Education and important people

Basically, I think my career has two parts which have happened in parallel. In one part, I began my musical studies reasonably early, and my education was decisively influenced by my piano teacher, Albertina Saguer, who, at a certain point, when I was about 14 or 15, realized that I, rather than wanting to play piano, really wanted to composer, or at least I couldn’t sit still without writing some notes, and she began to encourage me, by increasing the amount of repertoire we studied, not thinking in pianistic terms – of playing outstandingly well or with a certain degree of excellence – but of attaining the widest possible range of musical knowledge, and, curiously, by another means, inviting me whenever possible to play my own pieces. My pieces, my youthful output, so to speak – in order for me to get used, as a composer, to collaborate with performers and dissociate clearly what I heard in my head from that which was in fact in the score and was being played at that moment. So in this sense, she was a very important figure in my development.

Another complementary element in my development, and which would be very important musically – when I was entering into musical territory, as it were, professionally – was the relationship I have with film. My father is a film producer, and that meant that I saw in some way filming from an early age, being present at editing, or dubbing sessions, or watching how they made the noises of the room or the special effects, and so this kind of situation is also an important part of my creative imagination.

In addition, my father was very interested, already at the time – in the 1960s – in musique concrète, electronic music, which meant that I, from when I was a child, perhaps knew Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge better than Beethoven’s sonatas (I only came across them later as a young pianist). These two kinds of education went more or less in parallel, almost sealed off from each other, because with more or less classical training, there’s no electroacoustic element, for example. In any case, later on they came together at a certain point, which was when I gave up technical training – engineering in information technology (at the time electronics and communications) – and chose to go to the Conservatory, to do the higher course in composition. Thus, somebody who became very important, because she allowed the confluence of these two areas, was Constança Capdeville.

I’ve had some very influential figures during the course of my development – though I usually joke and say that I’m like that comedian, Herman José’s character Serafim Saudade - "I’m a cooperative”. And I am indeed the result of a cooperative to which there contributed several people who were of the greatest importance for my development. If I don’t always mention them all, it’s more on account of being frightened of forgetting somebody than deliberate omission. In any event, it was Constança who enabled the confluence of these two areas.

And, from early on, I also began to write music for film, documentary and television. This was, in a way, in parallel with my musical education.

Now that we’ve arrived at the 21^st century, once again I’m going to have a kind of confluence of two rivers that were parallel – music for cinema, in a way, and then instrumental music, electroacoustic. Why are they two almost completely distinct routes for most people? Because those who know my work for cinema don’t usually know my instrumental music well, and vice-versa – those who know more or less what I did for some Portuguese groups don’t very often know what I’ve done in film. Nevertheless, I think that all this together with my technological training – I never quite acknowledged giving this up, in part because the change of career was so abrupt – they’re all going to come together in this last section of my trajectory, so to speak.

Influence of cinematic concepts and techniques in musical composition

In film, one of the big things is the editing, at least in some narrative film (or even non-narrative if we think of Dziga Vertov – The cameraman). So editing is like a primordial element, which we also find in electronic music – the sort of process that, though related to the idea of mosaic, in spite of everything goes beyond it in the kinds of elements that it can put into play.

Another significant point was the question of the actual use of sound in film. It produced within me a kind of awareness of sound in that, very quickly, one learns in film that cause and effect are not necessarily related. I mean, we can place a sound in somebody or something, but not necessarily a sound originating from that source., but which is a sound that a viewer will associate as being from that source. So straight away there is a problem, which is having – as regards the sound itself – an attitude to develop. Something like what Schaeffer would call reduced listening, that is, hearing the sound in itself, independent of its cause, precisely to be on our guard, or at least to be able to apply it to other causes, and it becomes plausible. In fact, in the case of film, it’s not a question of making it more real, but more plausible. This is what film deals with, criteria of plausibility. This whole element was very important for my development. It’s interesting in relation to Constança – I don’t think it’s by chance that my copy of Schaeffer’s Traité des Objects Sonores has a dedication from Constança. She gave it to me on my birthday, and said at the time “This book may become very important for you!” – which was indeed the case. And it’s still true! So this was Constança’s approach, and also Peixinho – you can see that, even though he didn’t write specifically electroacoustic music, there’s something much more important, I think, which is reflecting on sound, which occurs in his scores – and also Candido Lima, who did much more with electroacoustic music. But therefore there’s a whole area there, and I think that I had, in a way – I like to say this openly – an area of influence from these composers related to the sound itself, which also comes from the cinema.

