Entrevista a Luís Tinoco / Interview with Luís Tinoco
2003/Apr/13
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INTERVIEW
WITH LUÍS TINOCO (complete version)
Could
we begin by talking about your family upbringing, what the influence of at
least two members of your family, your grandmother and your father, meant to
you?
Well,
to begin right at the beginning, my grandmother was a pianist and piano
teacher. She had a career as a
concert artist in Portugal, with some success. She had been a pupil of Vianna da Motta – her name was Maria
Carlota Tinoco – and she gave many recitals for Portuguese Radio. She and my grandfather were a very
interesting couple, because they gave concert series and organized an entire
cultural and musical life in Leiria – my grandfather was the director of the
local lyceum.
It
was in this atmosphere that my father was born, in Leiria, and the world of
classical music was present through this family connection, not just through my
grandmother’s being a pianist – very concerned with this tradition of the
pupils of Vianna da Motta, with a repertoire based mainly around Liszt, Chopin,
Grieg, and so on – but also the musical life in my grandparents’ house, where
everything would end with musical evenings and parties with people from all
areas of the arts. So, my father
grew up in this kind of atmosphere, and there were some great people who passed
through - Guilhermina Suggia and others.
My father, curiously, did not have any academic training in music. he’s a self-taught musician, with an
unusual aural ability, but he never did any conventional study – his field is
architecture and the plastic arts.
However, he also followed a musical career, principally in jazz. He played piano and double bass, and
was a member of a group which, in the 1950s and 60s, influenced the first
generations of jazz musicians in Portugal, which would later give rise to
people such as Rão Kyao, and in later generations the Moreiras, Mário Laginha,
Bernardo Sassetti, João Paulo Esteves da Silva and so on.
All
these different kinds of music found sucess in a way by means of the Hot Club,
and in particular the work of Luís Villas-Boas, and also of the musicians who
worked with him.
My
first musical memories are linked to my grandmother, and also to my
father. To my grandmother because
it was with her that I began to learn piano (I remember this well, because I
lived in her house for a while). I
remember things such as sleeping under the piano while she played, and studying
with her. She really wanted my
bother and I to learn and play piano, perhaps because of our close
relationship. We then went to
Elisa Lamas, with whom I continued my studies.
From
my father there was, obviously, a very strong influence, and not only as
regards to what I am today, but as a listener to music. It was with my father than I also began
to try to improvise. My father
used to play harmonic sequences a good deal on the piano, and my brother and I
would sit on his lap and improvise melodies that we played three-handed – my
father two and us one! so, I think
it was then that my abilities to build musically began. My harmonic world began there, because
I copied what my father did at the piano.
Very
often I would be doing my own things – it wasn’t exactly composing, I was more
searching for harmonic sequences – and, very often, he would be in the next
room. When there was a passage I
wanted to remember, which I liked but couldn’t remember what I’d done, and I’d
spend fifteen minutes trying to find it again, he’d say to me “Oh, what you did
was this” – and he’d sit down at the piano and play it. I’d say “Ah, thank you” – and that
allowed me to carry on. In this
sense, it was really a privileged beginning, because I always had somebody
there who would help me to hear and to develop this ability to sing and make
music.
At
the same time, I must make mention of the musical life that went on in my parent’s
house – my bother and I were very young, and, when we should already have been
in bed, very often we’d be sitting on the stars watching jazz musicians in a
jam session down there in the living room... So we lived in this atmosphere, with classical musicians,
jazz musicians, or even fado musicians – because my father was lined for some
time to “light music”, and he wrote lots of music for Carlos do Carmo and
others. There was a large number
of musicians from various fields, from folk music, Portuguese pop music to jazz
and classical music, which all coexisted in my parents’ house. So I ended up absorbing all this.
Did
folk music influence your own music at all?
No,
it didn’t at all... But perhaps
Brazilian music, because many Brazilian musicians appeared at the house, such
as Ivan Lins... When I was
young, between about twelve and fourteen, they were very strong influences:
Milton Nascimento, Ivan Lins, etc.
In
your music there’s a very natural link with tradition. You have melody, harmony and those very
traditional parameters: perhaps that comes from this coexistence...
Yes,
I think that, if you asked me, for example, where I pinpointed my contact with
Afro-American music or with classical music – because very often I read
biographies of people who say “I began listening to jazz when I was fourteen”,
or “I began listening to Stravinsky...” – I couldn’t do this, because these
things were always there. And that
was a privilege. From the
classical repertoire, I remember the Vianna da Motta concerts, which I sued to
go to with my grandmother. I
remember, at one time, seeing Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto, because in
that year it was the set piece for the finalists. I remember too how it affected me, that concerto, all that
lyricism – So this was, obviously, present.
