Photo: Constança Capdeville
MIC.PT Questionnaire · “Eight Contemplations on Constança Capdeville”
INDEX
>> Introduction
>> Questionnaire
>> 1. History
>> 2. Work
>> 3. Composer and Audience
>> 4. Pedagogy
>> 5. Projection and Influence
>> 6. Speculation
>> Constança Capdeville · Playlist
>> Footnotes
Composer, pianist, percussionist, and teacher, Constança Capdeville (1937-1992) allied music with stage components within the music-theatre context. She occupied a unique place in the universe of Portuguese new music. Her creation echoes the reflection on the inseparability between life and art, simultaneously emphasising the importance of the sonic, corporal, gestural, and literary research of the work.
Throughout her life, Constança Capdeville founded various groups and ensembles, such as the Convivium Musicum and the ColecViva. Her activity as a composer was always connected with that of a piano and percussion performer and, in that capacity, she worked with the Menestréis de Lisboa and with the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, directed by Jorge Peixinho. She also distinguished herself as a Composition teacher. Her very own approach to the pedagogical activity marked her disciples, some of them presently recognised composers. “As one can read on the pages of the Portuguese 20th-Century Music Encyclopaedia”: ‘Her teaching was oriented by an effort to inspire the young with the new relations which she aimed at establishing between the musical gesture, the sonority of the words and text, the movement and the physical spatialisation of the bodies, shifting them from their contexts to other universes, in which they assume new meanings’.1
According to various people who knew her professionally and personally, Constança Capdeville was a great advocate within the Portuguese music universe, having influenced new music composers and performers, whom she conveyed her ideas of music-theatre. She composed around 80 works encompassing various genres: orchestra, chamber music, music for dance, theatre, cinema, music-theatre (staging original music), and music spectacles (staging, above all, music by other composers). The musicologist Mário Vieira de Carvalho writes in the “Preface” to Maria João Serrão’s book “Constança Capdeville. Between the Theatre and the Music”: ‘Constança Capdeville’s extraordinary invention, her nonconformist gesture, almost always marked by an ironic, if not sarcastic vision, are in the origin of the hybrid genre that constitutes the distinctive trace of her work: between music and theatre, between vision and listening, between body and instrument, between structure and process, between space and time’.2
The tendencies already present in Constança Capdeville’s instrumental music are affirmed within her music-theatre: the strongly multidisciplinary aspect, the writing using open forms (where the themes are more repeated than developed, and where the polar note substitutes the tonic), permeated by quotations, and affirming the influence of her master-composers, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Claude Debussy, Eric Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. She chose texts by writers and poets, such as Federico García Lorca, James Joyce, Blaise Cendrars, Edgar Allan Poe, and T. S. Elliot, and repeatedly quoted them. Particularly in the collage process, she also referred painters such as Salvador Dalí, or Pablo Picasso, simultaneously ‘looking straight into the eyes’ of performance innovators, such as John Cage, Kurt Schwitters, Luciano Berio, or Mauricio Kagel. They were all close to her as inspiration points, yet she always kept them at a distance, essential for her original creation. In her work, integrating the tendencies of artistic creation of her time within an aesthetics connected with contemporary music, Constança Capdeville opened new possibilities for the relations between theatre and music, relying on new and uncommon forms of communication with the public. Nowadays they are paradigmatic for the music-theatre creation all around the world.
Not declaring any aesthetic credo, Constança Capdeville assumed, on the one hand, a mysticism within a dichotomy between ‘earth and heaven, subterranean and aerial, obscure and luminous’ which spanned many of her works, as well as a dialectics with the invisible which she repeatedly referred.3 On the other hand, the composer also frequently referred the existential pain, and in this sense one of her most emblematic works “Libera Me” (concert version from 1979) for choir, piano, percussion, and electronics, is focused on this human and personal conflict. ‘According to her, the fact that we live a life which we do not chose, and whose content and destiny greatly escape us, was a work of a major injustice’ – writes Gil Miranda on the pages of the book “Ten Portuguese Composers”.4
Constança Capdeville left us in 1992, 30 years ago; in 2022 she would have turned 85, and it is now, more than ever, that her work needs a reinforced and urgent attention so that it stays alive and constantly updated. In this sense, the MIC.PT, the Miso Music Portugal, and the Musicamera Produções, declare this November as “Constança Capdeville’s Month”, with various initiatives taking place, focused on the composer’s work. On November 4 and 5, Constança Capdeville’s music-theatre “FE…DE…RI…CO…” will be presented at the Tetro Aberto in Lisbon, in the context of the 4th edition of the CriaSons Festival organised by the Musicamera Produções. This performance is a modern recreation of this 1987 work, which, remaining truthful to the original object, aims at finding clues for the renovation of the music-theatre, opening it for the new generations of performers and public. On November 18, at the O’culto da Ajuda in Lisbon in the context of the Música Viva 2022 Festival, the Miso Records label will release António de Sousa Dias’ new monographic CD. It includes a work dedicated to Constança Capdeville, which uses a recording of the composer’s own voice. Additionally, on November 27 the O’cutlo da Ajuda will host a Round Table “To Understand and to Celebrate Constança Capdeville”, with the participation of António de Sousa Dias, Joana Sá, Luís Pacheco Cunha, Miguel Azguime, Rui Vieira Nery, .... This initiative is co-organised by the MIC.PT, Miso Music Portugal, and Musicamera Produções (members of riZoma – Portuguese Platform for Intervention and Research in New Music). On the same day, at the Final Concert of the Música Viva 2022 Festival at the CCB – Centro Cultural de Belém, the Metropolitan Orchestra of Lisbon under the baton of Pedro Neves, will perform the work “Que mon chant ne soit plus d’oiseau,” (1991). This is the last orchestral composition that Constança Capdeville wrote just before her death in 1992, and which can be now presented, 30 years later, thanks to a MIC.PT edition whose current notation is a realisation by António de Sousa Dias.
