INTERVIEW WITH EMANUEL DIMAS DE MELO PIMENTA (complete version)

Art, Science and Technology

Hegel used to say, about art and science, that one was the limit of the other, and Peirce would develop this idea, saying that science always begins from qualities in order to establish laws, while art begins from laws in order to establish new qualities.  I believe that all this is interconnected, because all the aesthetic experience of human beings is making, technoi.  So we have the technoi logos, the knowledge of how to do, how to make things.  If one wrote a history of aesthetics according to “making”, it would perhaps be more interesting, because “making” has everything to do with what we are, with action.  Our actions underlie and structure our being, what we are.

As you know, I’ve always worked with the principle of structuring synaptic complexes.  That’s always the root, the basis of my work and also in some measure my life’s work.  Now, all this very dynamic elaboration of synaptic complexes occurs by making, by means of our senses and the construction of a reality which is perception itself, cognition itself.

It’s important, however, to say this: if this actually happens, if I maintain this position, technology has a position almost of entertainment, like that of applied science, or can at least be read as applied science – as, in any case, entertainment may also be understood as applied art.  Publicity is a good example of that.  But I don’t have any preconceptions; I think we’re here and we must question all these essential conditions of the human being.  The difference that there is, perhaps, is one of repertoire.  For example, I think of friends who are folk musicians, and I don’t consider then lesser musicians, or less brilliant than other people who do other things.  The question here is the level of the repertoire, of the complexity of the repertoire.  I think that this is, perhaps the basic question.

The influence of architecture on music

The influence is so vast, so total, so global and so all-embracing, that I’d even risk saying that I’m neither a musician nor an architect.  What I work on are “logical snares”, which may appear in music or in architecture, but may also happen in photography, literature, and in other media.  Unfortunately, I won’t live very long – I may live for ninety years, one hundred and thirty years... I hope!  But I’m not going to live for two thousand or three thousand years.  We have to sleep, and I have very little time, I must bathe, eat.  The time I have for my creative life, that to which I may dedicate myself, is very short, very little.  And so I began to undertake the investigation of music and architecture as fundamental elements in my work.  But, in fact, there’s a plan behind this, an idea of subversion which is the establishment of “logical snares”.  That’s the fundamental condition.  I mean, music has no interest in itself, music for its own sake, to be beautiful, or to serve as entertainment, that makes no sense at all.  It could make some sense as entertainment or as a kind of speculation – what was called in the 19^th century “art for art’s sake”, or something of the kind.  But, in my life, there’s only the sense of creating “logical snares”.  Because only difference produces awareness.

There’s a very big impasse between the one activity and the other.  Now, virtual architecture is a concept, a strategy for thinking about time and space.  A strategy through which we take on all the sensory and cultural components of a particular historical moment. We take on a rupture with the local causality principally as an approach to certain questions of scale.  In other words, we may recover and apprehend certain resources on a subatomic scale, or up to an astronomical scale, we may travel in time and space and we can consider, take on and adopt all the cultures of the planet as our own culture, as our cultural heritage.  Thus we become direct inheritors of Japan, Egypt, India, Europe and so on...  As the hybrid beings that we are, this is a new being that arises.  This is the underlying concept of virtual architecture.  In music the same thing occurs, but in a different way, because we’re not talking about world music or something like that.  There are certain principles of integration and of interaction during the creative process of the music itself.  There are certain elements of method, of elaboration and conceiving music, which have everything to do, as strategy, with architectural thought.  In the end, it’s a life and there’s a strong correspondence between the two activities in my particular case.

When one looks at a virtual score, a score within a computer, one sees certain elements which may or may not resemble those of architecture – because architecture has a primary condition, which is function.  And function in music is of a completely different dimension.  We also have a function in music – if we didn’t have a function in music we wouldn’t have any understanding – but in architecture we have another condition, because it implies space, it implies vision too.  What I did here musically, and which traces a parallel between one world and another, was to fool the ear with the eye.  That’s one of the strategies here.  Why?  Well, a conventional musical score is a re-reading, and recovers much of the written text.  We preach...  It’s not by chance that Charles Ives wrote The Unanswered Question. The entire system of traditional teaching in our music schools, up to the present, works on the basis of the “question and answer” formula.  If we analyse Schubert or Beethoven, all these composers we know so well, they all have an element of preaching as a fundamental part of the structuring of the logical discourse of the music.  Now, when we have a complete approach, as is the case with a virtual score, which is inside a space, there is an incorporation of systase.  Systase is a visual element which allows us to see, or which points towards that which we see, all at the same time.  When we look at a picture, we don’t look at one thing and then another, we look at the picture.  When we drive a car, we look at everything that’s going on, we don’t look first at one thing and then another.  Listening is one thing after another, and in this particular case, one of the resources I use is systase as a way of fooling, or trapping the listener.  If we go a little further, we may see that, in architecture as in music, the whole process of construction that I’ve developed has been built around “logical snares”.  And the one thing has everything to do with the other.

