Interview

Musical Education

It was very simple.  I was at secondary school; I must have been about ten years old, and in a choral class I saw a boy playing piano, and was delighted by the experience.  I arrived back home, and asked my parents to buy me a piano and arrange lessons.  That was it, suddenly, at ten years old...  There was an openness towards classical music, music that I hadn’t chosen as my first musical experience; I liked Strauss waltzes, and other things, but suddenly, I became interested in Mozart, Haydn,  Schubert, Beethoven, it was quite a strange thing.  I began to have piano lessons – in addition to my normal studies.  I began to do exams at the conservatory; I began as a student of my beloved teacher, Madalena Sá-Pessoa, I did the course at the Conservatory and then became a piano student of Leonor Pulido. I finished the higher course in 1980-81, and then had some three years of private classes with Olga Prats.  At the Conservatory I had a marvellous experience, in the form of composition classes with Constança Capdeville.  I wasn’t thinking of becoming a composer at the time, because I was convinced that everything had already been written, everything done, and I didn’t have anything new to say.  I had three years of composition, and then I stopped and concentrated on the piano.

I went to Holland in 1984 to study piano.  I worked on contemporary music and chamber music, with Alexander Hrisanide, at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, and it was there that I found, through an experience of physical and social freedom, the freedom to go back to composing.  Thus, I began to compose almost as a hobby, perhaps a little naively, but this work was extremely important.  It increased, and I ended up deciding to study composition.  So, from 1987, I attended the Conservatory of Rotterdam, where I studied for five years with Peter-Jan Wagemans and Klaas de Vries, even though, I should say, my study of composition had been very much that of an autodidact.  Taking part in the discussion fora between composers, attending concerts, taking part in concerts as a pianist – concerts of contemporary music – this was for me the principal motivation.  It wasn’t so much a master-pupil relationship, because I think that, in compositional terms I’m very stubborn and do what I want, and I find it very difficult to explain the logic of my work to a teacher, but this somewhat difficult situation continued for five years, the duration of the course.  In 1992 I finished that course, of composition and orchestration.  I already had some works written, and it was an activity that thereafter never stopped.  I began to play piano less, to participate in fewer concerts as a pianist, and began to write more and to teach as well.  In Holland, an activity I began at the same time was working in opera theatres, as a répétiteur, which is something I love to do, and which was very important for my work as a composer.

In an opera, I enter into the score one hundred percent, whether it be by Mozart, Mussorgsky, Verdi or Schoenberg. I find in it a logic underlying the relationship between the musical text and its poetic meanings, which is something that has always interested me: finding this direct, or indirect, relationship between dramaturgy and music; between text and music; between poetic figures and music, or the elements of music.  This was always something that fascinated me, quite apart from the general pleasure I find in accompanying singing, or enjoying a song cycle by playing the piano part: Schubert, Schumann, etc.  It’s something that involves a great deal of discipline, it obliges one to know the work very well, instrumentally as well as vocally.    It obliges us to enter into the poetic or dramatic world of the composer; so for me it was a fantastic learning experience, very concentrated and intense.  I also did this at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam, where I had studied in the opera class (for seven years I was a répétiteur there).  I think it’s from there that my great love of vocal writing comes.

Constança Capdeville

I met Constança when I was fifteen years old.  I was her pupil between my sixteenth and eighteenth years, more or less.  Today I can say that I’d like to have known her when I was a little older, when I was a little better informed, more mature.  Such wasn’t the case, but for me, to have known Constança at the time was a great feeling of freedom.  Firstly it was an experience of creative freedom and stimulus.  Secondly, in my relationship with Constança I noticed that this freedom and this creative outlook of hers was built on a very strong discipline.  At the time, I couldn’t understand this duality.  Constança was somebody who had a very demanding structure as a composer.  She was demanding with herself, in the choice of sound, formal choices, the direction in which a work should go, which audience this work would come into contact.  She was a very strict person in this sense.  I think there were moments when my youthful lack of discipline and exuberance disturbed her somewhat.  I remember, at the same time, an extremely generous and open Constança, and an extremely strict Constança, almost indignant because of certain steps that a musician should not take because he would eventually lose himself.  I think that, with her, with regard to the pupil, there was a great concern that the pupil should not get lost, or at least, that if he began to get lost, he should get lost on the right path.  And the situation at the Conservatory changed somewhat, because I had to finish my course.  I didn’t continue composition, and Constança’s health also didn’t permit very frequent meetings. We would meet from time to time when God allowed it, but I retain from this time a great affection and nostalgia, and I think that memory has allowed me to recover this period and to know her better than I did in reality.

