Entrevista a Carlos Caires / Interview with Carlos Caires
2005/Jun/01
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My journey towards
composition… Well, since a tender age I was always pushed towards music. My
father was a melomaniac and he had a lot of records at home, my mother also
often took me to concerts, so since I was very young I have been very aware of
music. While I was still at High School, I would always go for extra-curricular
activities to do with music – either flute or guitar classes. When I was
thirteen I went to the Gregorian Institute of Lisbon and began my musical
education studying piano and later studying harmony, counterpoint and a discipline
which was the Techniques of the 20th Century. Somehow, it was this
subject which pushed me a little towards composition. It was given by my
teacher Bochman – who in fact was also my harmony and counterpoint teacher.
This subject was a little innovative – given the spirit of the times – and put
me in contact with the first works of the 20th century (Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky). Given that there
was just one year’s subject matter, we managed to get as far as Boulez – they
weren’t composition classes as such, it was more of a secondary level
discipline, but it had some analysis, always complemented with a little writing
in the style of the period. Going back to my teacher Bochman, as in fact he was
not only my teacher in this subject but I also went to an extra-curricular
series called “commented auditions” in the Gregorian Institute of Lisbon, in
which, once a month, he gave a commented session – or rather he would choose a
work, only works from the 20th century, he would let us listen to it
and would speak a little about the piece, composer and context.
When I finished my secondary
level studies – so I was finishing High School, my 12th year and I
was also finishing piano, harmony and counterpoint at the Gregorian Institute
of Lisbon, there arose that situation where I had to choose if I went to
university or if I chose music: it is everyone’s eternal dilemma. By chance I opted for music - I was also quite encouraged by my
family – and I went to the Lisbon Superior School of Music, which in fact had
just opened, I believe it was just it’s second year of operation. As for my
liking for composition in itself, and to be completely honest, I cannot say
that when I started at the Superior School of Music I already wanted to be a
composer, although I entered a composition course. I wanted to study music, I
wanted to study it at the highest level I was able to. I wanted to learn a lot.
I wanted to study orchestration, but really my liking for composition more or
less grew throughout the course – clearly when I was halfway through the
course, I didn’t know if I was going to be a composer, but I wanted to do
composition, without a shadow of a doubt. From then on I was composing and
trying to present works – everyone knows how it works and it isn’t always easy
– at the time I knew César Viana, who directed an orchestra called Sinfonia B, which
premièred one of my works and then there was the Lisbon Sinfonietta. So, little by little, some of my things were being
played. Then, when I finished the course, I entered the Superior School of
Music as an assistant – so in a way I kept in contact with composition, now on
the other side, as a teacher, getting to know new students, new minds, younger
people, something which is always very good and stimulating.
After that, I was at the
Superior School of Music for six years – and at the end of those six years I
wanted to complement my education and study a specific area which was “Computer
Music”. And it was at this time that I decided to go to Paris - I went to Paris
because I knew a composer whose music attracted me a lot. Not only the music
but the way of thinking, his writing about music and who was Horacio Vaggione. I decided to go to Paris to follow
a university path with him, and having done my degree there, which is called “maitrise” I did the DEA (Masters) and at the moment
I am completing my doctorate, always with him, always related with this area.
Following the composition
course – this is a personal thing,
but I have no problem in talking about things like this – there was a period
when I was a little, not diffident about composition, but lost in relation to
my references. I then directed a choir, spent some time directing, I did some
orchestra direction courses (Spain, France), I directed the Portuguese Musical
Youth for a few years. I then founded the Ricercare
choir with Paulo Lourenço and Vasco Azevedo, I did many concerts of choral
music, some with orchestra, I even enrolled in the Lisbon Metropolitan
Orchestra to attend the orchestra direction course – here, I also wanted to
compose at the same time, I was a little divided. The decision came with the
piece Al niente because I wanted to
revise it and, at the same time, I had a lot of material to study for the
orchestra direction course (an overture by Mozart, a symphony by Schubert…).