Elements of chaos theory in music.

I wrote a piece for Florence, Italy, which was performed in September 2003.  the whole piece is based on water.  For example, there may be a strong current of water... From these sounds, I managed to isolate small particles of differentiation, in other words, the discontinuities of the system, isolated from the rest and transformed by me.  I eliminated the whole entropic part.  I used only the information – if one may freely use that expression in this case.

In another of my works, I used sounds captured by astronomical observatories of stars and planets, extra-terrestrial sounds.  That is, my concern was, as part of the approach we’ve been discussing, to use elements that could bring into conflict what we think of as intention.  Or, rather, the intention that we may perhaps associate, intensely, with Schopenhauer’s will.  The will is directly and profoundly linked to our logical structure.  Our logical structure is our thought and our thought is our language. But it is not only verbal language, it’s all the languages we use.  It’s music, which we’ve dealt with for centuries, publicity, architecture, design, it’s verbal language, it’s the forms of written language – a whole, vast universe of languages which compete within a context which is culture.  All this sets up a particular logical model for which the intention is a structural element, and is also the element which connects us to literature, to the world of literature – the word, the structuring of all languages after the Gutenberg revolution, printing and movable type.

I use, for example, water of chaos systems, or sidereal space, the constellations, or even within the subatomic world, nanotechnology, in some of my works, in which I work with principles of molecular aggregation.

There’s a piece of mine called Fogo (“Fire”), in which I use that crackling characteristic of wood burning.  But what order is there in that work?  It’s an order that goes beyond us.  It doesn’t have my participation.  I can do something which is beyond that which I think, and that interests me greatly.  If it were not so, I would write popular music, without any value judgement on this kind of music.  Just the other day, I was listening to Santana, and I listen to many young singers, I have no prejudices.  And that’s the world we’ve got.

But there is here a fundamental point: why do I do this?  It’s because I believe in this: Freud defined culture as a social element par excellence of criticism and combat with nature.  Culture is an instrument against nature.  Now, culture is our clothing, that which means that we are not in direct contact with the wind, the air, the cold, and so on, it’s glass, it’s verbal language, it’s the table which contradicts gravity, the glass which prevents the water from spilling, the design of this.  And this is culture, all this design behind the world, which also enters into the material aspect, such as our values, laws, rules, such as the fact that I may not attack a person, all this is culture.  And everything that is culture is against nature.  It’s enough to go to the forest for a while to see how nature works.  Nature is competition at all levels.  One person has to kill another in order to eat, and so on.  Culture is against all this, it’s against nature in that sense.  Now, if we did not have another instrument that was quite efficient at taking apart this instrument of criticism of nature, we would live shackled to an immutable system of rules, norms and laws.  What I do is this: I try to subvert, to create a new element of subversion.  And here we have two points which seem to me important to consider.  One of them is art, which is this instrument par excellence for criticising culture – but it is not criticism of the content, it’s critical in that it is taking apart, it’s deconstruction, which implies an incorporation.  Nothing is criticized, nothing is deconstructed, not in the sense of tracing any negative element, but it’s not taken apart, or deconstructed, if it’s not known.  It implies knowledge, and so it’s a generative element.  All art, when it’s really art and not merely entertainment, that belongs to the world of culture, is criticism of culture, and is generative.

But we have another aspect, which is crime.  Crime is also fundamentally a criticism of culture, but one made by means of degeneration.  In crime, all the component elements of a particular moment are reduced, or synthesized into an objective which is the objective of the actual crime.  They are always linked.  Tolstoy thought about precisely this during his whole life and never arrived at an answer.  But it is exactly that, they’re linked by the fact of both being elements of the critique of culture.  While one has a degenerative appearance, the other has the appearance of diversity and generation.  It’s always linked through the actual function...  But, in any case, in its essence, it’s always connected.  A crime may have certain elements... There are some cases in which art and crime come together, but at the moment when crime actually joins itself to art, it ceases to be crime, it becomes art, because it implies knowledge, repertoire.

