Questionnaire / Interview
Part 1 · Roots & Education
How did music begin for you and where do you identify your music roots?
João Quinteiro: They're different, the beginning and the roots. The first memories of music moving me in some way, probably go back to the time when I was four or five years old, at my grandparents' house in Viseu. I persistently asked to listen to Vivald's Four Seasons and spent the afternoons with my cousins listening and dancing to Rock Around the Clock by Billy Holliday! My father has always been an enthusiastic fan of progressive rock, so I grew up with the first albums by Genesis, particularly Selling England by the pound, with Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Uriah Heep.
When I was six my parents offered me a guitar and music lessons. Playing music by ear makes part of the canon, nevertheless I have always taken a lot of pleasure from inventing my own progressions and creating ornaments around them. This has probably been the beginning.
When it comes to the roots, it's more difficult, since they haven't stopped developing and frequently I insist on reinforcing and questioning them. I hope to keep these roots growing for a long time.
I assume that the question concerns the delimitation of a nuclear point in the rhizome of my path. In formal terms I began studying music at the Conservatoire of Viseu quite late, at the age of 16. I remember the first time that I heard contemporary music (forgive me the inaccuracy of this term). It was more or less at this time, at the Free Composition class by José Carlos Sousa, where we listened to Le Marteau sans maître by Pierre Boulez. I remember walking from the conservatoire to my grandmother's house, almost crying and thinking – “what have they done to my Mahler, to my Brahms and to my Debussy”. I think that if I hadn't taken Ligeti with me to listen to at home, the Free Composition classes would have ended there! Today Boulez's Marteau and Dialogue de l’ombre double make part of my very, very short music list, which I always carry in my pocket, for the tightening hours.
Which paths led you to composition?
JQ: The paths that led me towards composition begin with a very profound disappointment and a state of frustration. I was a complicated teenager. The poorly generalist contents and the backwardness of the education annoyed me greatly and I ended up skipping lessons, on many occasions to stay in the library, to read or to listen to music. Not always, but at many times! However, I have always had good grades. I think this made it even more frustrating. I wrote, read, listened to music and played music during my whole adolescence, almost on a daily basis, but I didn't have a clue about what I wanted to do. One day, in the middle of a school afternoon, I phoned my dad and asked him to come to meet me. I told him that I would be a musician, that I would start living on my own and study at the Conservatoire of Viseu (my parents live in Barreiro). And so it happened. I owe them everything.
When I entered the Conservatoire, the aim was to follow classical guitar. Nevertheless, I continued “creating” music just for me and to write (texts). In my second year in Viseu I started the ATC (Analysis and Composition Techniques) classes and I remember feeling a terror and an incredible dazzle towards counterpoint. Somewhat in the middle of the year José Carlos opened the Free Composition discipline. As I mentioned, this is where I had my first contact with the music cannon composed in the 20th century, at the time greatly focused on the Darmstadt composers – Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Berio, Cage, ...
This was associated with the realisation of the first composition exercises, still resorting to simple approaches, such as exploring serial techniques or working with pitch filtering.
The truth is that, in this sense, composition as a creative act gained an internal legitimisation, which imposed itself on all the rest, in terms of responding to my personal needs. I say legitimisation not because of the aesthetic typology of composition. As I've already mentioned, since early the will and the internal pressure to create has been present in various forms. I've become aware that I would be able to compose during a lot of time, without it turning dull or becoming only a form of an intimate output.
From the Conservatoire I went to the licentiate course in Composition, in Aveiro, the old one, still via Education. There I studied composition with João Pedro Oliveira and with Isabel Soveral, composition techniques and counterpoint with Evgueni Zoudilkine and analysis with Virgílio Melo. In very distinct forms all of them were important to me. Some of them still are.
The contact with the ideas and compositional rigour of Emmanuel Nunes was more determining than this or that aesthetics, because of his demand for clarity, honesty and rigour in the relation with the métier.
However, the path that led me to composition is still being created. For me it's important that the path taking us somewhere, is the same one that continues to take us somewhere else. As Luigi Nono emphasised: “there are no paths, yet you must walk!” (“No jay caminos, hay que caminar!”)