In any case, there are also other things in relation to certain kinds of musical discourse – I don’t like using then term much; I confess that I have some doubts as to the idea of musical language and other terminology of the kind which at the moment doesn’t interest me much because it’s not even part of my musical terminology, and which is something we could come back to later: “How do I regard my musical output” – but as far as that is concerned, whether it’s cinema or electroacoustic music, they were deciding factors in the way in which I manipulated even musical material – apart from sound materials – even in purely instrumental music.

Instrumental writing and electroacoustic writing: the same reality

In my musical writing, at the moment, I make no distinction between what is written and other kinds of process. In other words, I integrated the same means – in this case digital means – in the same way, with the same weight, the conception of a filter and the development of the technique of extrapolation of notes. Therefore, I think that, from the point at which there’s a new medium, there probably appear new ways of making music. That’s symptomatic, when there’s a new paper-based music, in which a new musical notation appears. We see, for the first time in the history of music, the existence of musical techniques which develop, and even a certain liberty of large forms which were not possible, shall we say, memorizable or even memorized or learned by heart. At present, with a medium in which, for the first time, we have again a pre-Gutenberg situation, in that in the same medium we once more have everything – just as with manuscript illuminations, in which the drawing, text, graphics and conception of the page coexisted in the same medium, and which the Gutenberg revolution, shall we say, separated. Now, we have once again the same medium which brings together, indifferently, all kinds of different expressions. I believe that this is of fundamental importance in musical writing. For example, currently it often doesn’t make sense to speak of a kind of technology, technological musical technique or sound treatment, as something distinct from the writing of music in the traditional sense, writing notes. I think that today the composer, when dealing with these different media, treats them all in the same way, it’s integrated.

Today, as regards certain aspects of my own instrumental writing, obviously I owe a great deal to the electroacoustic approach and knowledge of sound. Which means that there are certain techniques of writing apparently merely musical – musical in the sense of notes, so, it’s that abstract entity, the note – whose positioning owes much to electroacoustic music. in addition, a certain kind of treatment – the use, for example, of resonating filters, the use of some morphing procedures, certain partial aspects of particular morphings, or a whole different kind of use of the idea of echo – of convulsion, so to say, has to do with the imposition of certain aspects of instrumental writing on electroacoustic means.

What I mean is that, even in my purely instrumental works, even in purely electroacoustic works, I think that you can no longer distinguish very much between them except in their concrete manifestation. In other words, there’s a work there that though there are no instruments visible, probably follows many aspects of instrumental music. Instrumental works that, without me having knowledge of other practices, would be impossible

Musical materials

With my musical materials, when I integrate them into a work, there are some concerns with the actual sound. The sound itself determines, sometimes, one or more operation, a merely symbolic manipulation. In addition, I myself have developed some techniques and technologies, based on the work of others, of course, so that even in materials apparently non subject to symbolic operations – I don’t much like using the term, but to make it more understandable, concrete kinds of material, so to speak, a kind of spectrality or with a spectral texture closer to chords or aggregates or notes – there may be found notes, which form bridges, or catwalks, between these kinds of worlds. This also implies a certain revolution in the writing itself.

I had to revise my own conception of musical writing and techniques of musical writing. I have to say that one of my first attempts – when I was in my twenties ... what enthused my in a certain area of composition was, I must say, given a good part of my musical education, all the kinds of symbolic operations and manipulations that came after Xenakis. Xenakis is much talked-about with regardt to statistics, but there’s much more than that. Not only symbolic operations, but logical operations, a whole set of operations and conceptions that come, one can say, from a more mathematical universe. This was my first thought when I came to certain problems of musical composition. Curiously, through Schaeffer, and even more, through the Musical Research Group, the GRM, I was confronted with the problem of sound in itself, which it is not so easily symbolized, and where a symbolization of the sound may become extremely arrogant. This was perhaps my first big shock that, through Constança, Peixinho, Cândido Lima, as well as other, foreign composers, I approached gradually, and realigned my whole position. So it was a kind of long sudden fall, in which I lost all possible and imaginable crutches, until I became so suspicious of writing that I had almost to reinvent it for my purposes, so that I didn’t fall into the temptation of the arrogant regulation of the sonic fact. Especially when, from the 1980s onwards, we had here one of the great revolutions – that had already begun in the 1960s, of course – in electroacoustic music, by means of the development of computers in music, and an increased access to sound. Just the expansion of that parameter – timbre, which stopped being a parameter and became an incredible network of dimensions that had already been foreseen by Scheoneberg, in the last paragraph of his treatise on harmony. He already points out the idea that he finds suspect, which is that pitch is one of the dimensions of timbre – in fact, it ‘s very interesting, this paragraph, because, in fact, 70 years later it made perfect sense and would be demonstrated. And so, this whole crossing of concepts, of ideas, of approaches, would become influential, obviously, in my own musical writing. In other words, I always recommend that one not look at the notes that are written, but that one try to see what the sound is that comes from it, because the operation is not made in this dimension of the act of musical writing – which is something merely prescriptive, so that the musician can play – but in the act of listening. It is, therefore, more centred on listening than on the act of writing in itself.