Lastly, in November, in the context of “Constança Capdeville's Month”, the MIC.PT releases the Questionnaire – “Eight Contemplations on Constança Capdeville”. Here, eight people who had a professional and/ or personal connection with the composer, and who research her work, open to us, by means of an eight-voice counterpoint, the window of her artistic and personal universe, inviting us for a (re)discovery of her legacy. With this In Focus the MIC.PT joins the appeal of various people and entities to preserve and promote Constança Capdeville’s work, so that it is not put into the 20th-century music drawer, but rather valorised and constantly revived by means of its presence and circulation at national and international concert halls, and through its archiving, reedition and thorough research.
QUESTIONNAIRE
The participants of the Questionnaire – “Eight Contemplations on Constança Capdeville” are: António de Sousa Dias (composer, multimedia artist, and teacher), Filipa Magalhães (researcher, and musicologist), João Paulo Santos (conductor, and pianist), Jorge Matta (conductor, and musicologist), Maria João Serrão (singer, performer, and researcher), Mónica Chambel (researcher, and musicologist), Pedro Wallenstein (double bass player, and GDA president), and Sérgio Azevedo (composer).
· According to your knowledge, what were Constança Capdeville’s music roots and what made her follow the music and composition path? ·
António de Sousa Dias*: Her father, who had influenced her, instilled in her the taste for the arts, particularly dance, music, and cinema. Constança told me once, that her father enjoyed staging operas when they listened to them at home.
Filipa Magalhães: Constança Capdeville was born in Barcelona in 1937. In 1951 she came to Portugal with her mother, in the consequence of the Spanish-Civil-War riots. She was then 14. At the time they were hosted by Janine Moura in Caxias. After some time, her father joined them. He was convicted to death by Franco’s regime but managed to escape.5 Capdeville enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music in Lisbon, having studied with Lourenço Varela Cid (piano), Santiago Kastner (musicology), and Jorge Croner de Vasconcelos (composition). Then she attended a Summer Curse in Santiago de Compostela as a Scholarship Holder of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, having been oriented by Philip Jarnach. Additionally, she went to various music-analysis seminars conducted by Nadia Boulanger, Croner de Vasconcelos, Luís de Pablo, among others.6 According to Janine Moura, Capdeville’s close friend and colleague at the National Conservatory, Croner de Vasconcelos’ strong personality profoundly marked both of them, either at the personal or musical levels.7
Nevertheless, when it comes to her compositional practice, Capdeville chose to follow a different path directed towards the music-theatre, having thus become the great representative of this performative genre in Portugal. Another important figure who indelibly marked her was her father, Filipe Capdeville. He was a cultured man, with an immense sensibility and taste for the arts, either theatre, music, or cinema. The composer had an enormous admiration towards him. And he instilled this taste in his daughter, taking her, since very early, to diverse cultural and artistic events. Constança Capdeville was a keen reader, and she had an enormous interest towards the arts, in general. Her work reflects some of the marking events from her life. There are references to her place of birth, and there is also a certain anxiousness manifested by a ceaseless pursuit either within the sonic or timbral research, and by the confluence of various artistic expressions, such as dance, theatre, or cinema. Her restlessness could be related with a departure with no return. The composer came from Catalonia, and she was forced to move to another country due to the consequences of the Spanish Civil War. However, she always kept contact with her roots, having visited her family in Barcelona multiple times. In her works, Capdeville also makes reference to her fellow-countryman artists, such as Salvador Dalí, also from Catalonia. The composer resorted to his paintings to show the performers some movements or poses that they should make on stage. Thus, these paintings served as their inspiration. Even the tribute that the composer pays to Garcia Lorca in the piece “FE…DE…RI…CO…” (1987), since Garcia Lorca was himself a Spanish-Civil-War victim, ends up being an allusion to a memory about this troubled and marking period that she lived in her country, from which she later ended up disconnecting, to never go back again. Consequently, this anxiety present in her work, or this internal yet externalised strength expressed through Capdeville’s work, is most likely connected with her homeland and the longing towards it. The conception of Capdeville’s works is thus a meeting point between diverse geographical music cultures, of the sound and the silence. But this meeting point is also social and affective, reflected by means of her ceaseless artistic pursuit.8
João Paulo Santos**: I've realised that I know very little about Constança Capdeville’s ‘musical past’, until the moment I met her which was, I think, in 1976.
I believe that in 1977 “Vamos Satiear” was premiered at the Conservatory; it was performed on the third floor of the building, which at the time served as storage for wood, furniture, pianos, and other old objects. For the most of us, it was a revelation! Doing music performances, concerts, presenting music in a non-conventional way, without any resources, dear Lord! Who could ever tell. The National Conservatory was a very retrograde school. Most of the teachers weren’t creative at all. I would dare saying they cultivated a non-innovative and ‘passive’ spirit in their students.
Jorge Matta: Constança Capdeville was born in Barcelona, during the Spanish civil war. She and her family moved to Portugal, where they settled. She studied Piano and Composition, and since early she distinguished herself with an avant-garde approach, and an absolute creative independence. She was a brilliant professor, pedagogue, and musicologist, having created and collaborated with various groups dedicated to contemporary music. She integrated the movement, the stage and the dance into her music and performances (which she herself designated as ‘music-theatre’). She also composed soundtracks for various films.
Maria João Serrão: Constança Capdeville was born under the bombardments of Barcelona, during the Spanish Civil War. When she was a child, she and her family went through a period of hardship and adversity. Her father managed to escape, eight times, from the guardian van. Therefore, following so many others Spanish citizens, the family fled and settled in Portugal when C. C. was 9 years old. Despite these difficult conditions, her father – a musician, cinema lover, naturally attracted by everything that had to do with art –, in the first years of her life (still in Barcelona) introduced her to everything that became essential in the future when Constança was an adult: plastic arts, music, dance, and cinema.
It seems evident that the traces of the horrible violence she experienced, but also of the love she received, are perceptible in the essence of her music, in her performances and in her relationship with the world. At every instant, C. C. lived the music which inhabited her interior, and which impregnated the simple gestures of her daily life. Reciprocally, her music was inspired by the small, everyday events. The computation of the music creation is correspondingly a testimony of her ideas: the verbalised ones, and the latent ones, in the context of her literary, musical, and philosophical choices.