And
are these things that you now identify in your music?
Curiously,
that concerto by Tchaikovsky, who’s a composer I don’t put anywhere near the
top of my list of favourite composers, even today, when I hear it, I feel a great
empathy for it. Because in really
was part of my musical education as a listener, at a particularly special time,
You
then went to the Escola Superior de Música in Lisbon.
Yes,
but it was late. It was late
because I was very divided between music and the visual arts and cinema. I was really in doubt as to what I
should do: whether I should go for cinema, or the plastic arts, or music. I spent a few years doing a bit of
everything, but not coming up with anything. I had private lessons, for example, with Elisa Lamas, and
then I did two years of jazz piano with Mário Laginha. I tried out various situations until,
at a certain point, I decided that what I was doing lacked substance. I was able to write lots of beginnings
for lots of pieces, of three or four minutes, but I couldn’t develop them in
time, I could manage anything long-breathed. And I felt that, if I did conventional composition studies
and studied orchestration, if I studied composition in a traditional way, this
would perhaps provide me with the tools and the vocabulary in order later to
develop what I was trying out, but hadn’t yet found the way. It was at this time that I asked to be
admitted to the Music School. I
think I started in 1991 or 1992 – at that time, at my age, I could already have
finished the course... It was there that I began to solve the problems I had in
writing. I don’t say that I got to know particular things, because, for
example, even when I didn’t have the slightest idea that I would take the
composition course, I went every year to the contemporary music concerts at the
Gulbenkian Foundation. I went from
the 1980s onwards. Sometimes I liked it more, sometimes less, but I remember
perfectly having followed them, and I continued to do so. Obviously, at that time, the composers
who most influenced me were those who had to more to do, perhaps, with what I
heard when I was a child: Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, etc. But then I got to know Ligeti and
Lutoslawski and others – also because of them being composers who had inherited
that music that I also used to listen to.
And, at the same time, I didn’t stop listening to Keith Jarrett, Bill
Evans or Herbie Hancock. So there
was a congestion of information rather than a digestion. I was always, even when involuntarily,
absorbing things from very different sources.
At
the ESML did you feel that your interests were very different from those of the
other pupils, or was this kind of eclecticism common?
I
think that nowadays it’s more and more common to find composers working in
so-called classical music who’ve come from rock, jazz, garage and so on. So that idea that you can only be a
composer if you’ve studied an instrument, been to conservatory and followed the
genealogy which begins, if you like, with Bach, and then goes through Brahms
and Mahler and so on – this genealogy, for me, had no relevance to my
studies. I may have followed it as
a listener, but not as a conventional study. I think this tendency is more and more common – we begin to
see in composers’ biographies that they come from all kinds of places, even
quite often from other areas of art, rather than music.
In
this respect, yes, it wasn’t to be expected that I would be accepted for the
course... I must say, in fact,
that I got in with some terrible marks, and I’m not at all ashamed to say
so! In fact, the admission test
that I took was much more influenced by Keith Jarrett than by any classical
composer. But I also need to make
it clear that I have never been, and never wanted to be, a jazz musician. Jazz for me is a matter of
digestion. Since it’s a kind of
music that I listen to regularly, sometimes some things appear spontaneously in
my work, but that I can’t even identify as being jazz. I don’t think it has that validity,
because jazz is music that basically depends on improvisation, and my
connection to composition has always been through writing, never with the
spontaneity which I so much admire in true jazz musicians – that I’ve never
had.
What
about your time in London? I
imagine that it was an interesting experience.
I
think that London came about for a number of reasons. One of them was perhaps for family reasons, because I was in
fact brought up in a family with Anglo-Saxon influences in various ways.
Then,
when I finished the course in Lisbon – I studied with Christopher Bochmann and
António Pinho Vargas, and also with a Brazilian teacher who int he meantime has
left the school, called José Carlos Bonacorso – I wanted to continue my studies
and wanted to go to a country where I could find a pluralism, a transversality,
which would be connected to what I consider to be my way of looking at artistic
creation, not just musical language.