Which moments from your music eduction do you find the most important?
JQ: This is a complicated question. I have already started to answer it about three times and I always find myself going backwards. The problem is that it's easy to convert “moments” into “people”. It's easy to fall into a descriptive narrative of relations, but moments, particularly the key-moments, are something else. I equally imagine that it's difficult for anybody to identify these moments. It seems to me that particularly for a musician it's difficult to mark out what “music education” means, because many of the key-moments are external from the formal education.
In my case the most marking moments would have to be the trials by fire – to find myself in front of the Gulbenkian Orchestra at the rehearsals of my first orchestral work and to feel, simultaneously, the indignation of some musicians for having to do such strange things and the availability and interest of others... for having to do such strange things!
Another moment, or set of various fundamental moments, happened every time I sat with a score next to Emmanuel Nunes. I probably haven't had trials by fire much more intense than those ones. They taught me how important a certain state of consciousness and sensibility was, in relation towards our own work. In a very early phase of my relation with composition, they made me understand the fundamental character of the responsibility implied in the act of creation, as an act of sharing with and towards the others.
Part 2 · Influences & Aesthetics
Are there any extra-musical sources, which influence your work in a significant way?
JQ: Yes, although the term “sources” seems to me to be implying a compromise which I don't know if I am able to accept. That is... have I already created works related with objects which aren't music by definition? Yes. For example, since 2014 – well to tell the truth way before 2014, but let's assume 2014 –, I've been working on a set of pieces for prepared piano and solo instrument, that have a relation with poems by Luís Miguel Nava. Whether I treat the texts as a source, seems to me a dangerous assumption. I don't think so. What happens is rather my identification of profound resonances in voices or in objects that haven't been created by me, but which in a certain way I find intimate, as if they were mine. And this sensation of profound intimacy gives origin to works, which are mine. The same happens regarding the texts with which I'm working in the framework of my first opera project. They're the texts by José Mário Silva. Marvellous. They have always accompanied me, back and forth, for almost 20 years. These texts have become a part of me, so I can't say that they are sources. They are not the starting points for my works, but rather the resonating objects. The same happens with the set of works on the pagan sabbaths, which I initiated in 2009 and with the work Khatib's Heart, whose final version is still to be premiered. Working on this composition I took a newspaper clipping about a 7-year-old Palestinian boy who was assassinated in an Israeli raid. This boy’s parents, Khatib, have donated their son's heart for transplantation, for an 8-year-old Israeli girl. I remember that this image of a moving heart has followed me during months and it has been stronger than anything else possible of being described, discussed and questioned, populating my thoughts. It's a fundamental heart. In this work I use quotations of Palestinian and Israeli lullabies, added to another quotation from Gesualdo's Tenebrae Responsories.
Again, these materials are not departure or arrivals points. They are objects which resonate in me.
In the context of western art music do you feel close to any school or aesthetics from the past or the present?
JQ: I have to admit that “western art music” is a term, which I particularly dislike (I'm not saying that there are better alternatives!). Perhaps because of this I'm not able to resist to answer this question, leaving the following safeguard: I don't think that “art music” constitutes any kind of aesthetic landmark. It seems to me that this term / concept, nowadays serves, more than anything else, a more capitalist purpose to legitimise bad music. It can be legitimate to make bad music, but it's not legitimate to exculpate bad music through concepts or argumentative foundations. That is, this term is used nowadays only because music as entertainment has become mostly a savagely capitalist object, poor as well as purposely and atrociously disposable. My question is whether one would ask Machaut, Josquin, Monteverdi, Bach or Mozart (I purposely leave Beethoven apart!), or even Schumann and Liszt, if they created “art music”!! If it was even possible to explain to them the concept. And yes I know that I'm assuming that the presumption in the question is that the western tradition is the one of these composers. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the problem of “art music” is that it legitimises a series of “composers” who, for being musically literate and writing music within the western instrumental tradition, are in a certain way automatically legitimised, independently of the content of their work, even though their music is much more conditioned with the need for an immediate profitability and much poorer in comparison with the work by the creators who don't easily fit in the “art music” cliché, but who are serious when it comes to defending art and its mission.