So - I thought - this is the
moment to decide, it is now, I will finish the piece and compose. Clearly I
could have probably done both, but what I am saying is almost symbolic. It was
a decision which would affect the rest of my life – even if I resolved the
question temporarily, I would have to deal with the situation later on and so I
decided: I will finish the piece and I will dedicate myself to composition,
giving up orchestra direction. And so, I cancelled my inscription in the
Metropolitan Orchestra, I left choir direction and from then on it was only,
composition. The piece Al niente represented my
return, and reaffirmation of my true vocation.
MASTERS,
DOCTORATE, AND DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW COMPUTER-ORIENTED MUSICAL WORK ENVIRONMENT
When I did my
degree, I developed my first basic work with music and a computer, to be more
generic. My project was a piece, a piece for piano and electronics in real time
– which in fact had already had its debut in the Música Viva Festival, played
by Ana Telles Antunes - and my project consisted
not only of composition, but also of the development of software which would
allow the electronics to be performed in real time as well as a discussion on
the implications that this had on my manner of composing. When I went to Paris,
it wasn’t as if I was a fully formed composer, but I had acquired a certain
“métier”, and obviously if I was confronted with electronics there was a clash,
shall we say. It wasn’t a clash, but a confrontation – and we need to see the
instrumentality in electronics, which is the instrumental gesture in
electronics, this being the aspect which has interested me most lately. This is
the aspect that I took to my masters and which I am developing in my doctorate.
Concretely, the doctorate – it is
a little difficult to summarise - but uses all the theoretical work and
reflection concerning this problem: the bridges between the instrumental world,
instrumental composition, and what I intend to do with electronics.
It is clear that if I use a
normal audio editor, Pro-tools or Digital Performer, or other, I can do this.
Only that the entity I create is not an easily re-workable entity – or rather,
it is not a structured edition of the sound. For as much as I cut little bits
and paste them (I have a session with twenty four tracks), I can perceptually
identify by ear that there are four compound objects superimposed there. I can
have done this with this intention, but afterwards it is extremely difficult
for me to take one, or another and another and rework them or introduce the
concept of variation in this object, because of the very type of editor. Now my
doctorate project has been essentially to try to propose another type of sound
editor and this is what I am working on, I am making a prototype in Max/MSP,
which already works reasonably well and with which we can make a structured
edit, shall we say, from the idea of a musical figure. Or rather, I start with
small entities, and accumulate – grouping them into figures – and the figures
can be accumulated into a higher entity which I call the mezzo-structure; the
terminology doesn’t matter, what matters is the principle, it is a structured
edit where I keep all the instructions related with what I have changed in that
sound in the working memory of my programming environment.
Or rather, I can always go
back, and keeping the same figure or basic morphology, introduce small
variations to create new, similar objects. It is clear that this is a highly
debatable compositional principle, but it is mine, it is the one I intend to
implement, and that is why I made this software.
What I am trying to do with
these electronic resources is something which always worked this way in
instrumental music. In fact the very notion of a score implies this a little
and although we know what gesture we want in the end, there is, in fact, the
need to realise it, playing a note, and then another, and then another. So if I
take a generic granulation tool and suddenly introduce a series of parameters,
I have a sound which can last five seconds in which I have control over each
particle, with a merely compositional gesture I have created an entire texture.
If I wanted to do the same thing instrumentally I would necessarily have to
detail each note for each instrument.
This is a little of what I am
trying to implement in my programming environment and, in fact, Horacio Vaggione also has this way of thinking, but
I think that this was a curious encounter. For some reason I obviously became
interested in going to study with him, it wasn’t exactly by chance.
There are just
instrumental works, there are just electronic works… well, not yet, but I am finishing one at the
moment. And there are mixed works, these being the ones that are captivating me
most at the moment. I have one mixed work with clarinet and electronics, one
with flute and electronics, one with piano and electronics, and recently, last
January, I debuted a piece for four percussionists and live electronics, in
Italy. I have therefore worked a bit with mixing environments. Concretely, in
terms of electronics, I have been interested in that question – what is the
“instrumental gesture” in electronics, how can get the same type of phrase, of
morphology if you like or of figure – I have worked on this and I have
developed some computer tools to work precisely on this concept, on the concept
of the musical figure, on how you can work on the figure with the help of the
computer.