Obviously, there were other possibilities, such as the USA, the
Netherlands and England, rather than Paris or Germany, for example. So I considered the choices, as the USA
was very far away, being so far for so long bothered me somewhat, while with
the Netherlands or England, one can be there in two hours – and so, I chose
England. I wanted to live in London,
and so I wasn’t even very bothered about what or where I was going to
study. I applied to various places
in England, and eventually accepted a place at the first institution to offer
me one, the Royal Academy. I went there, liked the atmosphere very much, and
found it marvellous, as far as access to contemporary music and its various
forms of expression were concerned.
I was indeed very lucky, and so I accepted the place they offered at the
Royal Academy. And it was there
that I did my master’s.
What
do you think was the most important part of this experience as a composer?
For
one thing, the pragmatism of the English, especially of my teacher, Paul
Patterson. I can’t say that, in
compositional terms or even in terms of my aesthetic position, he was a great
influence, because I don’t see much to do with me in his idiom. However, he was a person I very much
enjoyed working with, because he was extremely pragmatic in solving problems of
writing or notation. He was very
sensible in this, because he never tried to get me to solve a problem at some
point in a composition in his way.
He understood perfectly well in which direction I was going, what my
influences were and what my points of reference were, and his work was
precisely to help me to develop this musically.
On
the other hand, I had come from Lisbon. I think that, in terms of technical
preparation and correct writing, Professor Bochmann was wonderful, because he
helped me with this... I’d really come from quite that chaotic life I’ve already
mentioned – moving from this to that, and not achieving anything – and
Professor Bochmann was excellent at getting my head straightened out and
organizing ideas, including teaching me working methods. Then I worked with António Pinho
Vargas, who was fabulous in the realm of the poetics of music and musical
discourse. So, I had poetically
and technically, two outstanding teachers, with whom I think I learned a great
deal. I think that great thing,
during my two years in London, was to be able to write regularly and to be able
to hear my music played beautifully.
Suddenly, I had entered into a more professional world of music. At the Escola Superior de Música, everything
had been more theoretical; I’d write pieces and they would remain in the
drawer, while in London, everything I wrote...
That’s
relative too, isn’t it? Because
before London, you wrote your String Quartet, didn’t you?
That
was accidental. The String Quartet
is, in terms of my trajectory and my catalogue, Opus 1 – in fact, it’s not even
the first, it’s the second work.
The first was a quintet which was never played, because I think it’s
really a beginner’s piece. The
String Quartet is perhaps the first piece I did in an academic context, which I
think has something to say, and in which you can see where I’m going –
including some technical mastery in the writing. The String Quartet came about because in that year I was
working with Professor Bochmann.
He asked me what I wanted to write, and I elected to write a string
quartet. When I finished the
piece, which was what I submitted for examination in the second year of the
composition course, there was Lopes-Graça Composition Prize, which included,
and still includes, the performance of the prize-winning work – unlike many
composition competitions which give you a certificate and that’s it. In that year I was lucky. Since I’d done the String Quartet, I
sent it in, and was happily informed that I’d won. Thanks to that, I heard the music performed – but that was
thanks to the Lopes-Graça Prize, not to the Escola Superior de Música.
Do
you mean this work shows traces of the path that you wanted to follow? What are these traces?
I
think that, in listening to the piece, you can hear perfectly well one of my
great influences, Ligeti. Ligeti
is, among living composers, perhaps the one whom I would place first. I don’t like these hierarchies, because
it’s always unfair and somewhat simplistic. It’s very restricting, but I must say that he was, and still
is, a very strong influence on the way I understand music. I could only have written the String
Quartet because I analysed, for example Ligeti’s String Quartet no. 2. I listened a lot to his music.
There
are aspects of this Quartet – in terms of texture, notation, rhythm and the
discovery of timbre – that have a lot to do with experiments I made later
on. There’s a particular way of
organizing the content of the piece by means of panels, which has to do with my
visual and narrative way of perceiving my music. in he Quartet, you can already clearly see this tendency to
group things in what can be seen as a polyptych of situations, which I intended
to be quite visual and narrative – to have a line, a starting point, a
development and a finishing point.
In this respect, it’s curious that some of my more recent pieces,
principally because I have gone back to using regular rhythm, have moved
apparently quite far from the String Quartet. But I recognize their DNA, I know their genetic code very
well, and I know that there are many things there in embryo that I’m doing
nowadays. At first glance, you
could think that what I did in 1995 and what I’m doing today is by two
different composers. But in accordance with this idea of the panels, each work
is a panel in the polyptych. What
I’m doing today is probably an embryo of what I’ll be doing in ten years’
time. I think that’s the way
things evolve naturally.
Or
not... because there are composers with whom, on the contrary, one work is
completely different from another.
