INTERVIEW WITH ERNESTO RODRIGUES (complete version)
The Dichotomy
of the Improviser as Composer/Performer
I’m
increasingly aware of the importance of the existence of a greater awareness of
composition in real time, as regards composition as such. By this I mean that
there are some musicians, technically weak, in virtuosic and technical terms,
but who manage to work very well in real time. This is the case with some
musicians of the English school, some weaker than others, but some are
extremely good with real time. This attribute seems to be becoming more and
more important in the New Improvisation.
For me, they are two complementary
things. They are two ways of arriving at the same end. You can use one or the
other, it doesn’t matter to me. I know wonderful musicians in both areas. I,
for example, tend to do both things. I like to do both, and so I can’t say that
one is better than the other.
Compositional
trajectory
Some of my pieces were written
entirely by hand, and were then put through a sequencer. I also improvise,
which is another way of composing. There are n methods. For example, one can
improvise with notes, or do some gestures on a keyboard.
In spite of coming from this
tradition, I structure improvisation less and less. Formerly, improvisation was
structured, but today it is less and less so. Today, it’s more usual to receive
a Japanese, a German or an American, without ever having seen him before, and
to begin playing immediately. You don’t even talk, because each of these people
has his own vocabulary. Only afterwards does one discuss “musical” ideas for
the first time. Curiously, it’s this kind of improvisation that I find most
interesting.
I’m not interested in doing things
that have already been done and digested. It’s as though I’d been asked to
paint a picture in the style of Van Gogh. It makes no sense at all. I think Van
Gogh is one of the greatest painters, but let’s leave him in peace. He did what
he had to do and was at the vanguard of his time. Aesthetic evolution in
painting is the same as in music; in other words, it makes no sense to paint a
picture in the style of Picasso today, because it’s already been done.
Nowadays, something else is necessary. We’ve been through many things. We’ve
seen the suprematists, the monochromaticists. All this is related to music too,
because things are interconnected.
My
first piece was completely written-out, but what you hear is an electronic
piece. I have others that were played in their entirety and still others that
were played first and then I eliminated and made use of some elements. Until
now, none of my discs have been published. The first three contain complete
studio sessions, but not the most recent, because these days it’s a bit too
much to do discs of 70 minutes. We’re usually in the studio for an hour, 70 or
80 minutes, and we select the best, if something doesn’t go well. But usually
everything would go well and we’d use everything.
My
last disc, for example, is only 37 minutes and 40 seconds long. And I don’t
think there’s anything missing. I don’t find it too short or too long. I feel
that it’s balanced.
At
first sight, contemporary music and improvisation may not be related at all.
But I think that it’s possible for there to be contamination between these two
worlds. There’s no problem, quite the opposite, it only enriches the lexicon
and its world.
Sometimes
I’d prefer my discs to have less of this expressivity. I try to do this, but
then I am unable. For example, I Treni Inerti, which was a group I put out a
while ago… it has a coldness, a rationalistic and conceptual coldness that I
can’t reproduce. Though I’d like to be more arid, with less consonanza and harmony in a certain
sense. I don’t consider this a negative thing, but sometimes I’d like to do
something more rational.
The
disc (which I still don’t know if I’m going to publish or not, because I
haven’t heard it), which I’ve recorded with Costa Monteiro, is perhaps the most
arid disc I’ve done up till now. When we were in the studio, I didn’t give a
single note, and I usually always give notes. I also like this ambiguity of,
from time to time, giving a note, a certain expressivity. But on this disc I
didn’t do that, or at least I think I didn’t do that. For the first time I did
it consciously. But I haven’t the slightest idea what’s there.
As
far as contemporary music is concerned, at present I’m working on some things
that I find interesting. The problem with contemporary music is different. It
has to do with the question of performers. Because if you do a work for chamber
orchestra, or some other group, where and when is it played? This is the
problem. However, I can be my own performer. If I feel like writing a piece for
electronic tuba and violin, I could play the violin part. But it’s also not
that which interests me most. I’d have a great deal more pleasure in hearing it
performed by somebody else.
I’ve
been meaning to use live electronics for many years. But I never liked working
with sequencers. That never fascinated me. Putting something there and then
playing over it, no. I had the opportunity to do it many times, and never did,
and it wasn’t just chance… It was never a passion of mine.