Above all it is a problem of
conception of the thing itself, or rather, all the approaches that I made to
electronic music were always perspectives. We had a great idea of a sonic mass
which we then sort of – either by accumulation, or by juxtaposition, by
whatever process – we made it more complex by layers. When you speak of sound
“treatment”, and I don’t like the word treatment at all, because I think that
it is easier and even nicer to speak of composition, to compose, to invent a
sound is to compose it – it is generally worked with very global parameters -
generally, in fact the very “interface” of the computer, the metaphor of the
“plug-in” is a global thing which is applied to a sound in a global way. Now,
it is clear that you can also work instrumentally in the same way, there are
always these two ways to compose, top-down and bottom-up – which means to start
from the bottom and go up and vice-versa. In fact in instrumental music we have
two paradigmatic examples: Pierre Boulez who worked bottom up, he began very
small and accumulated and Karlheinz Stockhausen who perhaps already knew what
his globality was and then worked it down. Now, the way I see it, in my
perspective, I am much more inclined to define the detail and based on the
accumulation of details, construct the final scheme – although I know, or have
the idea, or I should have the idea of the final scheme where I want to end up.
Obviously it is not as simple as that, but the methodology is how I just
explained it. Now, concretely, it’s like this: when I work on electronics or
with recorded sound of any kind, let us suppose that I want to compose a figure
– and here I will perhaps throw in a word which is assembly, or micro-assembly,
because this is the way I like to work, a complex figure made up from many sounds
which form a given morphology. We can almost call it a theme, if we want, a
theme which could last one second, half a second, two or five seconds, it
doesn’t matter. But it creates an entity.
It is clear that by getting a
compound figure through micro-assembly, which may include sounds which last
fifty milliseconds, I am in a scale of work which is not the same as in
instrumental music. The idea is to understand – this in fact is one of
Vaggione’s ideas – that the problems which arise in composition are somewhat
the same whether in instrumental music or in electronic music. Everything
depends on the scale through which you look at sound: the sound has to be
composed. If I write a C on a score, I know I have to write the dynamics, I
have to say what is the instrument, I have to know what is the articulation,
and all of this makes up the sound which will finally be heard. I am speaking a
little of this, because at times there is a perspective that perhaps this is a
little old hat, perhaps in education, in school, I don’t know, where great
importance is given to the notes as a symbol on a score – only that a note is
not only a symbol on a score, a note is, in the end, a sound… it is there to be
heard. I will just give an example which may perhaps illustrate where I am
going with all of this. It is a bit influenced by the serial music from the
fifties, well more than fifty years have gone by but the education we received,
even up to the eighties, was influenced by this. Obviously, not that it is
wrong but I think that it is a fact, and when in an analysis class,
irrespective of your teacher – and I have already been a teacher and maybe I
did the same thing – you take Webern’s work, for example, and we see where the
series are. And in Boulez the same thing. And at times there are issues which
I’m not saying are not approached, but perhaps do not have, do not gain the
same weight as this approximation, of the notes, which are fulcral questions in
fact, because it is this, at the end of the day – it’s not only this, but both
things are interconnected. The question of timbre, dynamics, the sound in
itself – one thing is the note, another thing is the sound – and I needed to
work in fact with electronic and electro-acoustic resources to really
interiorise and mature this idea which is more or less accepted by everyone,
but which in my case was not yet second nature. I don’t know if it is yet, I
don’t know if it ever will be, but that is where I want to get to and which, in
fact, even when I write instrumental music now I think that my attitude has
changed a little in relation to what it was ten years ago. Of course there is
all the theory, games with notes, etc., but in fact, I think that I don’t place
dynamics with such impunity as I did for example ten years ago. And I am
speaking against myself, but that’s the way it is.
Concerning my works, I won’t
talk about all of them. Al niente was
my first piece to be played in public, but not in its final version. Shall we
say that this piece had a first version (I am a person who, in general, revises
my pieces) which was first played by the Sinfonia B
orchestra conducted by César Viana, so long ago. And it was in fact the
first time that I heard myself in public and this had a brutal impact on me.