Lachenmann used to say about the beautiful and beauty that it's necessary to take it to an “unsafe place”. I would say the same about art, the process and the métier itself. One needs to distinguish, once and for all, the approach using facilitating means and outdated sonic raw materials, desiring immediate self-congratulation, not challenging the audience and submitting creation to the utilitarianism of rapid capitalisation, from an Art which resists, which doesn't submit itself and which therefore recognises its function of contributing for the human spirit, so that it doesn't fall into the masturbatory blindness of unquestionability and absence of thought.
In my opinion, this isn't related with aesthetic currents, and the tradition is not a crystallised object but rather a perspective, a state, a form of being in relation with ...
This to say that until the savage industrialisation to which music was submitted in the 20th century, this distance between what is the “classical” composer's métier and the métier of a “light” music composer, assume very distinct values (the terms “classical” and “light” music are absurdly outdated, if only because the erudition is nowadays at the disposal of the masses and it doesn't define the final product. I don’t even know where to start with the term “light”... colonialisms...).
In short, what has been compromised is the process of listening. I know very few people who in fact listen to music in order to somehow open themselves by means of a strictly sonic object. No. Music itself has become something highly specialised which “nobody understands”. One understands a text, a choreography (particularly if it appeals to a certain form of sensuality or satisfaction of capitalist fantasies), but one doesn't understand music, because it's necessary to listen to it. Nowadays music serves all the possible purposes, with the exception of this one – listening.
It's necessary to bring music back to its own ontology, above all because if not, “art music” will simply be another niche fashion that won't possess, in order to be legitimised, other criteria than being “weird”, therefore outside the people's comprehension.
Hereupon I'm particularly interested in the line of composers, still today, succeeding the Darmstadt school. They have a type of thought, recognising serialism within its various fronts and experiences as an initial departure point for the rupture with the need of a common platform. It's the line that in this moment of liberation / constriction has discovered the potential for each work to genetically assert any possibility of formal coherence, through ceaseless questioning of what the work intends to be.
What does “avant-garde” mean to you and what, in your opinion, can nowadays be considered as avant-garde?
JQ: Frankly speaking, it's not up to me to understand anything about the term “avant-garde”. The meaning of the word seems clear to me. It implies both front or extreme part in the relation with a defensive combativeness. This in my understanding is avant-garde – a borderline front where some form of combativeness is always fervent.
Another strange relation, the one that the 20th century established with the concept of the “new”, by this I mean experimental. It doesn't particularly matter to define what “avant-garde” is. It would seem paradoxical to me (no ?), if it actually were possible to determine it, wouldn’t that, by itself, be a symptom that it wasn't avant-garde anymore? As Agamben said, quoting the poem by Mandelstam, it's necessary to “break the Vertebrae of two centuries” of the beast of time and to weld one to another, in order to have a vision being simultaneously now and after.
Nevertheless, I will take advantage of this question to report a strange relation which the “classical music composers”, particularly the ones more crystallised in dated practices, have with this term. The term “avant-garde” has gained during the 20th century, perhaps in opposition towards a complacent “light music”, a certain stamp of creative legitimisation. Apart from this, particularly in the central decades of the 20th century, the radical experimentation (either of a more rational or more abstract nature) was in fact the conducting wire among some of the most consensually interesting minds in music creation. Now, if a composer decides to turn his or her back to it and to compose as if we were still in 1902, he or she runs the risk of losing the legitimisation. I don't believe that somebody who nowadays writes Neo-Romantic music, does it because their available to run risks! This generates one of the two peculiar behaviours: or an extraordinary distance between a (profitably avant-garde) discourse and the music writing (crystallised as Neo-Romantic) or else, even more peculiar, injecting the music discourse with sonic elements (let's call them “decorations”) considered by their authors as “avant-garde” (as the above-mentioned “strange”). Generally this gives poor and hilarious results!!
In this double possibility I don't include the third one, which has at a point been presented to me and which I put here only as an anecdote, although it was expressed by somebody quite serious and in a quite serious manner: “the new neo-tonal composers are the real avant-garde, surpassing the trauma of the Darmstadt generation”. Hilarious!