What you are saying is that there are is a series of things that are
constant and which are worked on in each piece.
Yes,
if I look back, and look for great contrasts, the only situations in which I
think from one piece to another there is a very abrupt cut, tend to be above
all prophylactic. If, in order to
relax, I want to experiment with something completely different...
I’ll
give you an example: when I did Canto para Timor Leste
for string orchestra, which was a rather intense piece that I found tiring to
write, straight afterwards I wrote a piece called Sundance Sequence,
which has nothing to do with the previous piece – neither the idea, nor the
themes, nor the final aesthetic result.
I did it because I needed to “cool down”. When I finished Canto para Timor,
I needed to do something completely different, at the opposite extreme of what
I had done before. But this is
rare. Perhaps it happens more for
physical than aesthetic reasons.
It’s
rather an isolated work in your catalogue.
In
that work the text, of course, and the programme behind it, are intentionally
humorous. On one level, it’s a
provocative piece. On another,
it’s a preparatory work for a children’s opera, which was supposed to have been
written in the following year but which then didn’t work out.
Independently
of what I’m talking about – humour – as such, I never again worked on such a
disconcerting piece. There are
many aspects of the work that occur again in later pieces. Though there are differences
rhythmically, in the harmonic fields which lead on from one another, there are
some points of contact with composers such as Frank Zappa – not only because of
te humour, but also for reasons of harmony and melody. Even in the orchestral piece, Round
Time, there are things that bring influences from music of
a completely different kind, as is the case with Zappa.
So
I think that Sundance Sequence is not so far from the
centre as all that, and was also an embryo for other things which happened
afterwards. There’s nothing to say
that, from one day to the next, I won’t feel like writing another disconcerting
piece. But that one was important,
because I was in London when I wrote it, and it was a commission for a young
composers’ competition.
At
that time, I felt that the musical world, and what one heard in this kind of
concert, was stagnating in a particular kind of compositional solution. I don’t mean by this to criticize, but
in fact – and looking in from the outside – especially after having been to
London, that’s the conclusion I came to.
When
we distance ourselves from our own world, in some ways we become more critical,
perhaps because of that distance.
I felt that I needed to write a piece that would agitate people a
little, that wasn’t conventional or traditional, which is normally what you
expect from a young composer. The
attitude that I think I show in Sundance Sequence
doesn’t have anything new, bearing in mind that I already knew from abroad,
particularly England.
Perhaps
we could talk in more detail about the musical language of your last orchestral
piece. This also shows the
importance that literature has for you, doesn’t it?
In
this particular case, the idea of Round Time – though
the title was taken from an book – is not at all influenced by the content of
the book itself. I think that,
very often, I look for ideas in poetic texts, but the music doesn’t then have a
direct relationship with the texts.
I can give a couple of examples: the case of Verde Secreto,b
for piano and saxophone, arose from a poem by Alexandre O'Neill, in which he
says “In my opinion I have secret green [verde secreto]
in your eyes”. My piece has
nothing to do with this text, but I liked very much the image that it
evokes. What I did was to
decontextualize the secret green of the eyes of the person about whom O’Neill
is talking. In another case, in A
Way to Silence, I took the title from a book of poems by
Yvette Centeno – the book is called Entre Silêncios
– and wrote a piece which does not depend at all on her text, but explores the
idea of silence and the things that happen between silences. They’re musical events that happen
between silences, based on the title suggested by Yvette’s text.
Coming
back to Round Time, what particularly attracted me
was the idea of a round time, a circularity of time – which has much to do with
my fascination for eastern cultures.
I don’t mean that I have any great knowledge, or a way of approaching
philosophical thoughts via the East, because I don’t, but I am fascinated by a
certain serenity and tranquillity to be found in Oriental people. This notion of cycles that repeat, and
our ephemeral passage within those cycles, because everything is continuous –
this kind of contemplative attitude, which has to do with natural phenomena, cycles
that renew themselves, and so on – all that fascinates me. It fascinates me visually and, if you
like, even calligraphically.
There’s a whole series of visual elements in Chinese and Japanese and
other cultures, than attracts me a good deal. When I used the title Round Time,
I was, in fact, writing a piece full of circular processes, in which the
starting points are taken up again and become points of arrival. So the thing that sets off the
phenomenon is also the consequence of the process, in that I set something in
movement from a particular point – which is, at the same time, cyclically also
the point of arrival and functions as a point of reference. As listeners, we do
not perceive that they are there.