From the outset, there is a mystical tendency, standing out in the dichotomy between the antagonistic poles, around which Constança’s life and work oscillated – earth and heaven, underground and aerial, obscurity, and light. The composer confessed, for example, that while composing “Libera Me” (1979; one of her first works) she put herself in the centre of the earth; and while composing “Que mon chant ne soit plus d’oiseau,” (1991; her last work) she felt as if in a central point of the outer space. Could her mysticism be translated into a specific religion? Constança used to say: ‘I have my own religion, and it is very special. I believe in a force, in an energy, which is projected into another force, which initiates other energies…’
This energy anchored in a catholic education made C. C. believe in life after death, what made her a simultaneously strong and fragile person. It nourished a feeling of courage defending her from physical death, which threatened her since always due to hereditary reasons. This coexistence of life and death is present in a great part of her works.
Likewise, her music ideas were always impregnated with a strong presence of the invisible, revealed obstinately in various of her music-theatre works, through the melody on T. S. Elliot’s verse: ‘Who is the third one who always walks beside you’, which C. C. synthesises in the phrase ‘wo bist du?’. In each different version the interrogation is maintained, as a kind of music/ text dialogue in which the melodic line reveals a serenity, almost a certainty, while the text reveals an increasing restlessness, possible to synthesise in the questions: where, how, and when?
Mónica Chambel: It is constantly referred by the people who were close to Constança Capdeville that her father was an art lover. In 2012 Manuel Cintra said that, when she was only three years old, her father took her to Pablo Casals’ concerts at the public square. In 2018 Janine Moura recalled the importance of the cinema for both – father, and daughter. Her father, drawn by everything that had to do with art, passed on his love for dance, cinema, and music. He was certainly a major influence in the composer’s life. Capdeville started her music studies in Barcelona, but the family had to flee to Portugal, when the composer was nine years old. Here she continued her music studies.
When it comes to her interest in composition, Capdeville started to compose since very early. At the age of 12 she already composed some small pieces, always with titles (e.g., “Caixinha de Música” [1950-1952], for piano). Already in her initial works it’s possible to see her interest in textural and gestural components connected with music. In “Visions d’enfant” (1958-1959), a “Petite Suite pour piano” composed when the composer was in the beginning of her 20s, it’s already possible to find the pronounces of the importance later given to both elements. For example, throughout the 4th movement – “Maman, j’ai vu dans la lune” – the performer has to speak the title’s text (“Maman, j’ai vu dans la lune”) with different intentions, including ‘implorez attention’, ‘timide’ or ‘sous le poids du rêve’. This interest in the ‘music of the words’ (Serrão, 2006), in the musicality of the words’ sound, was developed throughout her career, and Capdeville was integrating more and more texts of referential authors, sometimes deconstructing their logical sense, and mixing them with texts of her own authorship.
Regarding her music roots, Capdeville was strongly influenced by composers such as John Cage, Mauricio Kagel or Edgar Varèse. John Cage, one of her major influences, showed her how to use the silence as the compositional material, and how to use the prepared piano. Capdeville was familiar with his music works and with his texts, including the ones regarding the silence. Just as for Maurucio Kagel, for Capdeville there were no delimitations when it comes to the performers’ activity on the stage, where the composer articulated and integrated several artistic disciplines. The performers stopped having their roles so defined (according to their area of action) and started playing multiple functions. For Edgar Varèse it was possible to use music instruments in an unconventional way, and Capdeville gets closer to this composer’s approach using music instruments in atypical manners, with the aim to achieve timbral diversity.
Capdeville was also an unconditional fan of Erik Satie. She admired him to the point of creating diverse performances with the composer’s texts and music (“Vamos Satiear! I”, “II” & “III” and “Erik Satie comem tout le monde”), and of quoting him in her own works. Maria João Serrão refers that Capdeville highly estimated Satie’s imagination: the symbology of his graphics, his contradictions, and his taste for interdisciplinarity.
Nonetheless, Constança Capdeville was a person with a nonpareil erudition, constantly connecting references, not only the music ones but also from diverse domains, including painting, philosophy, or literature. She let herself be inspired by everyone.
Pedro Wallenstein***: We never talked about that. Indeed, Constança had highly delicate prudishness in changing from the curriculum to an argument, which didn’t stop her from evoking memories and experiences, whenever pertinent or illustrative. Undoubtedly, any scholar, biographer or musicologist knows, better than me, to contextualize her work and its path within the esthetical currents of the second half of the 20th century.
· How was Constança Capdeville’s personality reflected in her creative work? ·
António de Sousa Dias*: Constança Capdeville’s life and personality is fully reflected in her creative work. Constança used to refer in her biographical notes as sharing her activity between creation, teaching, and performance. In this sense, for example, her teaching activity is articulated at three levels (always with creation at the heart of her activity), that is: working with composition (1), performance (2), and musicology (3) students, through a constant interrogation on music, its limits, possibilities, and its articulations with other expressions. Still regarding the teaching activity, one needs to mention her participation in diverse education reformations. In this context, and beyond the Composition, she also actively participated in the programme elaboration of other areas such as Music Education, among others.
Constança Capdeville possessed a vast cultural background. Her speed and voracity for reading, together with a very lively spirit and an incessant and restless curiosity led her to constantly questioning of the world, always in search for the essence of things, establishing unprecedented and always surprising connections (or questionings, I would say). (For more information in the relation with the phenomenology, see Sousa Dias 2012).
Jorge Matta: Constança Capdeville was a person of great intelligence, and with an enormous capacity for synthesis. At her lessons, or in personal contact, she had the ability to explain in one phrase something that a major part of people can only do in a long period of time or paraphrasing. I studied Counterpoint and Music Performance with Constança, I’ve discovered a lot by means of her pertinent observations, often dealing with aspects that I had never thought of being important (I remember, for example, the melodic analysis in terms of the arch drawing and the creation of impulses and directions, which has conditioned my path as performer). Apart from that, she was an unprejudiced person, possessing a great freedom of thought.
This intelligence, conciseness, and freedom are reflected in her works, which don’t follow the preceding currents, but her own ideas, and which in a short time express what she must express, always being very concise and efficient from a music-expression point of view. Once she told me that she wanted to create a work including the main cadences of Bach’s “St. John’s Passion”, in real time, that is, exactly in the moments when they appear in this Bach’s monumental work. Is there another work with a more perfect balance, with all the numerical and geometrical keys?