To conclude, “avant-garde” is a purposely and formally serious setting (and not comfortably decorative), assumed by the composer by placing him / herself in tension and imbalance, in relation with his or her materials, necessarily confronting a historical context. If this includes more or less technology, noise, microtonality, new complexity or simplicity, seems to me irrelevant, as long as it doesn't serve the purpose of the glow sprays used on apples in supermarkets. Wagner did it with four notes, Debussy with seven, Schoenberg with 12. Stockhausen did it with form and Nono with ideology. It doesn't matter which form or character does the avant-garde assume, but it always shocks me that somebody needs to impersonate a war hero, the more because it only means that one ran away out of cowardice and not ideology. I will always respect every individual position assumed within an exercise of personal consciousness. I find laughable, not to say consequentially dangerous, exercising farces with respect to the avant-garde, mainly because of its generational impact.
Part 3 · Language & Music Practice
Please characterise your music language taking into perspective the techniques / aesthetics developed within music creation in the 20th and 21st centuries, on the one hand, and on the other your personal experience and your path until now.
JQ: It seems to me, concurrently, fundamental to begin by saying that the answer to this question, when it comes to my work until now, has to be marked between the autonomy of the materials, from one work to another, being that each work asks for materials of its own and on the other hand, there's a narrow web of relations among subterranean materials, which create a broader tissue between the works. Some of these relations have direct familiarity (as I already referred, many of my works are conceptualised in sets or cycles) or typological resonances. This means that, despite belonging to distinct groups, in a certain way, they point towards the same place. I will be more specific, because I'm worried that a certain abstraction of the compositional discourse ends up being merely a subterfuge to a certain “commercial erudition”.
Works such as the set Eros (2017), Thánatos (2015), Energeia (2010-14), [Dynamis e Trieb], depart from the constitution of the acoustic / sonic nuclei. Here each nucleus is composed taking into consideration a sonic imperative, simultaneously charged with autonomous elements and the ones giving distant typologies of relations with the remaining acoustic nuclei implied in each work. The way in which the nuclei are articulated and developed in each work is then attached to the specific character which every work needs to have. For example, in Energeia every typological nucleus is worked within a continuous process of spatial and functional “modulation”, with every agent imposed on the remaining ones. It's a process that forces the continuous submission and the combative emergency of the relation between an acoustic nucleus and sonic groups.
In the case of works resonating with the texts by Nava, there are, I would say, two typological axes in conceptualising and treating the materials. These axes are, in the first place, transversal aspects in Nava's poetics that occupy, in a broad spectrum, a determining space in me: the body and its multiplicity of affects, tempests, contemplations, violences and contradictions (I emphasise, the body). Secondly, there's the particular content of every chosen text and what from this specific text resonates in me. To be more concrete, in dois rios (2019) there's the idea of reverse simultaneity, the particularity of the limitations of the body as a hinged territory where the borders (acoustic, performative, instrumental, idiomatic) are diluted in the navigation of an equal, singularly double “ship”.
In the case of the opera's satellite works, the relation with the texts by José Mário is different. Here, each work establishes a more direct relation with the texts, because each text constitutes, in the relation between the solo work and the opera, a meta-layer, as if the opera was a result of an infinite (entropic) summation of souls habituating the texts by José Mário. The opera's libretto is being constructed as adaptation of the original texts, however it's fundamental that the texts (or a substrate of the original texts) are integrally present in some way.
Going back to the question, for me it's not an issue to focus on the application of a specific compositional technique. Each work, in view of what it needs to be, either through the sonic pressure which it exercises on me or through the structural dimension and the place it occupies in relation with other works, asks for specific techniques. They can be strictly exploring the sonic and technical universe of the instrument, or their character can be spectral or even defined in relation with materials having specific historical weight, in opposition to a cheap idiomatic discourse. Yes it's fundamental for me to create music offering resistance and giving the possibility to move form a crystallised idiomatic place, to a broader universe of sonic perception and practice.