Recollections of the twelve years spent in the Netherlands

The Netherlands, for a musician, is a huge children’s toyshop, where there’s an infinite choice of products of all sizes and shapes, colours and flavours.  And, indeed, you can see that there is a great freedom of choice, and there’s a very simple relationship, very pedestrian, between culture and people.  People go to operas and concerts with the best orchestras, chamber music concerts, lieder, recitals by the cream of the world’s artists, at reasonable prices.  There is, in fact, a culture of going to concerts, to the opera, with big queues, very organized, for example, as regards to people who don’t use their tickets.  Returned tickets are much sought-after, there’s a great cultural fever.  This is true of music, and for other areas too – the plastic arts, cinema, and so on – but musically you suddenly have access to great music, to great artists, without it seeming that they have come from Olympus.  You get on your bicycle, go to the Concertgebouw and listen to Horowitz.  This implied some financial sacrifice, especially if you were a student, but it was possible.  I went to the opera regularly, and remained standing...  so in this respect, I very much miss this accessibility, the great diversity of concerts and programmes.  I miss this facility.  I think that in Lisbon we don’t have a particularly good situation just now, with few concerts, few operas... it’s been better.

But do you consider yourself a composer under construction...?

As a musician... The word “composer” is to heavy, isn’t it?... It has associations... I mean, I listen to a Beethoven quartet and I think that’s what it means to be a composer.  Now, for me to introduce myself as a composer...I don’t know if have that right yet.  That’s not false modesty, I really don’t know yet.

You need to have a very good, large-scale work.  It’s not enough to have written many works, or to have just one good one.  I think that there needs to be abundant and generous proof of quantity and quality.  So, a composer can be someone who works in composition, but “the composer”... I think it’s a rather risky word.  But sometimes, for purely practical reasons, I say I’m a composer – outside Portugal it’s easy to explain this.  But I’d say that I’m a musician.

In those ten years during which I studied with Constança and was then involved with contemporary music festivals in Holland, I began (when coming into contact with works by colleagues, young Dutch composers) to feel that such an experience of freedom had given them the possibility to discover themselves.  The question of knowing which notes to write, whence they come, what they mean, what two notes together mean, which signs, which hieroglyphs, which message can be decoded there?  I found it necessary to undergo an experience of inner freedom.  This unfreezing happened almost like a game.  It happened in a very sensory way, it wasn’t a metaphysical experience – it was a feeling that “I want to try this: let’s see... if I combine these sounds, if I invent this mode, if I wrote some variations à la…, if I invent a new form...” -  they were quite simple questions, which I began to answer by writing.  There was an intimidating mystery which disappeared and gave way to a more benign mystery.  The question: which are the notes, and what purpose do they serve?    From the moment when these notes acquire a meaning, this happens as a mystery.  But there was not physical inhibition on my part from experimenting; the inhibition disappeared.  I think that this was the great change, and I don’t know why it happened.  I think it happened because as a pianist I wasn’t fulfilled.  As a pianist I asked “Why should I study the Hammerklavier?  Why?  There are so many people who play it so well.”  Something like that happened all of a sudden, and I stopped taking pleasure in concentrating only on working on scores.  I felt it wasn’t enough.  I needed to take a risk, and writing music provided made that possible.