Maria João Serrão: When it comes to the way in which Constança Capdeville’s personality was reflected in her creative work, here are the composer’s own words from one of the recorded conversations, which we had at her home in Caxias: ‘The personality exists in the finished work. There are bits of me, but they shouldn’t be poured over the work as if it was psychoanalysis, but rather, yes, as my personal path. However, my concerns change throughout time, and my personality is always in the base’.
I would say that Constança was fully conscious that the genuineness of her interior was reflected in her merely musical compositions, as well as in the music-theatre and music for cinema. She built it from nothing else but the thing that she called ‘music instinct’, putting the technique in service of the unwinding of her own creativity. This process could be confirmed with the way she sometimes was surprised with the manifested expressivity, without previously orchestrating the composition process in all its prerogatives. Perhaps, due to this fact her works, independently of the genre, had the potential of surprising either the artists, her close collaborators, or the public, with the music solutions of all-encompassing theatricality, emerging from her unique intuition, as she used to say.
Through our personal acquaintance I could discover the strength of Constança’s personality, and simultaneously, the simplicity with which she presented herself. She was, on the one hand, aware of the intense work which she dedicated to artistic creation, and on the other hand, always attentive and connected with the simple acts of life. At one of our meetings, she referred the importance she gave to everyday sounds, even the ones that appeared outside her house, and how, in sometimes unexpected ways, they ended up influencing details of her compositions. I remember, with admiration, that she was equally motivated both with the silence and with the sound. And I think, more strongly than ever, that the silence became an appreciable element of her dogmatism. She herself said that: ‘the silence is a problem that needs to be solved musically. How will I be able to work with the silence having the presence of the text and the sound? The solution is to make the silence in the performance appear as if it was sound, and to make the sound take the place which is normally occupied by the silence’.
Curiously, beyond music the silence has increasingly become the object of interest of different knowledge and social-sensibility areas, including philosophy and neuroscience.
Pedro Wallenstein***: One of the most touching traits of her personality was knowing how to preserve, throughout her whole life, the genuine and pure child’s way of seeing reality. And ‘seeing’ should be understood in a broader sense, which engulfs image, movement, word, touch, sound, silence, time… To take a thing-in-itself, to isolate it from its significant or conjecture and ‘play’ with it by putting it into a diverse sequence; it was one of the most distinctive of her poetic processes that requalified the day-to-day banality into an artistic object. She was enormously fascinated with moments that in repeat become choreographed rituals once stripped of their original purpose, just like the sequence of movements of the flight attendant showing the security procedures, the weather forecaster’s gesticulation attempting to make it interesting, the para-musical act of rosining a bow, or muffling timpani’s drumheads. In “Silêncio Depois” (1990), after Beckett, a trivial, mindless act of intimacy becomes a powerful moment of a disturbing promiscuity, when a dancer and a musician, squatted ahead of each other, bite each other’s nails…
Sérgio Azevedo: I have known Constança Capdeville personally (although only up to a certain point) – she was my teacher and, occasionally, I collaborated in her performances during a short period before her death. I think that Constança’s personality, as, by the way, the one of any great artist, had to indelibly reflect itself in her art. She was an intimate person, who never raised her voice – her voice was gentle, just as she was. Having an extremely refined sensibility, being a poetic dreamer, small in size but big in soul, secure of herself and of her artistic choices, Constança lived her music, and her theatre. Her creativity was also significant in her day-to-day life. I would say that her life was also a music theatre piece. Nothing existed without a poetic element or meaning. Her house was full of art all, over the place. Her work room, with a fabulous view onto the river, was occupied by a grand piano, and all its corners had something drawing attention towards her originality and eccentricity. I recall a ‘painting’ (let’s call it this way) offered to her by an artist-friend, which was nothing more than a frame. Its centre thus was the wall and the lines of cracked paint, humidity stains, and the imperfections of the stucco. Constança constantly changed the position of this frame, thus changing what we ‘saw’ and what was obviously defined by it. Within the traditional meaning, the frame indicated that its content was art, just by the plain fact of being surrounded by it. It was, by the way, with this frame that Constança gave me a fantastic lesson on what art was or could be. Equally, her music was never entirely and only ‘Music’, but it was always something more – theatre, dance, declamation, movement, etc. For her the idea to write a string quartet, or a purely instrumental work, without anything more than the precisely written notes and rhythms, and without using extended techniques or some kind of iconoclastic ‘action’, was unthinkable. However, her vision was always intimate, loving, not provocative, much less violent, or radical, than Kagel’s or Cage’s universe could be (they were two of her great references). Her personality wasn’t moulded to violate the public, but rather to captivate it by means of the silence, the half-spoken, ethereality and poetic allusion, more than by means of shock elements. From this point of view, she was closer to other composers that she idolised: Ravel and Debussy, musicians of extreme refinement and veiled poetry. When, many years later, I visited Constança’s house, it recalled me of Ravel’s original house in Montfort l’Amaury, full of strange, curious, and rare objects, of oriental, bird-and-music-box mechanisms, and of tiny boats in strange glass bottles. Constança’s spirit hovered over there, and I had a déjà-vu from the first time when I visited her in Caxias.
· ‘To approach Constança Capdeville’s music-theatre means to penetrate a multifaceted sound-and-image universe of creative pulsations’ – writes Maria João Serrão on the pages of her book “Constança Capdeville. Between the Theatre and the Music” 9. In what way did Constança Capdeville open new paths for the relations between theatre and music? Please explain her concept of ‘music-theatre’. ·
António de Sousa Dias*: In Constança’s work, sound is the primordial and main factor. It is the centre of interest, being articulated with other elements and expressions.
By theatre-music in the context of Capdeville, I understand it as an activity that takes music as its core, articulating other artistic expressions (theatre, dance, movement, audio-visuals, etc.). From this generic definition, and even though it deals with a very broad field of creation, in her case, it can be particularized as follows: in the first place, the primacy of music that coexists with other forms of expression, the latter being able to acquire protagonism in diverse situations; in the second place the exploration of different formats arising from the concert in its audio-visual sense (a music-theatre work can be something configured between a work included in a performance and a performance in itself); in the third place an exploration of different strategies of articulation of sound and of the binomial theatricality/ theatricalization.
