It's a memory of voices, times, and places looking at the nymphs of the Tagus on the strings of two guitars, a poet from Lisbon's neighbourhoods would say. Personal memories of river crossings, coming from student life and from the Gulbenkian Choir, in Lisbon, to the barracks of Estremoz, in time of compulsory military service. The Tagus that sees me, shortly after, leave and return in time of colonial war, this work is another occasion to sublimate, through music, youthful emotions experienced by a composer who faced, with his art of thinking, the lords of war and the lords of the waters.
Legends of the river reminded me of my father and my brother, both sailors, who crossed the Tagus River to Alfeite for years, and from its waters, set sail for the seas of Africa (Guinea and Cape Verde) and the Americas (Brazil). These sounds are a song to the memories of blood and joy, departure and return, through a CHOIR in the shape of a guitar. These harmonies are a tribute to the lives and emotions of women waiting for ‘their mother's children’. From the quay of this river of Ulysses, thousands of women from Portugal, coming from distant lands, waved to thousands of soldiers at the pier of Rocha do Conde de Óbidos in uncertain farewells of return.
The spirit of the work involves itself serenely with the nature of the waters, reflecting not the drama but the silent song of overcoming and sublimation. The obsessive nursery rhyme as a leitmotif of songs from Papua land coexists with harmony and the rhythm of other latitudes. Some open signs of contemporaneity in the light of aquatic landscapes as an allegory of women on the quay waving white handkerchiefs on departure, are also present.
In the last section of the work, one of the guitars evokes the kora instrument (played by the Fulas and other ethnic groups of Guinea and sub-Saharan Africa), in which the natural tuning of the classical guitar is modified (
scordatura). This sonority takes us back to exotic African atmospheres.
Women of Minho origin, relatives of the composer, were also at the pier on my departure to Africa. I did not see them. They called me, and I did not hear them (luckily, they did not affect the pact of silence that I imposed on myself when, in the barracks of Estremoz, a military man read my name among the mobilised soldiers). I fortuitously found out about the presence of those relatives fifty years later. It was taboo to talk about that dramatic African experience as a family. To these two women (three, plus an old lady, not from the family) and the women of the family, to the guitar and mandolin players of the family, these remarkable memories of diverse lives evoked in these mythical sounds of mythical instruments of two guitars of a CHORUS – women on the quay.
Cândido Lima, March 2023
