Stories, pandemics and flowers
At the time, months and year when this work began to be written, April and May 2020, a time of dramas and tragedies, marked a new state of mind to express, through music, a light at the end of the tunnel. Other works preceded it in the same period, sometimes in opposition to, sometimes overlapping with the emotions of this inhuman period:
NEUMAS-pássaros invisíveis,
BAGATELA-1770-2020/Beethoven,
DIAFONIAS-vozes da terra, among other writing activities and projects of various kinds (TV documentary, academic accompaniments, editions of works, etc.). In the midst of these creations that occupied my days, flowers and everyday gestures exchanged at a distance, telephone conversations with friends and counsellors sublimated the images that the media was flooding our eyes with. After a mental attitude of disguise reflected in the works composed during the months of March and April, about what was happening in the world around us, the May drums sounded.
The privilege of a composer being able to have a group of 7 percussionists and dozens of instruments, with the relevance of this group of instrumentalists being made up of young people from various schools in the country, created an inner frenzy in the composer due to the combination of pedagogy and creation, which in real life collided with the individual resistance of masters and disciples anchored in the school community with a tendency towards collective aversion to change. With the victory of composers and cultural agents, this work, created in this "Holy Year" of the Pandemic for the concert project of the Arte no Tempo Association, is a demonstration of the extraordinary revolution that has taken place in recent years in Portugal in the world of music.
Thanks to the proposal made in 2019 by the Association, through the voice of Diana Ferreira, its creator and President, to write a work for percussion septet, this turnaround is cemented with one of those improbable ideas of utopias and possible realities in a country where they have, in spite of everything, been happening over the years. The recipients of this score are 7 young percussion students from various parts of the country, from Higher Education Schools from North to South. This circumstance, the recommendations on the conditions for preparing the work, the limited time for joint preparation due to the geographical spread of the 7 musicians, the autonomy of the musicians, separated by great distances, all defined strategies for choosing instruments, grammars, preparation, composition, coordination principles both in the internal and external structuring of the work, as well as its realisation in concert. This work, starting from the parts to the whole in the composer's mind, is a challenge to Gestalt theory. The audience will hear the whole, but the construction of the whole started from the construction of the parts as blocks or as autonomous scenarios. The possible existence of a score is nothing more than an a posteriori exercise for the composer himself. The aesthetic and musical compatibility of this instrumental and orchestral fragmentation obeys guiding principles that cannot be described and analysed here. A BIGINT path of research.
One of its dimensions is, by imposition and nature of the project, the multi-spatiality of its sound sources, their distribution and projection in space, with the 7 percussionists structured in autonomous groups, like pieces of a puzzle. Interconnected by a metric of four tempos within which everything takes place, and by a uniform metronome time from beginning to end, these pieces interchange protagonists and backdrops, sometimes of score, sometimes of instruments, sometimes of places, in the immobility of atmospheres and the dialectical mobility of paths. These are remote interactive processes that flooded the three months of global confinement, from March to May. These seven instrumentalists could connect remotely via an online platform without any constraints, without the need for a conventional conductor or any other coordination process. Postulates present in several of the composer's works.
HOQUETUS ("sobbing", physiological disturbance, not crying! ), on the one hand, a medieval composition technique (abrupt interruption of phrases and passages from voice to voice), defined internal rhythmic processes, among others; the subtitle
tambores de Maio, on the other hand, appeals to the symbolism of "time passing" and the theatrical expression, through music, of a 21-voice percussion choir (each of the musicians has three or more instruments), to celebrate life after two months of solitude, silence and collective expectation, as described above. Inspired by friends, emotions and affections present in the composer's life during these three months in the desert where, in May, drums announce, as a musical metaphor, the appearance of an oasis in the distance, a real landscape or a mirage, this work, a tribute to life, invites the listener to an open, immediate contact,
complicit contact, outside the aesthetic or philosophical considerations of genuinely contemporary grammars.
Cândido Lima