In the first aspect, despite a certain primacy of the music, the coexistence with other expressions privileges what I denominate as a heterogenous counterpoint. This counterpoint of differently natured layers can occur in various forms. From layers of diverse expressions that occur autonomously, as in the case of two simultaneous, but independent situations, where the scenes’ meaning results from their existence, up to synchrony situations, where an event in one of the layers, a sound, speech, or a gesture, can occur simultaneously or trigger an event in another layer.
The second aspect, the presentation format, is quite free, but temporal span can help us. In Capdeville’s work one can find: solo and chamber music making explicit some form of theatricality/ theatricalization; the so-called music-theatre works, which can be integrated in concerts or performances; and finally, there are the performances, which can be staged concerts, or scenic and musical performances. (Sousa Dias 2020).
Lastly, there’s the important element which permeates these aspects – the existence and explicit exploration of the articulation between the sound and the gesture, which can assume different forms, in an axis that I’ve classified as theatricality/ theatricalization (Sousa Dias 2020). In this axis one explores techniques and processes inherent to the sound, and where the gestures are intimately connected with the sonic result. I denominate it as the theatricality of the sound. However, what’s not excluded are the aspects where the gesture results from an interpretation or reaction to the sound, and where one of the extremes would be the caricature. (Sousa Dias 2020).
I think that Capdeville’s work contributed to the enabling of new paths.
However, the possibilities opened up did not have wide dissemination and development among us, as a result of his premature disappearance and reduced dissemination, which may have contributed to this.
Filipa Magalhães: In my opinion, with her ‘music-theatre’ Constança Capdeville sought to break the barriers, not assuming hierarchies between theatre and music.
For the composer everything was one – the music and the theatre were intimately connected. And this is also reflected in the fact of not having defined barriers when it comes to the functions of the performers on stage, that is, the actor, the musician, or the dancer. Capdeville intended to deconstruct these roles so that the performers (a word that I use today, despite the ColecViva10 members not seeing themselves in this notion) feel comfortable on stage, either playing conventional instruments in a conventional way, or acting and singing, or still in the gesture ‘producing’ the sound, etc. In her pieces the dancer or the actor would need to play music instruments (mainly percussion), the musician would need to act. I want to say that what can seem relatively easy for a musician, isn’t necessarily easy for a dancer or actor, and vice-versa. But also, the musicians, accustomed to entering the stage, greeting the public, playing (often hidden behind the score), and then greeting the public again, and going off the stage, don’t feel comfortable while acting, even apparently simple things. And this is repeatedly mentioned by the ones who worked with Capdeville. Therefore, I believe that these were the new paths which Capdeville tried to open, even in pedagogical terms. And this has been evidenced in the seminars she conducted and presented, together with the ColecViva members at the ACARTE, entitled “O teatro musical e o intérprete hoje” (“The Music Theatre and the Performer Today”) (1986-1988).
According to the composer António de Sousa Dias, Capdeville often mentioned that: ‘just as Pina Bausch did dance theatre, she did music theatre’. This phrase is, in my opinion, very enlightening with regard to Capdeville’s music-theatre.11 Her concept of music-theatre encompasses different forms of artistic expression (dance, music, theatre), combines different elements (music, sceneries, movement, text, recordings [on tape], images, props, costumes, light), and it is organized as a kind of ‘heterogenous counterpoint’ (term used by Sousa Dias to describe the structure of Capdeville’s music-theatre), constituted by elements of different natures.
Jorge Matta: Constança Capdeville likes to speak of ‘music-theatre’. It’s not about staged performances, but about music suggesting dynamic gestures, creating environments that are easily transformed into situations or scenes: a singer or an instrumentalist extending the note or phrase with a gesture; a chord that suggests light; a chamber-music-group section recreated as a dramatic scene; an instrument that becomes scenic; or inversely, movements on stage that become notes, or chords, or sonic timbres. For Constança there’s no ‘scenic obsession’, only a global creative thought, where the sound can easily move, or there are scenes with the intrinsically associated sound.
Maria João Serrão: As a genre, the music-theatre emerges from the appeal for other types of expressiveness, not only the musical ones. One of the elements admittedly used in favour of this expressiveness is the gesture. According to Constança: ‘(…) the gesture doesn’t appear only as an ornament. There is no work of mine, where the gesture emerges as a superfluous element. It always represents an intention whence the sound comes in line with the gesture’. And she gives as an example Satie’s automaton, where through the gestures the articulation of the influence areas is produced (in “Erik Satie como toda a gente”, a scenic concert with C.C. and Manuel Cintra at the Picoas Forum, 1989). And Constança still adds: ‘For me, with Erik Satie, one achieves a certain return to the austerity, a kind of purification – I have two hands, but it is necessary to know what I can do with them.’ This work has been considered as the beginning of the genre whereof she subsequently produced many other creations – the Music-Theatre.
One can’t deny the decisive impulse which various Mauricio Kagel’s works induced in a turning, progressively introducing theatrical elements into the music, including movement, dance, facial expressivity (smile, look, threat, etc.), gestures, and the importance of the word. Among the marking examples are Kagel’s works, such as “L’Atomisation” (1957-1958), “Sur Scène” (1960) and “Dressur” (1986), still unknown to the public. And, to go even a little further, we would need to mention Kurt Schwitters who transformed the poetry and the phonetics into music works based on German-language phonemes – e.g., “Ursonate”, sonata of primitive sounds which he composed along 10 years (1920-1930).
It is certain that Constança doesn’t deny the influence of the composers and performers who adopted the theatre approach of their works throughout the 20th century – the ones already mentioned, and others such as John Cage, Luciano Berio, Cathy Berberian, Erik Satie, Georges Aphergis, Francis Shwartz; as well as the Portuguese composers: Jorge Peixinho, José Lopes e Silva, Paulo Brandão, Clotilde Rosa, Alexandre Delgado, among others. Nevertheless, Constança Capdeville’s style and the versality of her Music-Theatre is manifested in the way how all the elements in her works – music, scenic movements, interpretative expressions, musicians’ and performers’ interaction, poetry excerpts, and lighting – are representative of an uncommon freedom.