They work, even subliminally, as foundations, as a scaffolding, as a
structure which makes these arrivals present in the discourse. At the same time, there’s the idea of
long time, of continuity. For
example, I have another piece, Ends meet, for
marimba and string quartet, in which the idea is that the last movement begin
with a slight crescendo beginning on a pianissimo,
as though suddenly the music were already there. In other words, this movement doesn’t even have a beginning
– all of a sudden, the music is there.
So this is an idea which fascinates me, music being able to begin as though
it were already there. In this
piece, my more recent relationship to the East is also there too in terms of
timbre and colour. I feel really
fascinated by this – and also, working with an orchestra is wonderful for me,
because it is, perhaps, my favourite “instrument”. Orchestration is perhaps one of the aspects that gives me
most pleasure. Composition is
extremely tiring, and somewhat boring, and I avoid it as much as possible up to
the moment when the time to hand in the score of the piece is dangerously
close. When I’m already inside,
there’s no way out, and in having to solve the problem, what I really enjoy is
the colour. And here I think the
East has things to teach. In fact,
Debussy already said at the Universal Exhibition in Paris that the gamelan made
western percussion completely ridiculous.
And
now, what’s the problem you couldn’t avoid? What are you working on now?
Oddly
enough, on a piece in which the source has nothing to do with the East. It’s a commission from Culturgest, in which
I’m going to use, at their request, a ballet conceived by Jean Cocteau, Le
Jeune Homme et la Mort. It will be a show in homage to Cocteau. In this piece, I decided to use five
percussionists and a baritone singer-narrator, who will, in a way, recount the
action of the ballet – so it will be an imaginary ballet, not
choreographed. The choice of
percussion has to do with the fact of it perhaps being the most choreographic
section of the orchestra. What
fascinates me in this section is precisely finding timbres, atmospheres and, if
you like, sound landscapes which excite me enormously, like a child playing
with toys. So, what I’m going to
do with percussion is very much influenced by this way of looking at timbre,
and which, at present, owes at great deal to the percussion section.
You
said a number of things which raise some questions. One of them is the question of the piece beginning as though
the music were already there. Does
this have something to do with creating in space, as though it were an
exhibition – when you go to see pictures, there’s already there. Is this important for you? Also, you spoke several times about
discourse: I’d like to discuss that further, because you spoke of the various
elements of the language of the discourse, but specifically in relation to the
visual, as a way of creating something that involves the listener – once again
we come back to space, to landscape.
And then there’s the question of detail – the choreographic aspect,
which you’ve explored in another piece, Mind the Gap.
Mind
the Gap, for example, is a piece for marimba solo in which I
explore, precisely, the choreography of the marimba player, because the first
movement is called “Keep Left”, and is to be played entirely on the left-hand
side of the marimba. The last
movement is “Keep Right”, and is for the right side of the marimba. "Next Train Approaching", the
second movement, is very visual, as though it were a train journey at night,
and the third is "Currently Out of Order", which is quite chaotic. There, the performer moves from one
side to the other of the marimba in an almost disorganized way, and we get into
the question of physical space, which it is only possible to understand by
observation.
Precisely,
there it’s explicit – is the performer intervening in space like a sculpture,
or...?
Absolutely.
And
this element is still very much present in your work. One could say that it’s something quite important to you.
It
certainly is. The other is the
dimension of time in space, and this perhaps brings us to discourse, as you
were saying. It’s also quite
important, in that we can distinguish two levels. One is that fact of there being a discourse which is
situated in time, which occupies a space in time, and from which we cannot
escape, because this is the essence of the actual musical discourse. But also in the sense that today
composers have the possibility to include in their language different spaces
and times, whether they be more or less contemporary with their own time and
space.
For
example, in Round Time, there are clear references to
geographical spaces where I have never been, but which, on account of the time
in which I live, I can see very easily – by means of television, radio,
recordings, the internet, or by other means. This is a rather urban side of things, which I think is
sometimes present in my music.
Once again, this has to do with the space and time in which I live,
which is a time in which on the television one can see things such as the first
cloned human being. So this has
some direct impact on my musical language, including a certain anxiety,
agitation or even a mechanical dimension.
This is the time in which I live.
Though I like the country very much, I don’t live there. I very much like contemplating the landscape,
but the way I live is 98% urban.
So, this has immediate consequences for what I do.
