1. In honour of Music and Portuguese composers
2. In honour of Franco Donatoni
3. In honour of Gérard Grisey
4. In honour of Olivier Messiaen
5. In honour of Luciano Berio
6. In honour of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pierre Boulez and Steve Reich, kindly gathered by Marc-André Dalbavie
7. In honour of Marc-André Dalbavie
8. In honour of Miguel Azguime and the Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble
Instrumentation
Musical Category Chamber music (2-8 instruments)
Instrumentation (general) flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano
After the work Ausgraben und Erinnern (2006, commissioned by the Miso Music Portugal), – which literally means “dig out and remember” – I've thought a lot about Luciano Berio's book with his Harvard lessons entitled Remembering the Future (Harvard University Press, 2006), and particularly about the lesson on Translating Music. The act of digging out and remembering – so well described by Walter Benjamin in his text under the same title (in Imagens de Pensamento [Thought-Images], vol. 2, translated to Portuguese by João Barrento [Assírio & Alvim, 2006]) –, is actually an act of auto-analysis, present in every musician's activity. In this Harvard lesson Berio tells us precisely about the gesture of digging out and remembering to defend the notion of transition as an endogenous element in the composer's work, stretching between more or less explicit forms related with past or unfamiliar elements, and more or less subtle forms involved in their own invention.
Now this inevitably happens at the O'culto da Ajuda where the music is permanently translated – from the instruments to the electronics and from the electronics to the instruments –, within a multiple play of mirrors, giving me a lot of pleasure. Open Enclosure aims at reflecting this intersection in the composer's invention. The composer is simultaneously open to the outside of his or her own invention where the intruding events ask for transcription / translation, and closed in his or her own doing, involved in the multiple plans of composition. It's a piece where I revisit my own writing and at the same time I want to leave its plot, rehearsing new gestures. These gestures emerge from the North American universe of minimal and repetitive music, from popular music as well as from the European heritage which I inevitably carry.