Mónica Chambel: Without any doubt, until today Constança Capdeville is the pioneer and major music-theatre reference in Portugal. The composer preferred this term for her works because she considered that musical theatre had evolved beyond music-theatre. At the time it was connoted with the theatre we associate with Broadway, and certain forms of theatre of the absurd.
Her works demonstrate a deliberate focus on the artistic innovation, both at the performance level and at the content level. Additionally, timbre research and the integration of movement were two of the aspects that most attracted her. Nonetheless, these weren’t the unique components which Capdeville explored. The composer was fascinated by globality within the creation, and she tried to break the traditional barriers between theatre, performative arts, music, and technology. Before they’d been treated independently, but her approach integrated the different forms of expression, giving them the same aesthetic and artistic value.
The music-theatre works stand out for the decomposition of the different expression formats, and for the interpenetration of the resulting components (namely, through the exploration of the word, sound, light, images, projections, movement, and gesture), the music being the conductor of the work. All the elements were developed autonomously and included in full or in part, without affecting their symbiosis.
This interpenetration of movement, theatre, and music, allowed for the exploration of new combinations between the different forms of expression, and for the creation of the whole new field of artistic possibilities, which Capdeville presented to us so well. For António de Sousa Dias, this exploration brought Capdeville closer to the work of Pina Bausch and her theatre-dance. For Bausch, dance was the point of departure towards other forms of expression, and for Capdeville it was the music.
However, Capdeville wasn’t limited to theatricalizing the sound. The sound (and all its qualities) was the core element, the one that brought the gesture, and the composer considered that one could not isolate the movement of the musician from what they were performing. Both Olga Prats and João Paulo Santos have mentioned this aspect in their personal interviews; the gesture, containing a contact between the body and the produced sound, was one of the determining elements to be worked with the composer. Although it is not described in the score, it’s one of the essential components to any of Capdeville’s performances.
The music-theatre works are also clearly distinguishable from scenic productions centered in the dramatic paradigm, and Capdeville made this distinction. For example, “Don’t Juan” (1985) was defined by the composer as an ‘anti-opera’. The theatrical actions are created by the music making, the music is influenced by the simultaneous elements, and the performers’ actions do not refer to fictional plots. The focus is thus given not to the drama but to the performance. The scenic spaces are diversified in order to widen and explore the sonic spatialisation, including off-stage spaces and structures which extend the scenic space beyond the stage limits. It is also possible to observe a demolition of the continuum, a demolition of the work’s time and action into individual numbers, pointing to another concern of the composer, the deconstruction of time.
Her works also share a creative perspective directed towards the ‘collage’ of materials, similarly to Luciano Berio, and this distinguishes them from other productions focused on dramatic aspects. Regularly permeated by quotations from artists of her choice (painters, writers, or composers), a great part of her works shares her own quotations (it is possible to find the same autograph material in different works). This issue is apparent even in the elaboration of the electronics since, and according to Ana Filipa Magalhães, she used a studio technique consisting of ‘cutting’ and ‘splicing’ the tape, which allowed her to mix the diverse sonic sources during the editing process.
Constança Capdeville was profoundly innovative, having marked the Portuguese experimentalism and a whole generation.
Pedro Wallenstein***: If I am not mistaken, Peter Brook wrote: ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all is for an act of theatre to be engaged’.
In the standard music hall, the convention, the ritual (again this word), says that the communication channel that reaches the spectator should rest essentially at the hearing level, reducing to a minimum the interference, the ‘distraction’ caused by other senses. It is a reasonable tradition considering that the musician mainly focuses on the interpretation of the musical discourse and technical aspects of the performance. Constança was puzzled by the emptiness of this empty space, the lightness with which the musicians – especially the performer to whom the instrument is frequently an additional shield to the invisible barrier, the fishbowl glass that steps between the watcher and the watched – dissociate themselves from the ‘bare stage’ that Brooks speaks about. Constança reacts to this turmoil with an appeal to the total conscience of the concrete body inhabiting the stage, thus giving new content and purpose to the mere technical gesture. In “Amen para uma Ausência” (1987), an elegiac piece for solo double bass, Constança takes fortuitous and accidental occurrences, which the performer rarely realizes, such as the breathing sound or the nasal and involuntary humming of the melodic line and introduces them graphically in the score as an expressive element, as a punctuation of the musical discourse. Moreover, at the heart of the piece, she inverts and subverts the predictability of the spectator’s uneventful eye by asking the performer to move the instrument from side to side, but not the arm that holds the bow (which is, by the way, a moment impossible to reproduce phonographically, since the musical effect… is essentially visual).
· Try to define ‘multidisciplinarity’ in Constança Capdeville’s work. ·
António de Sousa Dias*: In the case of Constança Capdeville I would define ‘multidisciplinarity’ as a complex assembly of different artistic expressions (theatre, dance, cinema, etc.) articulated by a central expression, in this case the music. Here the different components – expressive, technological, etc. – establish connections with different grades of intensity, and whose resulting surface can be understood as a heterogenous counterpoint, as I defined above.
Jorge Matta: In the case of Constança Capdeville, ‘multidisciplinarity’ isn’t and objective but a natural attitude. She frequently worked with mixed chamber music groups, which included musicians, mimes, dancers, … however none of them was obliged to act according to their speciality: the pianist becomes theatrical while performing, the singer acts scenically, the dancer or the mime become ‘sonic’, inhabiting, or furnishing the sound of a given moment. The space itself, together with its acoustics, condition the work, amplifying it into an extensive resonance, or closing it in a chamber environment (for example, in “Libera Me” [1979], according to the space where the work is executed, the sounds and durations are amplified or retracted).
Maria João Serrão: I would like to begin this theme with Constança’s own short quotation. She said: ‘In the 1960’s the music-theatre was an evolution moment turned towards the instrumental side, and which subsequently was notably developed. It’s a theatre of images as it corresponds to what each creator wants and sees. Due to the interpretation of the movement, the theatre, and the music, the expressive situations have become more and more complex’.
