Questionnaire / Interview
PART 1 - Roots & Education
How did music begin for you and where do you identify your musical roots? Which paths led you to composition?
Music entered into my universe and my life in different forms, yet always without an individual awareness on its own, of what in fact music was, or if there was indeed good or bad music. In a more general way, there simply was music and this phenomenon embraced me as a wave and took me without my own will.
My mother has always been a very active songbird and as I had an enormous “chance” of being educated by my mother and sister, during a great part of my day after school I used to listen to her, at most times accompanied by the radio or in the most hilarious duets with the great vedettes of the time. Without any doubt, at that time fado was her musical genre of choice. At first, my mother used to sing more intuitively, and in fact only after did she begin performing fado more consciously and publically.
Simultaneously and more or less at that time, at the beginning of my primary school, I started attending a philharmonic society with the aim of getting a more professional music training. This decision was made entirely by my parents and I didn’t have any influence on it. On the contrary to what was planned initially, that is to join a band, I ended up having classical guitar lessons. This experience opened my door to possibilities that I couldn’t have imagined before. This course, which lasted more or less until the end of primary school, awakened in me a true enthusiasm for playing classical guitar, starting from a premise carried out during two or three years with my guitar professor, and which consisted of the following: playing the guitar meant in fact studying; it was work and effort. I think that this assumption and the following process was for me the step to begin to understand in a more conscious way that I liked not only to listen to music, but also to make it, with all the effort and work that it then required.
When primary school ended, an absolutely fantastic time began for me, that is, the 25th of April. The revolution gave me something that in fact even today I cannot easily explain – basically it took me to the theatre, literature and poetry ateliers, presented me the experiences of collective, gestural and visual arts; in its essence I think that the 25th of April, that is the Portuguese Revolution, took me to the street and to the social contact within the communities and associations that hadn’t existed before.
Taking into account the fact of living in a region extremely active from a political point of view, where the associations promoted civic education, with great emphasis on education through art, it seems to me that this environment did have a great influence on how I was growing up and making my own choices. Music became part of my life and gradually I came to believe that I could have an occupation as a musician and later as a composer. From this time I also keep in my memory the trio, which I formed with Américo Cardoso and Tim Lopes.
Which moments from your musical education do you find the most important?
The contact with Constança Capdeville, as composer and professor, was probably one of the most significant moments in my whole path. On the other hand the contact with Franco Donatoni influenced many of my choices and how I think of my own music.
PART 2 - Influences & Aesthetics
Which references do you assume in you compositional practice? Which works from the history of music and contemporary do you find the most influential?
This question makes me want to smile… It is difficult to reconstruct every detail. The history of a life cannot be reconstructed by means of additive processes, where at the end we come across a sum, or where we add repeatedly some elements in order to subsequently reduce the effort of adding the whole! There are works and composers that I find crucial in my way of thinking: Luciano Berio is in fact an essential example, but I would never imagine myself making such music as Berio’s. Similarly as Berio (and because we are at the letter B), Beethoven is equally important for me, and following the same rule – it would never cross my mind to make music like Beethoven!
What remains from the works and the musical thought of Berio, Beethoven, Wagner or Nunes, Manoury, or Debussy, are the most important aspects of my own music: the colour and the austerity within a peripheral musical rhetoric. The colour in the sense of discovering the timbre within its most hidden or even bizarre aspects – in my process of research noise assumes a very important role. The austerity in the sense that the rhetoric of elements such as the intervals or their succession, either harmonic or melodic, can (and in the case of my music must) be disruptive. But coming back to the problem of additions, sometimes against my own principles, that life is not a mere addition, I add subconsciously, and later I end up having to decompose everything, within an infinite and implicit process. Grasping individually every part of the whole, I am obliged to realize a complex process of auto-analysis.
Last year I went to listen to the premiere performance of a new work by Wolfgang Rihm in Berlin. The work was sung by the RIAS Kammerchor in the fantastic location, the Sophienkirche in Berlin, which is located on a courtyard surrounded by buildings with façades full of holes from bullets, supposedly fired by the Nazis against the Jewish people who used to live there. Apart from this detail the church also lies next to one of the various Jewish cemeteries in Berlin.