When I do this work, for example, it’s the work of a lifetime.  As you know, I left my life, left many things that I could have done in order to dedicate myself to this.  I’ve dedicated to this for thirty years, now twenty-five years just to musical concerts.  In architecture too, but I began that before, studying and so forth. I think this is essential, especially these days.  And this brings up the question of identity.  Violence is nothing more, any violence – and this is the idea I have of violence – than the search for identity.  Nothing else exists, in any situation, even in an animal situation.  If there is violence, it is a question of identity.  Sometimes we can say that poverty brings violence.  No, poverty only brings violence when it implies a loss of identity.  For example, somebody loses his job, and he loses all his social links and in the end loses his identity, which very often makes him violent.  It’s the mask, the Etruscan personare, the dreaming, the birth of the actual person, the emergence of the actual person.  From my point of view, art has a very fundamental value in a turbulent society such as ours.  Our society is not theocratic, it’s a society in permanent turbulence.  We need an instrument of criticism and decoding of culture constantly, or we are condemned to a dictatorship, an authoritarianism, to a cultural totalitarianism.  That’s rather what’s happening today.  I mean, the television, systems of hypercommunication – the telephone, the mobile telephone, all the systems of hypercommunication – are hyperculture.  And we don’t have the other side of hyperart.  In other words, a competent system of criticism of art.  Once you called me a “libertarian”, do you remember?  I think it was the first time we met.  And I believe in that, I think you were right about that.  It’s something inside me.  I’m a libertarian in that I believe in the Greek concept of freedom, which was the capacity of each person to define his own limits.  The freedom that I put forward as an essential element is ours, because each one of us draws his own boundaries, his own limits.  Now, we can’t do that in a frozen society, mummified by a rigor mortis of laws and norms which cannot change, metamorphose or transform.

The computer and composing

The computer is an instrument, like a bar, like a pen, like an aeroplane, like a ...  No, it’s an essential instrument, because it’s an instrument that’s ours, of today, it optimizes a number of functions.  When I began to study electronics, a long time ago, there were no calculators, those little ones we have today, much less computers.  I began to work with computers in 1973 or 1974, and then began to use the Commodore VIC20, do you remember?  Those really old ones.  Well, it wasn’t very usual at the time.  I had to do all those equations in there, by means of analytical geometry and so on.  I was able to build forms and set up strategies with virtual scores, but which did not have the graphic character that they would have in the 1980s.  With the development of the CardScan system, things developed enormously, but then I had to make many calculations with a slide rule.  Even today I calculate with a slide rule, but imagine the distance between the slide rule and the computer... And what is it that the computer does?  It optimizes fantastic resources.  For example, this latest piece in which I work with water...  If I did not have a computer to help in the reading of these differential elements of that flux of events, it would be practically impossible to do anything.  I’d certainly do something, but note this: the means is the message and that’s our world.  I’m a computer, I’m part of all this.  Just as I’m a mobile telephone, a car, an aeroplane, and so on... We are this world in which we exist.  If computers did not exist, my concerns would very probably be others, because thought is not something that’s limited to one person.  I use the computer as a natural extension, mine, but that’s the way I use everything, the acoustic piano, the flute, you’ve seen me play everything.  I mean, I don’t have the slightest problem.  Moreover, my concertos – I have concertos for instruments, percussion, orchestras... In 1985, I did a concerto for four orchestras, large orchestras, at the Bienale in São Paulo – it was there that I met John Cage.  Imagine that all the instruments played only one note.  But I did a spectral analysis of each of the instruments of the orchestra in order to understand the structure of the harmonics, and the design of the harmonics of each one, and the fluctuations in tuning.  Well, I came to the conclusion that fluctuating the tuning at certain moments, with certain intensities and certain octaves, we could assemble the harmonics that were within the timbre of the actual instrument, and they would collide in the air, generating a third sound, other notes.  The piece was very interesting, because everyone heard everything, and a series of different notes, but only one note was played.  This was only possible using computers, but it doesn’t matter, it’s not so essential, I mean the computer is essential, but it’s within us.  We are the computers, and that’s also our concern.  For example, when I question identity, intention, predication, well, all these questions are the reality of the computer, it’s cyberspace.  These questions are the world of today.  I’d very much like to free myself from this and undertake some investigation, perhaps more interesting, but it so happens that if I construct a very interesting relationship outside this, I place myself outside culture itself, and therefore begin to do something which is nothing.  And I’m not interested in that, you see?  The computer has a function, obviously.  Here we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and there are another four built in there.  All these computers are linked, they’re working.  And for me to work on a project, very often I...  As I said, I jump from chair to chair, from here to there, which helps me not to put on too much weight.