Looking at my path from the beginning until now I would say the following: I’ve put the fist notes on paper in 2001. During the 13 following years I wrote perhaps 20 to 25 works, from which in 2014, the year when I understood that a certain learning phase had come to an end, I decided that I would revise / rewrite three. The other ones, even the already premiered ones, would remain in the intimacy of this learning process. I have written 14 works since 2014, where I use diverse types of writing techniques and various types of compositional means and apparatuses. At the level of aesthetics, what I find in common between them, at leats in my intentions, is the need to challenge. To challenge myself, to challenge the performer(s) who intend to embrace my works, to challenge audition of the ones dedicating their time to listen to them, avoiding commonplaces, easy expectations or hedonistic complacencies.
When it comes to your creative practice, do you develop your music from an embryo-idea or after having elaborated a global form? In other words, do you move from the micro towards the macro-form or is it the other way round?
JQ: My answer is brief. I compose out of the inevitability of doing it, out of the sudden presence of sonic objects exercising a tremendous pressure and occupying an enormous space of my mental availability. The way in which each of these pressures emerges is distinct. In some cases it's a condensed sonic mass which already has a form, but which needs “decompression”. In other cases there are only sounds, typologies, timbres, spectrums and relations between the bodies. Still in other ones, the sonic agents create temporal relations.
The process of elaborating sketches, previous to the writing of every work, appeases this pressure through the comprehension of the detail and the functional relations, putting the pressure in a more or less organised, temporal sequence. Do I start with the form or the content? I start with what the work needs in order to become whatever it needs to be, through me.
How in your creative practice do you determine the relation between the reasoning and the “creative impulses or the “inspiration”?
JQ: I don't understand why the creative impulses and inspiration are in quotes and the reasoning isn't.
Nevertheless the answer is equally short and it can be divided in two points:
1) I question, if it makes sense to categorise (in practice) the process concerning the tension between these two poles, that is, if they don't continuously overlap, join and dilute within a creative reasoning or a rationalised creativity.
2) Very, very carefully!!
What is your relation with the new technologies and how do they influence your music?
JQ: I will assume that, in this context, the new technologies are limited to objects connected with an electricity socket.
Again, every work needs what it needs to be. In terms of composition, I'm little interested, not to say that I'm not interested at all, in objects with a mere decorative function. In this sense, the works where I use technological means, until now, have resulted from a relation that certain materials have with space. This use of technology that puts certain materials in a mobile relation with space, occurs as a structural and typological function in the sonic context, at a level as essential as the acoustic typology of the used sound.
Nevertheless, it is important to emphasise that for me any technological element always needs to be tactually performed, that is, I'm not interested at all in a “press and play” relation with technology.
What is the importance of space and timbre in your music?
JQ: They're structurally nuclear recurrent agents.
Does experimentation play a significant role in your music?
JQ: Experimentation makes part of my obligatory process in achieving each work. I don't work with pre-prepared materials. To reach and understand what the work needs to be – the “whats and whys” constituting the sonic palette demanded by every piece –, always implies a long process of experimentation either personal, or with the performers, or with any other means.
To what extent composition and performance are for you complementary activities?
JQ: I will assume that in this context performance is understood as anything but the interpretation of music. In the experience of a sonic object it's for me fundamental to have a certain form of performative motor skills, implied in any work.
I will thus assume that here “performance” concerns any action of the body that isn't sonically organised or doesn't take the resulting sonic organisation as a structural criterion.
In the opera project which I've been writing already for four years, there are 10 satellite works, among which five are compositions for solo instruments, containing a performative element and performed spatialisation. In short, I write these works as trios where each performer encompasses a distinct performative category, for example: Hermes, nove da noite (2017), for spatialised tenor saxophone and live video, piece on which I've been working in collaboration with the director Sinem Taş; or Eurídice, sete da manhã (2016), for spatialised percussion and dancer.
Each of these works is composed out of the web of relations established between the three agents integrating them, as well as of their simultaneity and the consequent temporal agency. There's no submission, but rather a counterpoint between the performative agents.
Part 4 · Portuguese Music
Try to evaluate the present situation in Portuguese music.
JQ: I feel like answering 42!