Meeting with Constança Capdeville

It’s strange, because I find indications, symptoms of this attitude in some of my things for film before even meeting Constança. What pleases me is that our meeting was not as fortuitous as all that, but came about through necessity... In other words, there was something I was already searching for in musical writing, and it was with her that I was able to develop this. I think that in this sense, I may have managed, as far as I could, to catch, as it were, her thoughts. Moreover, she used to say, rather curiously, that we had more or less the same objective, but with different means. I had more to do with cinema, she with theatre. I had more to do, for example, with technology and technological issues, computers, sound synthesis and so on, and she had more to do with dance. Both always very much connected with music, in a particularly sensual way, I think. Sensual in the physical sense. I don’t think it was by chance that she did something dedicated to dance, to the Waltz, in which she included a waltz of mine from another film. It was also no accident that I did a piece dedicated to Constança, five years after she died, which is actually a waltz called Komm, tanz mit mir!, which is a phrase of Pina Bausch’s, used in Constança’s pieces, and which is in fact a dedication to her, because you can also read it Constance mit mir.

Works

There’s a piece of mine, from 1986, called Para 2 pianos – from which there developed later Para 2 pianos nº 2, which is for seven instruments – in which there is set out a series of basic concerns, notably the idea – and perhaps this comes from film – that I see music not as a result of development and of certain processes of proliferation, but as a kind of photography. At the time I saw it as a kind of photograph of the planet at a particular time, or in other words, where there are musical materials that intersect, that cross each other, and at that moment they appear in that way. Not music in which there was development – moreover, that was the problem at the time, which was going, “as a young composer”, against a kind of tradition, when it seemed to me that all the techniques that I knew at the time, or at least most of the techniques for developing music that I knew at the time, through the very word “development” brought with them a kind of concession to the principle of continuing a certain kind of traditionalism, which I was interested in breaking with. In this sense, it seemed to me that the point I had to attack was the idea of development, and so my music ceased to have the idea of development and I began to develop the musical material beforehand. So before the work is begun that are developed and in the work, the fact of there being more or less movement – which can suggest that there’s a development of material – comes from their collisions, their encounters. That’s how I came to the idea of a kind of planet which is photographed at a certain moment, a kind of meteorological report, so to speak. This idea of the planet had, for me, an advantage at the time, because it was quite a poetic idea, and afforded me a considerable degree of mobility. I can do what I like within a planet, a planet is such a big thing, that allows us to do what we want. And a planet is interesting; its poles are very different – in the case of the earth, though not others, such as the moon – from its equator, and this allowed me to begin to work out how to integrate postures, materials and ideas as different as, say, concrete electronic materials, instrumental material, even if I didn’t yet know how. So I had something that was very broad, not excessively defined, but which allowed me to take an initial stance. At times I moved away from this kind of situation during the course of my career. So there are works in which, at a particular moment, I would enter into other situations, solutions, but always with the same sort of idea – the material is developed beforehand, and when it appears in the work I’m not very bothered about following its history audibly. This allowed me to bring in another idea. It’s the idea that, for me, it’s not very important how one looks at music, but the way in which one writes it is important. I soon abandoned the idea of music as language, with its ideas of syntax, the search for a possible semantics, and so I start from the principle that music, in my case, may obey a series of situations. And this idea of the planet came back later on, at a certain point, with the idea of a work as an interface for a database, in which I finally integrated something that had, in spite of everything, been rather forgotten, which is that I had had training in engineering. Though I continued to be aware of the mathematical part – more mathematics than physics – of this training – I confess that it’s something that I never mention, but when I studied engineering, I was very hesitant because my original idea had been to study pure mathematics, and then, as I could take both courses at the same time, I decided to do engineering instead, but I was completely indifferent to it at the time, my interest was really in mathematics. Later I also studied all the problems inherent in technology, and then I reintegrated – but within a wider perspective – the idea, no longer of a planet, but a kind of database directed towards objects. Objects which are sometimes sounds, sometimes musical, and other things, that increase, and suddenly, I had not only the poetic idea of the planet, but also of the interface in which we can see the same materials in different ways. So it’s not a question here of materials that come from one work and appear in another, but materials whose works are, in essence, windows onto that world. This also allows me to establish a kind of relational algebra, in relation to certain kinds of models for databases, in which the writing of a filter may be the same, or can have the same value as writing for a harmonic grid, let’s say, or operating with notes. So, different levels of writing – a more symbolic writing, more based on a code, a writing, one can say, based on the processing of sound itself, or of certain kinds of algorithms which allow a symbolic manipulation of the way this sound is used – that then may result in an instrumental score, all incorporated into a kind of great universe which is a database orientated towards objects, with this kind of metaphor.