Rihm’s work, Fragmenta passionis and Sieben Passions-Texte, was performed alternately with the work by Heinrich Schütz, Musikalische Exequien. Schütz is a composer whose music I know well, yet in spite of the profound knowledge on this Schütz’s work, in this specific context, both Rihm’s and Schütz’s music, revealed itself to me as a kind of apparition, a true rediscovery, and a total illumination. As a matter of fact my knowledge on this work was based essentially on Schütz’s musical style and technique: a collection of mere additions, which have never given a thorough awareness, apart from a systematized knowledge on the endogenous logic of the work’s manufacturing. This knowledge based on simplified additions, results from an academic approach, acquired when we are apprentices of music or of composers. Obviously when confronted with the work of art, in a context completely different from this analytical sense, much more focused on two or three parameters (pitch, harmony, counterpoint), and when the musical experience and the artistic culture is diversified, I always end up taking some few steps “back” and inflecting on the rediscovery of the same works from a different angle; and it is not always direct and obvious. Listening to the work in the spatial environment of the hall, but also in the context of an enormous refinement when it comes to intonation and the resulting sonorous mass, all this constituted a moment of a great confrontation between my knowledge on two or three rhetorical aspects, and the need to understand the dimension of the whole – the word, the intonation, the colouring, the spatial conditions for the work’s realization, the movement of voices within the choir’s different dispositions, the location but also my recent memories from the walk to Sophienkirche.
In other words, until some years ago what seemed to me an experience acquired as a form to structure the knowledge, and subsequently my own musical choices, became an epilogue for doubts and the desire to re-experiment the knowledge on the music in a new context, totally different from what I learnt as a student.
The dichotomy occupation – vocation can define the artistic / professional approach of a composer. Where on the scale between the emotional (inspiration and vocation) and the pragmatic / rational (calculation and occupation), can you identify your manner of working and your stance as composer?
I think that a certain motivation is always necessary to make any kind of thing. In the case of creation, this thing has a different dimension: it involves the object, which invariably is exposed to the critique of the public opinion. This example shows very clearly that the object of creation is broader than the mere object of manufacture. Creation involves ethical and moral issues, and above all, the responsibility of a public act. Within the process of creation, the way in which I reach the seminal idea for a work is not emotional at all, it is indeed quite structured and systematic. The process of assembling the system, even though simple, implies the responsibility of understanding and perceiving it, before defining the final formulation. Then there is the craftsmanship, stage dedicated to realization, where my perception is expressed with the memory of all the techniques and strategies within composing and recombining of materials that constitute the composition of the work, and which I was learning and preserving throughout the years.
Music, due to its nature, is essentially incapable of expressing anything - emotion, mental attitude, psychological disposition or any natural phenomenon. What music expresses is only an illusion, metaphor and not reality. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? In this context how could you define your aesthetic stance?
Yes, music is in fact an extremely abstract form of expression and generally I don’t think that it is possible to establish any logic of communication through music or sonorous expression. The idea that music is a universal language or something similar doesn’t have any sense when taking into account the form of how I conceive my works. At the most, music stimulates determined sensations, yet which are always accompanied by a cultural context. Psychoacoustics has already explained very well all these problems and trying to add here something more can only result in a mere rhetoric exercise.
Are there any extra-musical sources, which influence your work in a significant way?
Yes, there are quite many, such as architecture, literature, photography, etc.
In the context of western art music do you feel proximity with any school or aesthetics, from the present or from the past?
From a more technical point of view, taking into account the composition techniques, my answer would be no. Nevertheless there are many influences regarding the reflection and pure aesthetics. Even though the rhetoric, music technique or even the political identity of the founders of the Italian futurism can be considered quite simplistic and somewhat tendentious, this movement, directly related with music, came to influence the forthcoming generations in a determining way. The reflection on the new aesthetic dimension of noise and the opening provided by this “breakthrough”, mean a lot to me both from the aesthetic point of view, as well as within the consequences that this vision gives to musical technique and composing.
Are there any non-western culture influences on your music?
I don’t think so. Or at least I don’t think about them.
What do you understand as “avant-garde”? In your opinion, what nowadays can be considered as avant-garde?
I cannot see a lot of innovation at the beginning of this century. The musical programming and the tendencies, also when it comes to younger composers, are represented by music and creation, which don’t take risks. This is the current state of the musical avant-garde in Europe, worse even in the United States and practically inexistent in Asia.
PART 3 - Language & Compositional Practice
How can you characterize your musical language when taking into account the techniques developed in composition in the 20th and 21st centuries? Do you have any preferred musical genres or styles?
