man of his word; he said he’d
première the work, and he telephoned me and said “I’m not there any more, but I
can première it with the Madrid Symphonic.” I said: “Wonderful!” I sent hi
the work, and it was premièred there… played and played well!
I should add that the work created a
certain response amongst both audience and critics, which reached the ears of
the Gulbenkian Foundation. And then something happened which is often the case
in Portugal: if you want them to perform you or read you, first you go abroad
and do something, and then you are recognized. And in the following year the
Gulbenkian programmed the work twice.
The Intradas cycle, Silence and
Non-tempered Spaces
The Intradas are works… especially
between Intradas I-A and Intradas I-B, there are more than influences,
there’s almost a re-instrumentation. Intradas A was commissioned by the Cagliari
Festival in Sardinia, for three instruments: trumpet, horn and trombone. Of
course, three instruments create a few problems harmonically speaking: you’re
lmited to three voices. The piece had to be short, more or less in fanfare
style. But I’ve always wanted to adapt the piece, doubling the instruments:
two trumpets, two horns, two trombones. Intradas B has, in relation to Intradas
A, this
characteristic, of having double the number of instruments; but the material is
practically identical, slightly more developed and lasting another minute or so
longer than version A. Intradas II has nothing to do with I-A or I-B; it’s a totally
different work for a large brass ensemble. So there’s no connection at all,
except the title, because it’s an Intrada, something which begins, or can
begin festively, I hope, a concert. There are two things I also wanted to
mention… when I while ago I tried to do a “stylistic radiograph” and spoke of a
tendency towards silence, and not very dense structures and an increasing interest
in non-tempered fields. I have always said, demonstrated and proclaimed my
inability to distinguish between musical sound and noise. A sound object, a
white noise in the middle of a Mozart Sonata, is obviously a noise. For
example, in a work by Emmanuel Nunes, suddenly a sequence of perfect chords
would be the worst kind of noise. At any rate, my tendency is to demolish this
boundary, between sound and noise, a tendency towards non-tempered spaces.
I’d say that a tempered note, or a
sequence of tempered notes, creates harmonic fields, which has bothered me in a
way for some time. I need to bring in there something that distorts that
planetary system – as though seeing a particular image unfocussed. What I’ve
been doing is a kind of sfumato of the contours by means of the use of notes, not
that one, but rather one that’s a little bit higher or a little bit lower.
Obviously, when one uses conventional notation and one introduces
quarter-tones, for example, one runs the risk of the final result being merely
slightly out of tune. And our ears aren’t prepared for this, and perhaps will
require hundreds of years of evolution in order to be able to differentiate.
My idea is more a sfumato of the contours… it’s an enriching of a chord, a complex
aggregate, which becomes much more complex when you have some notes repeated,
but slightly un-tempered in relation to the others.
I think that the tendency towards
silence is still very much present in my work. And I often say something that
is perhaps not to be aken very seriously, that the ideal would be to write a
work that’s a very complex sound object, preceded and followed by an infinite
silence. A kind of lost world.