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.