I don’t have my own musical language. I think I still haven’t reached sufficient maturity, which would allow me to feel that I actually have a language. On the other hand I also don’t feel the need to define or find my own language. There are, nevertheless, elements resulting from a profound research around the concept of noise, and which have guided my research and my work within composition. With respect to instrumental music, since many years I have been trying to explore the relation between extended instrumental techniques and the mimicry of noise by musical instruments.
Could you describe the process behind your compositional practice? Do you compose from an embryo-idea or after having elaborated the global form of music?
Normally the central idea in my works always results from a determined interest in elements occurring to me somewhat separately, and which I then try to “assemble” by means of different processes, until achieving an object where I am able to identify the form, luminosity, matter, etc. After this stage there is the writing where some details can still change according to certain decisions, which the musical writing imposes at the moment of the work’s notation.
In the context of your compositional practice could you define the connection (or opposition) between calculation / reasoning / scientific processes (for example connected with acoustic phenomena) and the side more turned towards emotion (the so-called “creative impulses”)?
I use technology recurrently, in the sense to obtain certain demonstrations or approximations of the material used in my works. At times this technology helps me to conceive harmonic materials (not harmony as musical parameter, but rather the spectrum of one or various instruments), rhythmic patterns, or even the temporal reconstruction of a given timbre.
What is your relation with new technologies (for example with computer means) and how do they influence your way of composing and your musical language?
My relation with digital technology has already been quite long, it is quite usual for me to employ it in order to generate materials or even compose. It is difficult to evaluate to which extent technology influences or conditions the music, which I imagine and compose. Yet as in all periods of the history of art and science, the tools have always been a factor of a major or minor success in the realization of an object and within various phases of its fabrication. Art, as any other activity related to producing unique pieces, has always had a manufacturing phase, which undergoes the influence of the instruments for fabrication. In this sense I think that technology influences considerably the result of my music and reflection, but I don’t think that it conditions it.
What is the importance of the spatial and timbral aspects in your music?
Some lines before I have mentioned the importance, which I attribute to the new aesthetic dimension that noise started having in western music at the beginning of the 20th century, particularly with the futurists, but also with Varèse or even in the music of Stravinsky and Cage. In this sense timbre, within its broader meaning, is the matter and the element mobilizing all my reflection and concern at the beginning of the creation and composition process.
What is the importance of experimentalism in your music?
When you say experimentalism do you mean experimentation?
Experimentation is fundamental, even with the risk that I take when producing commissioned works, which end up not being paid as the musicians find the music liminal. Experimentation is at the base of my attitude, without challenge and risk peace becomes unbearable.
Which of your works do you consider turning points in your career as composer?
I have a lot of difficulty in mentioning one or another work, as a fact of change or turning point in my career. I have constructed my path slowly as I am not one of those gifted composers with immediate intuition and immense capacity of production.
My career has been constructed through the determination that I have to express myself through music, as well as by means of struggling and learning, which can sometimes be quite hard. It involves training and maturing processes within the technique and in terms of the needs, which an idea or project demand to be concretized. In this sense, my processes of change derive invariably from the processes of endogenous growth. These processes are always a progress, and in my case they are always long, meaning that in fact there is not a single work that would have a drastic effect on me, or which would mean a significant change at a given moment or at different moments.
What has been always occurring constitutes more global influences, by means of a set of works or forms of reflection, as in the case of many works by Donatoni and his deliberations; of the timbral world of Vaggione, above all since 1998 until today; and also of some works by Stockhausen, particularly from the end of the 1950s, as for example Elektronische Studie II. These are some of the works, which undoubtedly and consciously influence me still today when it comes to my research and attitude as artist. Generally, all of them have some aspects in common – the repeated and, sometimes, minimalistic exploration of the timbre. When I mention minimalism I refer myself to the technique of composition, where the texture results from iteration or recurrent use of extremely reduced mosaics.
Yet apart from the musical technique there is also the aesthetic attitude, where the resistance is revealed in a kind of purity and awareness of the musical discourse. For me this purity reveals itself in the clarity of organization of the elements, and in the choice of the elements, in order to produce a sketch with a crystalline and transparent form.
There are many other composers who have influenced me in a very pronounced way, as in the case of Philippe Manoury. Nevertheless this influence is revealed, above all, in the organic symbiosis between traditional instruments and the threshold of technology. It is also true that Philippe Manoury has a kind of mimetic influence on my relation between contemporary music and impressionism, above all with Debussy or even with Fauré. It certainly remains important as I spent a lot of time in France, and this has left deep marks on me.