Portuguese contemporary music is a very embracing and diversified frame. This could be the beginning of a perfect answer, if it weren't for what is about to follow – that is, observing the profound unbalance ruling the actual state of things.
Since two years I've been officially a member of the APC (Portuguese Association of Composers) direction. Before, during probably three years we were observing and analysing the context which we wanted to integrate, so that it would be possible to bring to the table something truly valuable for the community of Portuguese composers. We needed to contemplate how to achieve it without compromising the mission we propose – to give some professional balance and institutional dignity to the community. It has become immediately clear that it wouldn't be easy. Again, Portuguese music is too broad a context, so I will limit my answer to the part for which I'm presently fighting, that is, the state of music for whom creates it nowadays in Portugal. Even this problem is very broad and it demands for diverse particularisations. I will focus on two aspects: the rights of who creates and the preparation of the ones who intend to create.
In relation to the first one I would say that we are incredibly unprotected and, as a consequence of this prolonged exposition to this lack of protection, we are, as a community, defensive and suspicious.
The creators of music in Portugal have, at best, a structure securing the collection of their author's rights. However, the life of a composer doesn't just boil down to the major or minor profitability of his or her works. In Portugal there’s an enormous fragility in the relation between the music creators and the contracting entities or the ones commissioning music. On the one hand, there's no regulation of the market, that is, the practiced values are either “imported” (at best) or they depend on the criterium and the common sense of the entities, what generally doesn't end up well. Either one falls into the circular process of a very short range of names, or the composer has to be grateful for the extraordinary opportunity of working for free. I'm not, evidently, referring to embracing causes or the personal relations which move us towards creating, independently of the financial sustainability. We all have the right for personal projects and close to heart causes. To me it only doesn't seem adequate that an entity contracting the work of a professional, takes advantage of it to nurture the status of “commissioning entity”.
There are very few composers, and not only in Portugal but around the world, who are able to live exclusively from composing with more or less success, since it also varies from current to current. What matters is the dignity in the practiced values. It's understood that dignity means a fair adequacy of practiced values towards the produced object.
In Finland the fellow association to APC, with which we have been recently in contact, uses, in defence of its associates, a referential table of values where the criterium is the complexity of the works. It doesn't seem absurd to me. Independently of the current, somebody who takes three or four months to produce his or her object, can't be remunerated equally as the one producing two or three objects per day.
When it comes to the composers' labour life, there's still a lot to be done in the state of music in Portugal.
Regarding the second point which I mentioned above, the one concerning the formation of the ones who create, in Portugal there seems to be an enormous distance (and not only in relation to music, but transversal in diverse areas), between the higher education and the available professional life. Since 10 or 15 years, every year there has been an average number of 25 to 30 composers graduating from composition in Portugal. Please notice that I won't even mention the numbers in the other diverse superior music courses. I leave this concern to the rightful ones, but the numbers here are probably between eight to ten times higher than the ones related with composition. There has been and there is a continuous effort and an investment in the formation of these young (to whom I also belong). The articulated education at the conservatoires and the professional education in music has had an exponential growth in the last decade in Portugal, educating more and more quality musicians. So I ask... where is the job market, or better, the investment to create a job market for these young? Where are the orchestras and the professional chamber formations, decently financed or public, in order to give vent to this investment?
But this isn't a problem only of the musicians in Portugal. As professor and researcher I'm aware of it on other forefronts. In Portugal one invests in educating and specialising for unemployment and emigration. In my opinion presently there are conditions in order for this potential, in which so much has been invested, to be harvested.
What in your opinion distinguishes Portuguese music at the international level?
JQ: Coincidentally, whilst answering this question, I am at the interval of a European panel of associations fighting for the rights of composers. It seems to me that the best way to start answering this question means, literally, observing the room surrounding me at this very instant.
It's important to make it clear that:
1) I'm seated in a room with the representatives from all European countries and, from every country, of various aesthetic quadrants and currents within music creation.
2) In its present format the APC has existed for over a year. We are here with colleagues representing associations fighting for composers' rights, whose beginning dates back to the second world war. This convention of associations has existed for 13 years and we have been the fist Portuguese entity to be invited here. I don't want to be misunderstood. This second point is for me an object for lament and preoccupation and by itself it answers a considerable part of the question.