“Sonata para piano”

I still recognize myself in that Sonata today.  The choice of instrument was easy, because it was an instrument I knew well.  At the time I felt very resistant to post-1950 composers, very resistant to Boulez’s piano works, Stockhausen’s.  I think I never had the key of understanding, of the poetic decoding of that repertoire, so I wanted to do something that had nothing to do with it.  Of course, in the pianistic writing of the Sonata, you can see that there’s an approach that coincides in a way with that of Boulez, especially the Second and Third Sonatas, but it not being a serial work, and me being convinced that I was transmitting something absolutely romantic in that work, I thought “right, this is mine, Boulez is not as romantic as this, and it’s a work that’s still up-to-date.”  This is a very simplistic way of looking at it...

My Piano Sonata, which, with a certain humour, I called Opus 1 (because in my catalogue there are almost no opus numbers) I made an attempt at building it with three themes, and I explored this tri-thematic relationship contrapuntally and using variation, and the work is very strictly constructed, in spite of the almost improvisatory character that listening to it suggests.  It was very negatively received by my colleagues in Rotterdam at the time, because they thought (and the Dutch always thought this) that my music was very Germanic... the great romantic gesture.  The Dutch don’t like this romantic gesture, but prefer music more like Mondriaan, more geometric.  That’s why the prefer American music, Stravinsky, Scandinavian or English music, but that great enemy, the German monster that’s “come to eat them” – any association with that aesthetic they find utterly deplorable, and they can be quite ferocious in their criticism.  So, with regard to this Sonata, there were people, teachers and so on, who liked it a lot, and it was played several times.  I was somewhat surprised, because I found it so logical formally that there was no room for so much polemic, so much interpretation concerning that romantic gesture behind it, but it seems that it was there after all.  Later I was happy that the content of the Sonata was more important than the form and that it made one forget the form, so in the end it’s the picture that counts, and not the brushwork.

“Songs of the Beginning”

Songs of the Beginning is a song cycle for coloratura soprano and piano.   I wrote it in 1991-1992, and it was written at the request of a Canadian singer who specialized in contemporary music, Janice Jackson, who lives in the Netherlands.  As I had begun composing late, at least seriously, and I was very strict about choosing material, modes, themes, series, I found myself suffocating a little in this collection of rules, which had become an impediment, and so I decided “I’m going to write a song cycle without thinking about the overall form, without thinking about internal relationships, or correlations.”  I thought “ I’m going to write music au fur et à mesure as the text suggests, as the word gives me the sound, and this sound will then suggest the music.  and so, I started this work, which was not a commission but a request, an invitation, but with the condition that the texts be in English, Spanish or Portuguese, and I picked up an English translation of a text by Lao-Tse, taken from the Tao Te Ching.

I chose this text – I already knew the work, though not in detail, only superficially (perhaps I still only know it superficially) – that was precisely about learning.  It spoke of the non-learning which is the accumulation of knowledge, if this knowledge is not transformed into being.  I divided the text into twenty-two fragments, but not horizontally.  Firstly, I divided it vertically – there’s a line which cuts words in half – and then horizontally.  So the text of each song is two half-phrases, or one half-phrase.  Very often the separating line cuts the word in the middle of two syllables, and there’s a syllable on each side, but sometimes there’s a syllable in the middle too, leaving just one letter – an “a” or a “q”. so, I wrote a piece that was an anti-piece, an anti-knowing, and anti-construction, just by experiment.  The result in the end revealed correspondences between some of these fragments.  At times we fine music that has already appeared in one way or another, but the relationship was not intentional.  I also didn’t want to eliminate this relationship, because it was there.  It was also an evidence; it wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t an artifice.  So I decided to write music for the word, obviously my association of the word.  If I talk about eyes, about a boat... I have an association, and perhaps in this association there enter archetypes of what we hear, from Monteverdi and Wagner, Alban Berg... But it was an experience of complete freedom.  At the end, one feels that the cycle coheres, and this cohesion is fortuitous, it’s occasional.  For me it was very important, above all, to trust in chance, to trust in my instinct, to trust in my intuition.  So I needed to be more in contact with this world of instinct, chance and intuition.  I was blocking it off in a false learning.  For me the cycle was a turning point, because from then on, I tried to bring the two worlds together, that of the search for the ideal form and at the same time keeping my feet in mystery, or my head in mystery.  There should only be a part of the mystery which is declared... I think that’s it.