PART 4 - Portuguese Music
What do you think of the present situation of Portuguese music? What distinguishes Portuguese music on the international panorama?
Portuguese contemporary music has had very strong impulses at the beginning of this century, thanks to the personal dedication and sacrifice of two or three people in this country. This dedication is connected with the realization of festivals, events or even publications on the most current musical creation. Without meaning to omit anyone, I think that Miguel Azguime and Jamie Reis, as well as Pedro Junqueira Maia, have had a very important role in trying not to let the musical creation fade away, above all in the case of younger composers. Unfortunately these two or three activists, whose work I consider exemplary, struggle year after year with an inconceivable resistance and iniquity not only of the government but also of the state institution. These institutions compete disproportionately with the activists, but ironically without the vision for creation of a patrimony, which Miguel Azguime, Jamie Reis or Pedro Maia have revealed through their actions. Unfortunately the OrchestrUtopica, which belonged to this utterly important group, has been defeated. We will try to resist collectively in order not to let it happen to the ones who at this moment and almost exclusively, allow the composers to create their works and the audiences to enjoy contemporary music.
In your opinion, is it possible to identify any transversal aspects in Portuguese contemporary music?
I have not been living in Portugal since many years, and the lack of contact with Portuguese everyday musical and artistic life has created a too great gap in order for me to be able to have an overview on this problem.
How could you define the composer’s role nowadays?
Without wanting to be too destructive, it seems to me that in fact the composer doesn’t have a great role in our society. Generally the composer doesn’t belong to a stereotype providing the “art merchant” with works that have a negotiable or estimable value.
Last week I read a text by Vítor Rua, composer who I respect considerably, above all for the risk he constantly takes not only in his works but also in his approach. It concerns his attitude of opposition, and the lack of recognition by the society of Vítor Rua as an exemplary worker. And in fact it is true. Vítor Rua, who many times works seven days per week and who wants to work, who produces and wants to produce, who released more than 50 CDs and who has excellent achievements as artist, doesn’t see his work valorised, as our society perceives art and artistic creation merely in terms of market rules. If the object doesn’t establish the buyer’s sureness in order to confirm a certain stereotype, it can be easily rejected, because the buyer doesn’t want to take the risk.
Our society became savage and it is the market that determines the value of any object, either related to war or art. And in this way we have more and more artists who in fact find “value” in decreasing their production, and the other ones who have much more ease in trying to respond to what the “market” accepts as viable objects for business. It is in this way that one dismantles the future without even getting there.
But the situation is not very different from the one in science. Science also obeys to market rules based on the logic of sustainability. In other words, if a pharmaceutical company subsidies a laboratory or a PhD scholarships to make research on a drug, it is this assumption that defines the standards and research procedures. And the governments and politicians support and applaud it, as only in this manner it is possible to control and dismantle groups of scientists and artists depending on subsidies. Once again science has to obey to the rules of market, where in fact private interests dictate what a politics for research and creation should be.
According to your experience what are the differences between the music environment in Portugal and in the other parts of the world?
It depends on which parts of the world we are thinking. In my trajectory I have always tried to go to countries and societies where art and invention are considered important for the development of reflection and identity. This assumption makes that culture and musical life (or environment) have prevalence not only in social life but also in education. Portugal is far away from this reality, as in accordance with the more modern political models structuring a social system where it is necessary to pay to teachers and educators, in order for them to stimulate the taste for making and listening to music, to pay to musicians, ensembles and festivals as well as to creators to be able to make art, means maintaining a system that is not sustainable. In fact, it seems to be more up-to-date to sustain failed banks and corrupt bankers.
PART 5 - Present & Future
What are your current and future projects?
At this moment, as usual, I am working on various projects: a commission by the Sond’Ar-te Electric Ensemble, a piece for orchestra, still looking for a commissioner; I am also finishing the edition of my new CD. In 2015, there are various concert projects in Germany, Belgium and China.
How do you see the future of art music?
Taking into account that musical creation is influenced by a contamination from painting, sculpture and decorative arts – the obedience to the market rules – I am somewhat apprehensive, with the politics of the organisms aimed to stimulate the creation and artists.
Paulo Ferreira-Lopes, September 2014
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