One of the things distinguishing us, as I've already said in the previous question, is that, majorly, we limit ourselves to exporting a considerable part of our best musicians. Last year I lived in Italy, where I worked at the Luigi Nono Foundation – a place of extraordinary generosity, defending in an absolutely incredible way the ethics of creation. I also worked with Beat Furrer in Austria, a country whose great diversity verifies an incredible consideration when it comes to culture and its outputs. These are radically distinct contexts between each other and from the Portuguese one. What matters in this question is that, apart from the great pleasure of working with extraordinary musicians from all over the world, I had the opportunity of getting to know some of our best musicians who either live abroad or are majorly in transit, outside Portugal. This is not the only distinguishing aspect, but in my opinion it seems to characterise what distinguishes us from a certain international panorama, where music and culture are treated with dignity.
Part 5 · Present & Future
How do you define the composer's role nowadays?
JQ: The composer's role starts with the relation between his or her personal creative consciousness / necessity and his or her creative necessities in the relation established or intended to be established with the world, with the others. As I mentioned above, I will always defend any creator making an effort to act in a clear and honest way, conscious of him / herself and the other, recognising his or her position, whatever it is. Music doesn't have only one function, therefore “the composer” doesn't exist. Each quadrant of music creation answers to certain human needs. Among them there's the potential to light the human mind and not to anaesthetise or cover it, which in my opinion should be common. It's a false pretentiousness, not to say a poorly stylistic egoism, to think that there's a defined function of what the composer is, reserved to a range “selected” by the gods. The positioning of each composer towards his or her objects should be serious and exercised in a serious and conscious way, independently of the major or minor seriousness of the relation which the audience establishes with his or her work. What we give to the world should make an impact.
What are your present and future projects?
JQ: I'm presently working on the composition of an opera project, covering the creation, apart from the opera itself, of diverse satellite works.
Apart from this personal project, there are some works which I will write by request and by commission during the year.
Could you highlight one of your more recent projects, present the context of its creation as well as the particularities of the language and techniques?
JQ: I can describe the work on which I'm presently working. It's one of the opera's satellite works – Sísifo, cinco da tarde, for spatialised accordion and narrator.
It's one of the works constituting the opera's satellites, the only one where language is used as an explicit sonic material. The accordionist is seated in the centre with the audience around him (at 360º). The audience is surrounded with four channels, spatialising the materials, both of the accordionist and the narrator moving continuously inside the circle created by the audience. As in all the works of this cycle I use the homologous text by José Mário, respecting its total integrity. The space and, consequently, the acoustic nature that the diverse materials assume in this space are the work's fundamental element. Here, unlike the other satellite pieces of the opera [Eurídice, sete da manhã (2016) for spatialised percussion and dancer; Penélope, meio-dia for spatialised harp, actor and actress; Hermes, nove da noite (2017) for spatialised tenor saxophone and live video; Prometeu, meia-noite for Portuguese guitar and actor], there are three sonic sources articulating five distinct “spaces”, the sound of the accordion and the accordionist's vocalisations: the instrument's fixed sound, the mobile sound of the instrument and the mobile sound of the accordionist in the monitors; the sound of the narrator – physically mobile and its spatialisation. The articulation of the space occupying each of the elements is thought as a counterpoint, that is, each element has its own materials which are autonomous both at the acoustic level or when it comes to the technique or the range of specific techniques, which every element uses. Yet it's always thought in a relational manner within the agency points and cohabitation of the resulting acoustic places and palettes.
Each element (there are other ones, apart from the space element) begins with a typology of its own, seated in the properties of the sonic and performative body, acting in the relation with each type of the performer's physical action. In its turn, these actions are articulated with the parts of the text which are related and resonate at every instant with the opera's macro-structural frame, as a conducting subterranean wire, from one satellite work to another. To sum up, it's a fabric of mobile multiplicities (and I don't only mean the space), acting and reacting at every instant.
João Quinteiro, November / December 2019
© MIC.PT