Influences
Since
I was 15 or 16, I’ve liked composers of written contemporary music such as, for
example, Xenakis, Peixinho, Boulez, Nono, Berio… I’m hugely fascinated by these
composers. But without any doubt, the one who has most influenced me is Ligeti.
I
came to Ligeti through Stanley Kubrick. I was still quite young at the time,
but when I saw A Clockwork Orange I realized that the music was
fascinating. So I began to investigate, to look for things in an encyclopaedia.
A few months later, I already knew most of what had been published, and I
became completely fascinated.
And
I also learned a lot in Emmanuel Nunes’s seminars. In these seminars, we didn’t
only analyse his compositions, but those of everyone who was there. And
Emmanuel Nunes is a fascinating person, with an extraordinary capacity for
discernment. He’s one of the greats, an extraordinary and fascinating composer.
Situation
within the New Improvisation
Recently,
I’ve been in e-mail correspondence with Dan Warburton, who’s a critic,
violinist and pianist. I already knew his discs, and thought some of them
fantastic, but I didn’t know he was a violinist. And in this respect, he has
become one of the people who interest me most within the New Improvisation. And
the piano too, I find interesting his exploration of the inside piano and those things that
are more fashionable today in more avant-garde improvisation. Dan Warburton
proved exactly what I had in mind some time ago. It’s that, if I feel like it,
from one day to the next, why not do a disc of free jazz? Why not do it? It’s
something I like and that’s inside me. It interests me because it has no
barriers, “do this”, “don’t do that”, “I can do this”, “I can’t do that”.
I
know in which aesthetic I should be moving. I know that I can’t do things like
Costa Monteiro, for example, or play like Cecil Taylor, or some other musician
of that kind. They come already from that tradition, and I have to adapt myself
to another way. But, indeed, I like both things, and what interests me is that
it be good music.
Though
just now I said that I could do a disc of free jazz, because I like it, it’s
not very likely. It’s much more likely that, of my next ten discs, nine will be
New Improvisation and one of free jazz.
But
there’s an aspect of New Improvisation which I’d like to underline: the
category that John Cage proclaimed, in the 1950s, still in the first half of
the 20th century, that of silence, was, I think taken up much more
by the New Improvisation than by new written music.
I
had an argument about this with Emmnanuel Nunes, because I thought that silence
was being increasingly looked-for in new music, the “living music” that’s done
today. And he asked me: “Well, show me where…” and, indeed, in the composers of
the written tradition you don’t notice it much yet. It was more obvious in
Cage, fifty years ago, than today with Gérard Grisey and all those composers of
this new generation.
In
this kind of music, silence is not something so sought-after as in the New
Improvisation, in which it’s almost obligatory nowadays. But already in the 20th
century, John Cage had indicated a path for this. One point is that silence is
noise, but in the end noise and silence are such in a natural way. It’s natural
that it be so. One thing implies the other.
All
improvisers since Parker and Bailey included these elements, during the course
of time, in their music. Bailey in 1995 was more noisy than Bailey in 1960. All
this is progressive and natural.
The
aesthetic paradigms and concepts of the avant-garde of the New Improvisation
Though
we know that the Tokyo Off Site is more of a determination than an orientation or an
aesthetic, it has much more to do with a circumstantial need than with a
conceptual need.
The
entire history of man’s aesthetics, not just music, was always determined by
power. If we think about it, in the 11th century, the rhythms used
were the Greek feet. They were all tertiary because of their connection with
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Musical evolution was connected with
the harmonic series because the Church found that the harmonic series was
perfect. There was the octave, the fifth, and fourth and then the third… And
all this with people being burnt at the stake. So, in relation to Off Site, it doesn’t matter to me
whether it’s circumstantial or not, but the fact is that it was born, and
continues as such. Throughout the world there are many people following this
line.
I
think that the New Improvisation comes from that. It comes from spaces, from
being unafraid to confront silence. Many years ago, people used to say “Two
seconds of silence is too much! Three seconds is too much! Be careful when you
put it together”, and then there were Syberberg, Tarkovsky and Jean-Marie
Straub. Even Orson Welles, in Touch of Evil, did something extraordinary… He
did an enormous sequential shot which was the record holder for years.