Beyond what has already been mentioned, the following hints seem to me important:
a) The importance of allusions to fragments of prose, poetry, and philosophically inspired texts, or of a simple everyday occurrence, which emerged in certain, apparently unusual passages. After a more attentive analysis and through the explanations given by Constança to her performers in the moment of realisation, one understands their profound sense for what the composer wanted to communicate. Just as the other ones, also this factor has obviously a decisive importance in the context and in the development of the other interpretative elements and of the music.
b) In the same way one should emphasise the movements of every performer and the sometimes-surprising shifts during the representation, what obviously raises curiosity to understand the reasons for such physical actions – the why, here-and-now, what it adds or introduces for a new sense, possibly an unexpected resolution of the plot. Important examples can be found throughout the anti-opera/ music-theatre “Don’t Juan” (1985), such as the one in the climax, in the final. There, the protagonist, who never appeared before, disappears very quickly leaving a theatre box as a figure, being seen only in the distance as the shadow of the fluttering cloak, and leaving the doubt in the air: did or didn’t Don Juan exist after all?
c) When it comes to the particular use of the Voice, I would like to transcribe some notes provided by Constança herself: ‘“Mise-en-requiem” (1979), four musicians; not for singers, but the voice is very important. They leave the music stands and move forward. One seems to be playing, but the sound comes from the other one. One seems to be singing moving the lips, but the vocal sound comes from the other soloist. The most comic, and amusing work!’
I also asked Constança:
‘What does the Voice element means to you’?
‘What I look for is a different vocal sonic object.’
‘Do you work the voice?’
‘I do – warming up, positioning. I try out the timbral variations.’
‘How did you initiate Manuel Cintra’s voice, his presence as a performer? And Luís Madureira’s? I believe that in these two performers you looked for a higher tessitura, sometimes reaching the falsetto. What does this requisition mean to you?’
‘What I want is a different vocal sonic object, a phantasmagoric ambience, above all. So, I asked Manuel for a falsetto.’
‘And what is a vocal orchestra for you?’
‘I don’t know. I have never thought of it, but what occurs to me is the taste that I have in doing, and then exploring: if I could grab one of Shakespeare’s characters, for example, and to hear it saying all the texts at the same time; or if I could hear the texts of all the characters simultaneously, with the voices’ timbres overlapping; for me this would be a vocal orchestra. The vocal expressivity is the most important. Then I try to discover the technical means to achieve this realisation, that is, the technical means only interest me as a manner of getting the expressive ones (…)’12
Quoting Georges Aperghis regarding the music-theatre score: ‘it assures a certain dramaturgy of the unspeakable’. I would say the same regarding the multidisciplinary work by Constança Capdeville. And that is also why I appreciate it so much.
Mónica Chambel: Capdeville approached the ‘performance’ concept with a vision of her own. The composer thought that music, theatre, and dance should be presented to the public in a different way, having reached ‘the moment of all of them working towards the same thing’.13 Her works are multifaceted and show a deliberate focus on artistic innovation.
As I mentioned above, Capdeville found references and inspiration beyond the musical framework. Her music-theatre integrates a variety of proposals for internal relations established between music and literary and artistic expressions, such as poetry, cinema, philosophy, and plastic arts. By decomposing and interpenetrating these different expression formats, the composer found and explored a whole new field of artistic possibilities. However, I emphasise that all the elements present in her works intervene on an equal level. All of them have the same importance and are articulated and integrated without affecting their symbiosis.
Capdeville also considered that the extramusical elements (such as light, tape recordings, props, projections, theatrical elements) had the same value as the traditional music elements. She explored, decomposed, and merged them during the creative process. The means (and materials) resulting from this process could be used in the works to define spaces in the performance hall, to establish environments, or to create emotional states. For example, the games of lights assume particular importance in her works, functioning as one of the essential elements of the performance and to its comprehension. Capdeville explored the light design to create stage environments, or to highlight images used as quotations or memories. Additionally, objects and instruments also intervene directly in the action, and they can be used as characters or scenography elements. In “Don’t Juan” (1985) it is possible to find the symbolism given to inanimate objects (e.g., the piano represents a phallic object, and the ladder the rock of Sisyphus).
The use of such diverse elements and materials meant that Cpadeville’s works weren’t only presented in the form of a score with conventional or figurative notation. Rather, the composer adopted non-standard models of register (such as the scripts and screenplays – reference points for the music-theatre works). This multidiciplinarity – patent in the fusion between different forms of expression, in the valorisation of the gestural aspect, in the exploration of sound and space, in the games of lights, and in the scenographic elements – was polarised in the music and promoted the creation of an avant-garde language with very specific characteristics. Thus, when analysing Capdeville’s work, it is not possible to describe an element without referring to its relation with the other ones. All of them create the performance. Although they have an independent development and an autonomous discourse, the elements intertwine, becoming inseparable in the global perception of the work. The multiple ways in which she incorporated the various disciplines in the artistic creation constitute a very particular case in Portugal, and for Ana Pires, Capdeville managed to concretise the idea of performance as ‘a total work of art’.
Pedro Wallenstein***: Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, codisciplinarity… at a first glance Constança’s suggestion for the ‘theatre-music’ may seem to be the inside-out of a ‘cinematographic soundtrack’ (music supports, enriches, and highlights the dramatic narrative), to put the music discourse in the centre and to build on it a ‘visual track’ or ‘any other track’. Nonetheless, the reality of her process was much more diverse and complex. In a first meeting for a new project, Constança would come up with a script (many times an embryonic and unfinished one) and showed us a range of ‘decoys’, imagination catalysts – a picture, a score passage, a newspaper article, a photograph, a tree branch, an advertisement… things that, directly or indirectly, would evoke memories, affections, associations along with the script’s ‘narrative’ and the truth of each one of us. And that truth that belonged to the musician, actor, dancer, singer, light technician, and plastic artist, would mingle by layers into the process of the original script until been crowned by our favourite motto «…Now, that works for me».