“Moh”

In recent years I’ve made experiments with vocal music, very different experiments, from using a kind of list of Leitmotiven, experiments with rhythmic or prosodic superimposition, and so on, and with all this behind me, I began to write instrumental works and explore instruments in a para-vocal way.  In Moh, in the third movement, there’s a section which is quite vocal, because Moh means the divine breath from Adam’s nose.  So I imagine God breathing into Adam’s nose as though it were a wind instrument – imagine an ocarina in the shape of a nose.  Therefore, this wind passage is quite a vocal moment, and there’s a slide whistle singing a cantilena, accompanied by a very sinuous line, notes on the viola connecting with the bass clarinet, bassoon and contrabassoon, and suddenly there’s an undeniably vocal part there... vocal music is never absent from instrumental music.  I think that in Moh, which is a ten-minute piece – a compact symphony – this encounter between the intuitive and, let’s say, the intelligent, works well.  I think there are moments in what I did when I was intelligent.  There are moments when I wasn’t!  I wasn’t for the most part, but there are many in which I was intelligent, and sometimes I’d like to get them back.  That’s why I sometimes listen to my things – I listen to a recording to find out in which moments I was intelligent without knowing why.  It’s a funny thing... I think very often of my work as a pianist, when my teacher would say “Why don’t you relax?  When you relax the sound is much better.”  This is something very difficult to learn, but it has to come from me, from inside, because when somebody tells you to relax, you obviously don’t relax, do you?  But, in the moments when this grace arises, we’re intelligent. And what Mário Sá-Carneiro said makes sense: “I’m sensitive when I’m intelligent, and intelligent when I’m sensitive”.  And I lose this intelligence.  If I have any discipline in my work, it’s that of seeking this sensory intelligence, which is very difficult.

I relate better to some works than to others, because there are works in which I see too much effort at learning.  They were all important steps, but there are works in which, apart from that, I receive some feedback, which is being able to listen to it as thought it were not by me.  I have this distance in relation to what I do.  I am not attached by an umbilical cord to what I do, and I can be very, very critical of what I do, as though it were by some other composer.  At times I need to listen to things that I’ve done in order to learn from them, because the experience of a première is to rapid and volatile an experience.  One is under tension, and the concert is gone.  So, the recording is very important in order to learn what one has done well, and what one has done badly, and above all to fine those moments of harmony between intellect and instinct,of fusion between the poetic world and a formal realization according to this information, and also, at the same time, to identify the neutral zones, zones in which nothing happens, badly constructed or rhetorical zones.  I don’t like rhetoric, I don’t like redundancy, everything in a work that announces that something is going to be repeated.  No, I don’t like that at all.  I’d like my works to be something like Alexander Calder’s mobiles – never the same.  A mobile in the wind.  Things are hanging within other things, and that’s enough logic, and the piece is always different and unpredictable.  Very often people say to me: “But it was short, it could have lasted longer.”  Alright, then let’s hear it again!  Because things happened too quickly, but I looked for this velocity, avoiding repetitions.  And so there’s a fast trajectory, which is fascinating for me.  Now, if this trajectory is slow and can explain calmly all the spaces, show them, and allow time for people to become used to them.

... and to be able in slow moments to suggest a fragment of eternity, and to be able to suggest a wide space, a horizon... It’s just a suggestion, there’s no counting in real time that in fact justifies it.  When we feel that the music is slow it’s already boring, and I want to avoid boredom.