Working methods and processes

Of course, there’s always a method, isn’t there?  I mean, there’s always a process of composing.  So the first thing I have to know is the time the piece will last.  Then I set up all the strategies.  But there are two interesting things here.  One ugly, and the other beautiful.  Which do you want first?  The ugly one is what Villa-Lobos said: “I compose as I defecate”, and it’s quite true.  I mean, I don’t control the process very well.  I know that I have principles in setting things up, I have to establish certain parameters, but I don’t know how to explain them very well, because it’s a bit like a trance.  I study for ages, but then the actual creative part, of composition, of elaboration, is a technical reflection.  I mean, we have to have this.  Which resource shall I use for this particular element, etc...  And all this implies invention, the principle of invention.  One piece is always different from another.  I never repeat myself, I don’t do the same thing twice.  I’m always questioning myself, always seeking to learn what is essential at that particular moment.  The second thing is that, normally, I compose when I’m asleep, during the night.  I always have at the side of my bed a computer, or a notepad, or a book, and always, but principally when I have a deadline to meet, I work while asleep.  So it’s funny, I sleep and working things out, then I awaken and write or put it on the computer and fall into bed.  When I fall into bed, I sleep imediately, and continue to work.  I continue, wake up again, go over there, go back to bed, sleep and continue.  That’s a whole night, and I don’t get tired, I actually rest.  On the following day I feel absolutely fine.  It must be some genetic defect; my father was like that too.  My father was an inventor of watches, and it was interesting, because he didn’t have this habit of getting up all the time in order to write things down, but in the morning he would say “Ah, I can’t forget, I can’t forget”, and it would be a new invention or a patent that was about to come out, or something of the kind.

All my pieces, when they are to be performed, have a public performance, except for some rare cases in which I play alone, and then I give myself the freedom of deciding what I’ll do on the spur of the moment, but when I work with other people, which is what I like best, there’s always a creative process which implies the participation of everyone.  People have to create, to work things out.  That’s part of my music.  I was at the Lincoln Centre in 2002, with Merce Cunningham, and he said, “Emanuel, we’re commemorating the first concert, and in the first two days we’re going to open with your music”.  He was referring to Fabrications, which includes two pieces of mine, Shortwaves 1985 and SBbr, and he said “It’s historic, we’ll do what was done twenty years ago...”  I answered: “It can’t be done, I can’t do it, it’s impossible, it doesn’t exist, what was twenty years ago was twenty years ago, it was interesting then and that’s it”.  And so that was the situation, and Merce said: “You’re quite right”.  But Robert, who was the director of the company, found it difficult to assimilate this.  That was when Christian Wolff and Takehisa Kosugi played with me on that recording.  But it ended up being something completely different, something else.  We’re not the same in half an hour’s time, in five minutes’ time.  And that’s the value of recorded music, isn’t it?  We can hear ourselves, and each time we hear, because we hear differently each time, we hear our own change. But the musician, even if he wants to play something conventional, Bach of something, Handel, Josquin, whatever, he always plays something else, always differently.  Why should contemporary music be any different?  No, this can still be optimized, can be amplified, and so I have my working methods, each piece, when it’s going to be performed, it’s a job that implies...  For example, Microcosmos – in the first concerts, it was practically all electronic and digital, transforming the sounds and so on.  But one of the requirements of the piece, what it needs, is that for each city to which the company travels, a sound be collected.  A tin can, a place, it doesn’t matter, a piece of metal, something, to the point at which all those digital sounds are gradually replaced by the sounds compiled during the company’s travels throughout the world.  At the end, it’s another piece, it’s a pieced in metamorphosis, in permanent transformation.  And it’s that that I believe, I believe in metamorphosis, in transformation, in interaction, in diversity, in creativity, in the individual, these are the values.  All these values are values of a philosophy, or, in other words, a love for knowledge of the world, a love for things as they are – that’s what I love, it’s my life.  I could never write a score, for example, for something that would always be done in exactly the same way, because I don’t believe that’s what human beings are.