Coming
back again to the question of time being able to be more or less contemporary –
the possibility of recovering aspects of even times which are not mine – that’s
more delicate. Obviously, you have
to be very careful, because recovering times other than my own doesn’t interest
me at all unless I can inject some subversive element that makes them of my
time – something that makes it so that it could only have been done in the last
decade of the past century of now, in the first decade of this century. I’m not at all interested in taking
things from the past as quotation of mere pastiche without in some form
reinventing it, or recontextualizing it in the light of the present, which is
my time.
Does
the question of communicating with the audience condition your compositional
work?
I
don’t think it’s difficult to understand what I do. However, communication at any price doesn’t interest me; one
has to weigh the pros and cons.
But, in terms of communication, I think I’ve now found an extremely
narrative dimension. People are
thus guided by a musical narrative which may or may not be programmatic. For example, in Invenção sobre
Paisagem, I even say in the programme notes that intend that
listening to the piece should create a perception of an imagined visual space,
and that I want that space to be reinvented or recreated through
listening. So, I try to make the
music sufficiently suggestive to stimulate this relationship, this
communication, in order that there be a more communicative participation from
the point of view of listening.
But I don’t like overloading what I do with elements that are too
defined, to the point of conditioning too much this perception that I try to
establish.
But
it’s also creative, as you said?
Exactly. It’s like creating a complicity. It’s interesting, because we all have
this experience of people saying “Ah, here I find this, and here I see that”,
and very often they find things it never entered into my mind could be there,
but for me it’s extremely amusing to observe this. Very often it’s perfectly relevant, in spite of me
relatively indifferent to it.
António
Pinho Vargas raised precisely the question of process – he conceives of
composition as a process in which he participates. Then objects appear, some of which he chooses and others
not. You spoke of your concern,
already at the Escola Superior de Música, with the construction of a language –
the narrative side of your works is part of the language, and then there’s the
material side. But you also don’t
like talking about recipes... How do you cook? There are composers who really hate speaking about
this.
No,
I don’t hate it, but my memory is very bad at times. I don’t know if it’s a defence mechanism of some kind that I
created, but normally, when I finish an piece, a week later I’ve forgotten most
of what I did. The double bar-line
is able to eliminate my own knowledge of my work. It’s not through not wanting to, or any kind of
unfriendliness, but sometimes they ask me questions which I just don’t know how
to answer. Apart from that, and in
a more general sense, I think that my choice of materials is always made after
listening. I often write my pieces
in a continuous gesture. Examples
of beginning a piece from the middle and then reorganizing it are very rare; I
almost always begin from the first bar and finish with the last one. In most cases, I have an idea, which is
the moving force of the piece, but I never have a pre-composed structure that I
can’t get free of and go somewhere completely different. So, it is, in the end, as though I
caught a bus without knowing very well where it was going... Then, if halfway through the journey I
don’t like where I am, I get out and catch another bus.
But
is this difference in a piece in terms of objects?
Yes,
but I think that the idea of objects in music is an idea which has in a way
become banal, but has always been present. I mean, I think so, that much of the music I’ve written
begins from initial materials that are the embryo of what the rest of the piece
will be. This was one of the
things that I really wanted to develop when I began to study composition. I’m very interested in the idea of a
music that has the potential for what will happen afterwards, as though a
synoptic form were there in order to implode the musical gesture. When I said that my materials begin
from listening, perhaps I’m going to fall back on the reply that other people
have already given. I seek out
harmonic fields and melodic ideas, or I begin simply with listening to a
timbre. Some people think “Ah,
you’re going to write a chord, choose a melody” – no, that’s something very far
from the process. Sometimes it’s
colours. I can work on a type of
interval combined with another, or find that a certain timbre is wonderful for
developing a musical idea. But
everything is tried out, as far as possible, by listening. For example, just yesterday – we spoke
a little while ago about the piece I’m going to do with percussion – I was in
Oporto with some musicians from Drumming, trying out things on the percussion
instruments, in order construct an edifice on the basis of these ideas that
arise. It may be that only with an
effort at solitary abstraction can I manage to obtain these results. This foes for timbre, rhythmic ideas,
melodic ideas, or ideas for a harmonic field. But there’s always a lot of experimentation, and composing –
this is also a cliché – is also elimination. I think that the most difficult part is to have the courage
to throw out what we think are good ideas, but we have to limit ourselves to
what is essential, or, in other words, the discourse I’m constructing. Then there’s always compromise, or, if
you like, an equilibrium between fumbling around and then organizing the things
on paper. For that, writing is
fundamental. This is the reason I
could never be a jazz musician, because I don’t have the capacity to develop my
composition without going through this kind of attempt at rationalizing and
organization, which is the writing.