I think that in my work there exists on the one hand this kind of reintegration of various kinds of knowledge that I acquired during the course of my life, and on the other there are some works which, from today’s perspective, give an outline idea, with various key points, of my trajectory. There’s a process that I think is the culmination of my inheritance, narrative film, a film in 1993 called Chá Forte com Limão, in which I think one sees the sum of my concerns of cross-cutting a history of music, from tonality o the 20^th century, and the integration of different kinds of writing applied to narrative cinema, going back as well to the more recent tradition, a mere 100 years, of that same cinema. There’s a series of instrumental works – they all have certain points and characteristics, in my latest investigations, and make up a path, though they all go in different directions. Estranho Movimento para um Dia como o de Hoje, for example, is a work completely without reverberation, an electronic work in which all causality is left behind, because there are only practically electronic sounds; there are some sounds at the beginning and the end of more causal origins, which are more or less recognizable, but where the idea of spaces is clearly set out, there is no space of the work; everything happens in the concert hall.

In a work such as T3, the different spaces and the different treatments of materials begin to appear, they are integrated, when it seems that I was looking for the idea of a sound object, or for a certain typology in the field of sound objects, in different strata. Of you look, for example, at Quand Trois Poules Vont au Champ, causality, which in the case of a sound object – in more Schaefferian terms, or even in terms of spectromorphology – is completely eliminated, in this case is integrated once more; you hear sounds which take you back to particular codes of listening and certain behaviours. You hear hens, cockerels, doors shutting, but the music is made in such a way that you are between two struggles – in other words, you don’t only hear in this way but you can also hear them as abstract entities and structures which undergo a symbolic treatment and manipulation. This creates a work, seen as database, I think was very important, Ressonâncias Memórias, a work for instruments and tape, which is a kind of index, a kind of directory of all my works – in which are contained all the elements of the works, not previous works, but materials that I’ve used throughout my life, and with an idea I find interesting, in spite of everything, because it’s a work is always articulated very rapidly - “teca teca teca teca”, always based more or less on this kind of pulsation. It’s interesting because it endeavours to build a bridge between a Platonic idea, let’s say of a memory, the establishment of a memory as something that registers by insistence, but at the same time, as it contains chords and other materials that will be used in a future work – which in fact do not yet exist in this work because they will exist in the following work, but they’re already there – and it’s a kind of bridge between Plato and Bergson. In other words, memory in this case as activity, not passive – an active memory that itself engenders new things which will appear later, in another work, Trois Chansons Inachevées, for soprano, saxophone and tape.

In any case, right now I have gone back to film, specifically to documentary and experimental film, now dealing with aspects utterly distant from the narrative process, but I consider that all these experiments, from more “commercial” film in a certain narrative sense of the term, such as television series, to music theatre itself – I myself wrote a music theatre piece in 1998 – is part of a trajectory that I think is becoming clearer and clearer. I like to think of it in this way. Or at least more defined as it goes on.

Manifestations of a personal language

I think that, during the years, I adopted certain materials as, shall we say, fetish materials, in my work. If there was a point at which I had a problem because it could have seemed that I was becoming a cliché of myself – which is a risk – it seemed to me that, through the years, their integration in a natural fashion led me to a path that in some way we can find in all composers. In Constança herself, for example, in the Amen para uma Ausência series that, in her case, is a work that is seen again and again through a new perspective, but in which she herself also – in other works – used, reused the same materials, just as one uses a chord or any other kind of material. Its very reconfiguration may bring new data.