There you are, a person composes on the score, consciously knows what is there,
knows what he is putting but there is something in the execution which
transcends everything he might expect when we compose the piece. I am quite
aware that there are many people who say that they know what it’s going to
sound like from what is written but there are always countless unforeseen
factors. And even more so with the question of time. Time passes, and time
passes in a completely different way when we are listening. This is the eternal
dilemma, to control time when we are composing. One page which takes a day to
write will be heard in a second, it is tremendously disproportionate and this
is the composer’s constant control – time, time, time. And when this piece was
played it was an extraordinary experience; one week later, I got hold of the
piece to revise it – there were many things I realised in the rehearsals,
without having an orchestra at my disposal like Mahler to make changes during
rehearsals - but I made a significant revision. Shall we say that the essence
is still there: it is the same piece for all effects, but at the same time it
isn’t, and that is because I changed sections, others disappeared, others were
included, their order was changed or they were stretched because of the issue
of time, I needed more; others I shortened. It was like putty in my hands to
change it but the end result on the one hand had grown so distant from the
original that I even changed the title of the piece, I then called it Al niente, because it came to have a solo
instrument which is the clarinet, and the title even comes from the last
gesture of the clarinet, which is a note which hangs until it disappears,
giving the indication that Al niente is approaching, which is what gave the title to the
piece. It was with this piece that I won the 1st Composition Contest of the Lisbon Municipality in 1995 and the fact of re-hearing a piece which was played later, after
being revised, relaunched me somewhat along the path of composition.
More works…there are works which basically are included in this period,
shall we say, they have the same type of musical and compositional concerns,
the piece Wordpainting, the piece Lebhaft for flute. The piece Melodrama is a little different, it is a
melodrama, or rather, music with recited text. It was based on a sermon by
Father António Vieira as well as on other texts, but the main body is from the
sermon. The programmed content of the piece was a little different from what I
was used to composing at the time, but it is a piece which I should also
revise, because although it worked, I think that there are things there which I
could now rework, specifically the electronic part. It had a central section
with piano solo which then connected with a small section with electronics. It
was also at the time of this piece that I began to get into electronics and I
began to listen to, become interested in and explore the computer and the
available tools. At that time I wrote this piece – in 1997 – and for some
reason in 1998 I went to Paris. There are more pieces, at least there is Clepsidra, for string orchestra and writings
for the Lisbon Sinfonietta, which also belong a little to this period, a period
with more rhythmic concerns while the piece Al niente is more strictly concerned with harmony. Then in
Paris I composed Tríptico, a quartet for viola,
harp and two percussionists. There is also the piece I mentioned just before,
for piano and electronics, there is a version of the piece for flute with
electronics, there is the piece Linear,
for clarinet and electronics…Little by little I was entering a world where
electronics is increasingly present, specifically with this piece, Linear, which was not for clarinet and
electronics, it seems absurd to say so, but the first part – the piece lasts
around eight minutes – is only tape, around four minutes or more. The clarinet
only enters in the second half of the piece. This is partly due to the fact
that I am still searching to see how the instrumental world could connect to
the electronic world. I think that this is an eternal question which everyone
who works with these resources faces – how is it that these two worlds, which
are apparently so different but with so much in common – can really come
together in a consistent and beautiful way, because this is what is important.
So, this piece still reflects my search and so it has this solution, this
device – the first part only with electronics with a type of elaboration which
little by little introduces the clarinet, or rather through small melodic
gestures, the clarinet is introduced by the electronics but they don’t ever
completely come together. There are electronics in the second part, obviously,
but much less present; there is clarinet in the first part, because this uses
many clarinet sounds which are sampled, worked and mixed, but the two worlds
don’t ever really come together. The next piece was a piece for four
percussionists and electronics in real time and which was a commission from the
RAI for a percussion group of the RAI Symphonic Orchestra. It was first played
in January 2005 in Turin, conducted by the maestro Valade. The electronics part
was performed by me and continued in the studio of the “Tempo Reale” centre. It
is a piece where I am already looking for a greater fusion between electronics
and instruments.