“Melodias Estranhas “

The opera Melodias Estranhas (Strange Melodies) was written in 2000-2001 for the European Capitals of Culture, Rotterdam and Oporto.  It was the most difficult work, the most complex and laborious that I’ve done to date.  A difficult libretto, because it doesn’t immediately reveal its dramaturgical quality   I needed to find at a deeper level of the text the drama that did not appear on the surface.  There was a very visible clash of characters. It was more a drama of ideas than a drama of action.  But the text was very deep, very good, by Gerrit Komrij, a great Dutch writer and poet who lives in Portugal, and with these experiences of Songs of the Beginning, trusting in instinct...

The relationship between voice and orchestra, the registers I used, the prosody, the relationship there is between the tempo of the drama when there’s a text to be read, and that of musical drama, in an opera, is different.  It’s one of the most interesting and fascinating things in this kind of work, to discover, in the work, in the drama, in the written text, what it’s tempo is, its true tempo.  Because sometimes it seems to us that the tempo is very broad, and it’s not, it’s very quick, and sometimes it’s the other way round.  So I had to find in Gerrit Komrij’s text the true tempo, the tempo of the drama.  This was something I brought from the other opera; there were many experiments at that time, in Cânticos para a Remissão da Fome, which were very useful for this new work.  This second opera, Melodias Estranhas, is an opera with which I’m satisfied in some respects, perhaps many things contained in it, and one of those is the musical speed of the drama, which was associated to the speed of the drama of ideas, the clash of ideas.  There’s a synchrony.  For the listener, or the spectator, the criticism was the same: it seems that things happen too fast, that it’s very dense and that I could have introduced more time, etc., but this would have spoiled it.  That was not my aim.  I don’t like hearing a scene from an opera, in which it’s like being in a jacuzzi.  I have all the time in the world for that warm water, for being massaged...  no, I don’t want that, I want instability, anxiety.  If the libretto were like that, we’d get into the jacuzzi, fine, but it’s not the case!  The libretto is something else: the main theme is intolerance and punishment.  The main character is Damião de Gois, the Portuguese humanist, a young man keen to learn, who went to Antwerp at a young age, twenty, as secretary of the administration of Flanders.  He made use of the fact of being in the centre of civilized Europe in order to study music, philosophy, religion.  He was a person with many interests.  He was entrusted with delicate diplomatic operations by the King of Portugal.  On his journey, he met Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was the great figure among European humanists, with whom he had quite a cordial relationship.  For months Erasmus put Damião de Góis up in his house, when he was already thirty-four or thirty-five years old.  So Góis was Erasmus’s guest, and at the same time his pupil.

Damião de Góis is a tragic figure in Portuguese culture.  Because he was a victim of the intolerance of the Portuguese Inquisition.  The Inquisition managed to arrest him at the end of his life, making use of many things he’d done in his life, as a diplomat, as a musician, as a businessman.  For me, the important thing was to explain, or perhaps illuminate, in my work, the fact that freedom is something which it is necessary to defend and preserve, always.  There is no automatism; freedom is an educational process, which must never be taken for granted, safe – it’s always the fruit of the effort of some people, or of a collective.  Freedom must be treated well.  So, Damião de Góis is a moving figure in this respect, in that he was a generous man, who trusted, who wanted to learn, and came back to Portugal, which would not tolerate him.  So, there’s this almost folktale episode pf Góis making polyphonic music in his house, quite a wealthy house in Alfama, already an old man, seventy years old.  He made polyphony with his friends from abroad, with whom he got on well in Lisbon, and there was a neighbour, Mr João Carvalho, who thought that strange melodies came out of Góis’s house.  This suspicion, this accusation, is recorded in the acts of the Inquisition, which are extensive in the case of Damião de Góis, and one can follow the whole trial quite well.  So, accused of producing strange melodies, he ended up in prison, where he remained for two years.  And after he was released, possibly by royal intervention, he was murdered.  So he’s somebody who was a great challenge to authority, to freedom of thought and to intolerance, and so I found him to be a good symbol.