Argument for the use of synthesized sounds

Do you know what the problem is?  Or why this happens?  When I was working in Brazil, until 1985, I had many musicians working with me.  I gave, in the Large Auditorium of the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, six or seven concerts a year.  Many concerts, with many people, with many musicians working, and there was a spirit of solidarity, of camaraderie, which I didn’t find in Europe.  It’s finished, it’s not here.  Here, very often the people who are going to play want to know about the money, about payments, but we also experience great difficulties, especially when we’re just beginning our careers, in getting things done.  Either we go, we bet on the thing and do it, or it doesn’t get done.  And there have been so many times in my life when I’ve done things for so many people without charging a penny, because it was part of my life.  So when I began to travel more, I came back to Europe... I have a great need to work; I can’t depend on people.  I’m not the kind of person who, when a difficulty appears, gets round it and says “forget about it”.  No, I go forward, get on with it.  One of the solutions I found was digital music, and working with sampling systems and then with amplification...  This allows me to work alone, but I never try to recreate acoustic instruments, never.  Very often I make use of concrete music resources, in the sense of creating a conflict between what is collectively established and what we set up as an individual intention within this cultural framework.  There’s also a very interesting resource there, it’s natural.  For example, those pieces for Fernando Pessoa, with only synthetic sounds in one of the pieces, which are transformed in MIDI elements, in MIDI information.  The structure came from the journeys that Fernando Pessoa would probably have made in downtown Lisbon and so on.  Now I don’t know...  I think that we are also very much built as well from the possibilities that occur.  Our life is made by us, but we are made by it too.  I mean, we make, but we are made.  I don’t feel very responsible for that, I think I’m rather a product of it, of the world, of things, of transformations, of people who cease to exist, to others, other people who come into existence.  Other demands arise; I began to do a lot of music for the cinema, lots of music for dance, I began to have concerts in various parts of the world, performed by different musicians, and very often this also began to demand a different approach.  I don’t know...  You’re right when you say that this happens in many of my pieces, but I don’t know up to what point, and I wouldn’t know how to tell you now, to what point there’s an influence of any substance.  Anyway, that doesn’t interest me.  What matters is the project that lies behind it, the idea, that which structures the actual thinking of the composition...  It’s natural that I am interested in all of the material, but there’s something behind all this that articulates, the ties it all together.  And it may be that tomorrow I’ll cease to agree with all this that I’m saying now, of course.  Because that’s what I think.

Influence of John Cage

I had a wonderfully mad teacher who used to make us lie on the floor listening to Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, John Cage, and all those composers.  This was in 1968, during the military dictatorship in Brazil.  And from early on I was fascinated by John’s music.  Later on we met, in 1985, and became friends.

My music was always different from his.  I always made a point of emphasizing this, because I never tried to imitate John.  My work is my work, it’s something else.  He liked my work because it was different.  And John had a position: it wasn’t just my work he liked, he loved things very much.  John was a very interesting person, but something I think nobody likes is when one person begins to imitate the other.  And that’s not the case, it never happened.  But it was curious, when my book on John came out, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of his death, that an Italian critic understood it in a way that I had never done, and that perhaps only after ten years had passed after his death I would perhaps be able to.  This critic wrote about the book saying: “He was a young composer, very young, whose life was profoundly altered, indelibly altered, by his contact with John Cage”.  At the time, I didn’t feel this, but now, ten years later, I think John had a great influence on me.  But I wasn’t aware of this influence at the time, because it wasn’t reflected in my music as such, but very probably in my actual life.  John was a marvellous person; he was one of the most wonderful people I’ve met in my entire life, and today I think...  I speak of him with great happiness, because in some sense it’s something that links us spiritually. I love being influenced, I think it’s the greatest thing, the most interesting, beautiful thing in life when we are open to influences from absolutely everything.  And if today I’m able to go back ten years and say “Wow, yes...”, suddenly that Italian critic was quite right.  I was young - when I met John I was twenty-six, and I really think he had a great influence on me, in all ways.