Tarkovsky,
for example, has an eight-minute section and subverted all the rules. All this
was prohibited because silence is very disturbing, and may be terrifying
people. Now, the acceptance of silence, voluntarily and in a perfectly
conceptualized form, is something of which much may be made, and we are only at
the beginning of all this…
The
case of Eddie Prévost is a good example of what I’ve just been saying. He’s one
of the few improvisers of his generation who openly shares a weekly space in
London with the younger generations (between 15 and 40 years of age). These
young people have new ideas. And there’s a day in the Freedom of the City
festival in which he promotes these young groups. I never saw him improvising
in the “old” way. I think AMM are some distance ahead. It seems to me that the
kind of improvisation of Schlippenbach or of Kowald is more rudimentary than
that of AMM. They’re already pointing towards a new generation, or at least
they share various musical experiences.
I
have the greatest respect for the more classical improvisers, such as, for
example, Evan Parker, and all those people, but I have increasing difficulty in
listening to that kind of music. I don’t know if this kind of improvisation
will ever come back again. I don’t think so. In its golden age it was extremely
important, and had an important role in the development of improvisation, even
influencing some composers of written music, but I think that this kind of
music is not going to be sought out. It’s not going to go back to exhibitionism
and technicality.
In
technical terms, one thing is obvious – the way of exploring instruments in
this New Improvisation covers new conceptions and new experimentalisms on the
instrument in question. Until now, instruments had not been used in this way,
as it happens in written music.
For
example, in Gran Torso, a string quartet by Lachenmann which I consider
extraordinary, the instruments are played in an unconventional way. He asks the
musicians to play on parts of the violin, or of the cello, that are not usually
used. Nowadays one can give an excellent concert just with two notes, within a
semitone. Because today there’s such a wealth of things that one can do as much
with two notes as the excess of information of the romantic composers whom I
also love, such as Schumann and Wagner. But all this is part of a period. I
think that anything that comes about has to do with the world as it was at the
time. Many notes were demanded at the time. 100 years before, we see, for
example, in Miles Forman’s film Amadeus, the emperor criticizing Mozart and
saying: “Too many notes, too many notes…” So these are things that come and go.
I think that now we’re in one phase, but in 200 years’ time we could be in a
phase when more notes are wanted.
Arts
and perfection
For
example, in films, what I like is precisely what isn’t considered film by most
people. The directors I most admire and like are Jean-Marie Straub, Syberberg,
Tarkovsky, Sokurov (especially Mother and Son) and I also like Bergman very much.
As Straub says, I’m fed up with stories, I think the cinema should be something
else. And it was for that reason that my music stopped being narrative. Though
we had lived through a time of crisis, which coincides with post-modernism,
which at the time generated a certain confusion, in which all narrative art
conquered some terrain over what has being developed at the time, I basically
like “heavy” things. I like to feel weight in art.
I
have many discs based on silence, and they have a density… I like Thomas Mann,
Dostoievsky… Basically, I like what Milan Kundera set off at the end of the 20th
century with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, even if it seems the other way
round. Because, for me, the most difficult thing is to attain simplicity. I
like a certain ambiguity in things, but I also can’t see this in a Manichaean
way. Whether it’s good or bad… Just what it is, and I think that about any
number of musicians.
What
fascinates me in Zíngaro, in Brötzmann, in Xenakis or in Ligeti, is precisely
the personality of the individual in the service of his expressivity in that
field. Nobody can think that if Ligeti wanted to he could compose in the style
of Berio, because it would be false. It would be false because each one has his
own personality.
And
then there may be more rigid ideas, for example, Jean-Marie Straub, whom I
mentioned a while ago, when he films a magazine of 20 minutes, does so without any
interruptions at all. Then he does another, with the same scene, and doesn’t
edit at all. He chooses the best and makes no cuts. He chooses the best with
all its errors and virtues. He doesn’t say: “This part is good”, ”I liked that
bit and will use it”. He watches them both and chooses one. That’s the way I
like to work, because there is more truth in it.
There
are people who tell me exactly the opposite, but I find this stupid, because
they’re damaging something for rational or conceptual reasons.
I
realize that if we have, for example, two things in which the first ten minutes
are good in one part, and in the other part it’s the last ten minutes that are
good, why not cut and edit? But often things are not so perfect. Perfection
doesn’t exist in art.
Everyone
says that Velázquez was perfect, but it’s not true. He had his own perfection.
But what is a perfect thing? What are we? Do we have divine awareness in order
to say what is perfect? That would be very good… but perhaps if Velázquez rose
again now he’d change something in his art. I don’t like perfect things!