What about your relationship with Portugal, as a Portuguese composer?

I think that between the composer and his surroundings there’s a relationship of tension comparable to that of a child in the family.  There’s always a dialectic; if there’s no dialectic, if there’s no resistance, there’s no growth.  So, we don’t have here a kind of resistance that’s lacking in other countries, but there are other kinds of resistance.  I know the Dutch situation quite well, and it’s not easy.  I know American composers who have enormous difficulties too.  In Portugal, logistically we are in a weak situation, because there are few opportunities for concerts.  My fellow composers, and I myself, have regular commissions, but it’s little, it continues to be very little.  We need symphony orchestras in Lisbon – in Oporto we now have one, but a consistent and logical policy of commissions and performances is lacking.  For us it’s difficult, because, with fewer events, of course there are more tensions and delicate situations on that account.

As far as being a Portuguese composer is concerned, and being in Portugal, in my case Lisbon, I don’t really know what to say, because I close the curtain.  I really do close the curtain when I’m writing.  Of course, my sensibility has much to do with Galician-Portuguese sensibility... poetic, sensitive to light, to mist, to humidity, etc., but I’m also very stimulated by western tradition, one the one hand enlivened by information concerning the lives of the Greeks and the Phoenicians and of North Africa, and on the other hand, Germanic thought, the tradition of the symphony, the sonata, variations, etc; so all these stimuli contribute to our definition or identification.  Now, I can’t find in anything I hear, for example, of younger composers, anything I fins specifically Portuguese; I can’t hear an Portuguese element at all, unless somebody males use of a text by a Portuguese poet, and finds there something that recalls other things done in Portugal.  But I think there’s a great cosmopolitanism in Portuguese writing at the moment, I wouldn’t say that I was a cosmopolitan composer, but in the things I do it’s quite possible to find relationships, lines which lead one to Germanisms, even an Indo-European melody.

What about your relationship to poetry and text.

We all grow up with that commonplace of music being in the first place the human voice, and that the eternal search is to imitate the human voice, so it must be cantabile, with vocal legato, and so on; and it’s undeniable that the first step in understanding this is listening to the voice, if possible singing as well, or being around song, or working with sing – you learn a great deal in that way.  Now, I note that when I examine what I’ve written, song cycles, of the operas for example, the writing between piano and voice is quite unified; so it’s not song with accompaniment.  In the end I treat the voices in quite an instrumental fashion, and the instrument in a vocal fashion, sometimes creating hierarchies within the work, but which do not have to do exactly with the fact of the singer being above the instrumentalist, or there being a principal within a group of instrumentalists.  These hierarchies have more to do with the formal unfolding of the work.  For a long time I thought that music had to be message, a message above all, that there should be an effort to communicate, a text, a motivation, something like a gesture... music continues to be a gesture of communication, but now I have doubts about the message, and very often the text is only interesting to me, as the composer, and will mean much less to the listener; the poetry I use may have merely, let’s say, the spark that ignites the gunpowder and for you, as the listener, in the end it;s the musical result of the fusion between song and instrument that counts, and the message is not there.

Therefore, nowadays I have some doubts about the efficacy of the message.  I think that in recent years what happened was that the text, the poetry, provoked mujsical creation, and this musical creation became almost an autonomous discourse, because, however much effort I make to have the listener receive the poem as I received it, nobody is able to do this.  It’s a very personal and unrepeatable experience. For that reason I am these days quite... not sceptical, but I would say that for me the poetry that I use, that I read, makes sense, but for whomever receives it, it could be just music.  Because the diction of the text, of a poem in music, is always very problematic. The other day I was listening to Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien, and I understood perhaps five percent of the text.  Now, of course the text was very important for Debussy, and he wrote the music for that, but I only understood five percent.  So there’s another message behind the text, which is perhaps the real one.