I work the electronics essentially according to principles which I
explained just before – based on small figures, with the same figures as
another scale also to be played. We can say that the electronics functions here
as a fifth percussionist, only that it is a virtuoso percussionist, it can play
very fast and with notes of very small values – it is a little surreal, but
that’s how it is. There is also more of a cause-consequence effect between
instruments and electronics, it is not only a subversion, but I try for there
to be greater complementarity. In fact the electronics is all exclusively based
on sounds recorded from percussion instruments, which are then reworked, mixed,
cut, paste, etc.…I say the electronics is in real time, but there is no signal
processing in real time. There is some, but it is very little – some resonant
filters – but the main work in real time is the control and triggering of the
various figures and which is done by me. Basically, the other percussionist was
me. I therefore had an interface, on the one hand the previously composed
figures or rather, I had the description of the figures stored on the computer
under the format of text and on the other hand the computer keyboard with a
module of Midi potentiometers, as well as a graphic mixing desk (Tablet) with a
digital pen, with which I controlled the way in which the figure would be made
up. I thus controlled the selection of samples which were read according to the
positioning of the pen on the graphic desk, with the pressure of the pen being
used to control various types of parameters. And there it is, basically, the
real time is more in terms of interpretation than properly of treatment.
It is not the treatment which interests me at the end of the day. The
treatment forms part of the act of composition, I don’t look at it as an effect
(as it is sometimes said: “to add an effect”), it is not an effect as when you
assume the responsibility when you are composing by opening that plug-in, etc…
and this has to be faced and then conclusions have to be drawn from this act of
composition. So it is important for me to go back, in relation to what I just
said, in terms of my environment, so as to be able to decompose what I
composed, in order to recompose in another way. If an effect is an act of
composition, for me, it has this implication, that is, how am I going to
develop what I have just done. And in respect of the piano piece, it was a bit
like the same thing: there was a program, the Max, which worked in real time
but which was not exactly signal treatment in real time, it was rather a
reorganisation of the figures of the material which was written. In fact, I see
my program Max as a score, somewhat like Philippe Manoury, the virtual
score; that is a score, a description of a certain type of musical text. They
are not notes, but whether they be algorithms or whatever, there are figures,
rhythms, there is everything that a conventional score has. My attitude is not
to be too rigid amongst all this. I have, for example, an ascending design,
another design composed of four chords or four impulses, another also composed
of a melody which has a certain shape…Now, each of these elements which makes
up this figure can be worked individually – for example, the figure which is
ascending can be varied in terms of velocity rising up or with the chords I can
play with the deformation of the pitch (more condensed, closer together), etc.
And my work is a little split between real time and deferred time, by varying
these parameters which make up the general figure, or rather, the figure
resulting from the reworking of the parameters – which does not become a new
figure. Our ears recognise it as the same form, the same Gestalt, shall we say, and this is a very
important aspect for me. Returning to a question I already mentioned –
granulation - we have a cloud of grains of sound, produced by an algorithm to
which we make an “input” , we provide the parameters or rather the duration,
the panorama and that’s it, it is generated. In the environment I have created
in programming, one of the tools is obviously a granulator which allows you to
do this, only that then, through the interface, I can visualise each of the
grains. At times it can be something precious, to be observing each one of the
grains, but I can rework small modifications in this cloud of grains, modifying
one parameter - for example, a filter at the start, in the middle and at the
end. By this I want to say that you recognise the same basic morphology, but
now with a small nuance in the filter parameter or in the parameter of the
velocity in reading each sound or even, taking a cloud and introducing new
particles of sound in it which can from somewhere else – and little by little,
transform a cloud of grains of sound into something else and all this because
it is important to generate something from a single gesture. There is a
global idea that defines a musical
object which only makes sense from the point of view of the composition if we
can then work on the tiny singularities which are there – our desire as a
composer. To a degree this represents the work philosophy which is guiding me
at the moment.