Usually one’s concerns change and I think that the idea of there being, in the case of my trajectory, musical material, not as coming from another work but as being placed at a distance in a kind of reservoir – where it become manifest, of course, through the work – where I myself, as composer, keep the memory of the techniques of generation, and that therefore allows, very often, certain kinds of material completely different from those that appear in other works. In fact, they are results as if from fields of calculation. I’ll go back again to the same metaphor – in a database I can have somebody’s date of birth but be presented with his age: this datum is not in the base, but comes about from the interface which imposes something on the material, and so the vision of the material changes too, it’s not static.

In addition, I also returned to another idea, which includes the idea of a filter, which can then be applied to other aspects, and which is a kind of palimpsest too; in other words, very often I use the actual materials or the same techniques on other materials, and this means that when I rewrite the material – the sounds, the chords, whatever – it appears, we can say, with a different configuration and this is imposed by means of certain types of procedures that are applied, developed for a specific work. There it is – the interface – but here I’d like to emphasize that the interface is not disconnected; it in itself is important in relation to the material of the work. We may think that probably, and why not, a work may itself become part of a database, and so at that point it is itself also subject to further manipulation. So this means that, more even than the materials that circulate from work to work, entire works may circulate from work to work. One may pose this possibility, not in the sense of a different version.

And then there are works that can function, let’s say – I, as a joke, classified some of my works as internal cannibals or external cannibals – some feed off material that already exists in the database and therefore have no need to search for material that is in some way different, to gather again, but to find a new perspective for the way in which these materials are worked, to find new techniques of generation, or alteration, of revision of the materials, to give them new directions. Other works function as search engines; they search for new materials, find new things, in a kind of external world, which feed this database, which increases. I must say that this database, though it’s a computer-derived idea, may also be highly metaphorical. I don’t depend on a music programme, of writing or working; this means that there ideas that can be in my head, others notated on paper, others digitally recorded. I’m not talking here about a database which physically exists, or, shall we say, a programme for working with these materials.

Of course, anyone who knows my work will suddenly recognize certain harmonic structures, that there’s always a door being shut somewhere – on each fetish – there’s always a chord: either it’s been there from my first pieces, which is seen through a new perspective, and is a kind of cross with a certain kind of spectralism, a certain Webernism, a certain Varèsianism. There’s something there that I always liked in these kinds of configurations and which sometimes is imposed on other material. It’s not there, but it’s a filter; at other times it represents the result in terms of notes, or is horizontalized, or verticalized, or compacted, and, so it gives rise to a completely different kind of figuration. There are certain materials which circulate but – in a way which I hope I have learned during the course of my life – absolutely without any compromise. I always like to quote something Debussy said to Guirot, at a certain point, about some parallel fifths. Guirot said: “You can’t do that!” and Debussy says “Yes, but it sounds good”. And he says “Yes, but the rules don’t allow it”, and Debussy replies “There are no rules. All you need to do is listen, pleasure is the rule.” I like to keep up this spirit – the same spirit, in fact, that led me to become a composer, the enormous pleasure that I had in writing, and so I like to try to maintain this kind of approach. No compromises of any kind, the object is to write a pertinent work, which pleases me, and that may have some pertinence in the context to which it belongs.

New directions and challenges

The aspect I mentioned, with regard to Constança, of following her own path and so on, at this point has taken me to a kind of alley, which is not exactly a dead end, but which may in fact be a huge entrance, because, all things considered, in my career as a musician, in some way my connection to film and to the other stage arts has been until now somewhat marginal, and now, the most recent tendencies in my work, using a new medium of writing and accepting that this medium will change even the way I think musically, has led me to the idea of a much greater connection to multimedia work. Not in the sense of me devising projects, conceiving my own films, or theatre works, in CD ROM or whatever, but in the sense of being a member of a working team. I’ve interested myself in developing certain ideas that I already had concerning the articulation of image and sound – I don’t like to say correspondence, because it’s a term I hate. I much prefer to used the term articulation than the idea of correspondence, which I think is something that was attempted in the 19^th century, with little success, and frankly with little relevance now – that I’ve been trying to develop in my most recent pieces and that will probably take me further in the direction of installations, of video art and experimental film, and probably to go into other areas where I’ve always partly present, but now in a more direct fashion. I think this is a possibility, without forgetting that my training was a traditional one.