· Please chose and shortly describe: 1) Constança Capdeville’s works that in your opinion are most relevant in the composer’s path; 2) Constança Capdeville’s works that are the most important for you. Explain your choices. ·
António de Sousa Dias*: In the case of three works that I think are important in Capdeville's career, I would point out “Diferenças sobre um intervalo” (1969), “Don’t Juan” (1985), and “Take 91” (1991). There are other works, of course, but the choice of these works is due to the following reasons: “Diferenças sobre um intervalo” (1969) is his first major work for orchestra, and whose preparatory and conceptual work allowed a reflection on compositional aspects (a reconsideration of musical techniques and materials that would mark his subsequent path); the anti-opera “Don’t Juan” (1985) represents a moment of condensation of her work in connection with theatre-music, in the establishment of working methods and techniques, from conception to the stage, which would mark her subsequent production; “Take 91” (1991) marks the high point of her work in theatre-music: ColecViva's work over the course of six years - in addition to other projects - presents not only a maturity both as a group and as a vehicle for the exploration of what I would call ‘Constança’s Universe’, through the free exploration of authors, references, themes that were dear to her.
From a personal point of view, there are three very important works for me, with a direct and evident impact in my path. These works are: the music for “Pílades” by Pier Paolo Pasolini with staging by Mário Feliciano (1985), “Libera Me” (concert version, 1979), and “Tibidabo 89 – Museu de Autómatos” (1989).
This choice has the following reasons:
1) Music for “Pílades” by Pier Paolo Pasolini with staging by Mário Feliciano (1985). It was one of the first works in which I collaborated with CC. The percussion movement, found for example in “Rosa de Areia”, or in works such as “Amen para uma Ausência”, was worked during the rehearsals in the summer 1985. The need to work the presence on stage (the piece lasted around four hours and a half), the collaborative work with the flute and the piano (Olga Prats), were determining to cement our relation and to deepen work methods.
2) “Libera Me” (concert version, 1979) – my participation in the recordings of this work in 1986, either as a percussionist or as Constança’s assistant, was also a determining experience. Later, Constança’s asked me to write the liner notes for the CD including this work, which allowed me to enter a little more into her universe. This provided an exchange between us and in particular for me to get to know more deeply from the ‘outside’, some of her references and their interrelationships.
3) “Tibidabo 89 – Museu de Autómatos” (1989). For me this work is particularly important, for several reasons. The first one is that I closely accompanied its conception, in a very special moment, appreciating the enthusiasm and importance which CC gave to this work. Then, because the work wasn’t immediately performed – it was premiered only in 2012, in the context of a fascinatingly complex reconstruction, almost a police enquiry, I would say (see, Sousa Dias 2012). Finally, I think that this piece reflects some recurrent themes in CC’s work, such as the automaton-performer dialectic and tension, or the articulation of scenes and their relationship with the music substance. I would say that it is an important missing link to understand CC’s thought.
Filipa Magalhães: When it comes to this question, I’m only be able to refer the works that I had the opportunity to study in the context of my doctoral thesis, and which were my case studies, that is: “Mise-en-Requiem” (1979), “Cerromaior” (1980), “Molly Bloom” (1981), “Double” (1982), and “FE...DE...RI...CO...” (1987). Despite having been written with different purposes, these works have similarities within the creative process. In “Cerromaior” the composer wrote music for the film, and in “Molly Bloom” she composed musical interventions for the theatre piece. The other works have been composed in the context of the music-theatre. Despite comprehending a temporal space of almost a decade, all of them have common contact points. These points result from the fact that all the works include audio recordings, scripts, and screenplays, and that they are performances or works with image (here one can suppose that the performance on stage makes part of the ‘image’ – visual elements in a performative sense). These works also have common musical specificities, such as: the prepared piano (live and recorded); ways of using percussion instruments and other artefacts as sound sources; or the use of tape as a ‘character/ musician’. Additionally, all the works are based on one or various texts. In the case of the music-theatre pieces there’s an almost constant ambiguity among the musicians, actors, and dancers. Another common element is also the reutilisation of sonic materials (for example, the recording of a train sound).
Nonetheless there are also various aspects that are specific to each of the works, for example…
· In “Mise-en-Requiem” Constança Capdeville makes reference to past music works (e.g., Mozart’s “Requiem”, or Monteverdi’s “Orfeo”); there’s a general score; there’s the use of reservoirs (as well as of notes concerning their use); in the score there are notes with the symbol names, created to be used specifically in the performance of this work; there’s also the recording script.
· In “Cerromaior” the music works as a leitmotif accompanying the main characters, and it creates effects referring to death, or other moments; neither the sound design, nor the choice of other music works reproduced in the film, are the composer’s responsibility.
· In “Molly Bloom” she creates sonic effects (e.g., the urine sound, and others); this theatre piece doesn’t have live sound, except for the monologue performed by Graça Lobo (voice); there’s a tape with unedited, raw material; there’s also the text narrated by Ruy de Carvalho (used for the tape recording).
· “Double” leads to exhaustion the use of the tape (actually, two tapes simultaneously), regarded as an ‘intervening character’; due to its features the work depends even more on the tape (doubling the performers, thus the title “Double”), and there’s a straight interaction of the performers with their double (reproduced by the tapes and by a mirror, a visual component); there’s a silent choir (a scenic element sonorised by the tape), and still during the performance there’s a chess game (performed by Jorge Peixinho and João Heitor) on the top of the timpani, yet without producing any sound; there’s a general score, scripts and text excerpts, or other complementary information.
· “FE…DE…RI…CO…” uses ‘provocative’ elements such as the recording of an excerpt from a theatre piece “Bodas de Sangue” with the (very tragical) voice of Lola Membrives, but also of other Lorca’s theatre pieces; it quotes music works (popular melodies, lullabies) by Lorca, and other authors; the texts are essentially of Lorca’s authorship; there’s no general score, but only scripts and screenplays, and other documents with the description of the scenes; there’s a lot of complementary documentation; there are slides (with Lorca’s drawings), objects (balloons and other ones composing the scenery, with the possibility, or not, to produce sound), instruments in form of a toy (tin frogs) producing sounds, a cuckoo clock; there are various scores of the music performed during this music-theatre piece (e.g., polka and ragtime).
Although each of these works can present individual features, there’s a transversality to them defining well Constança Capdeville’s hallmark, an unmistakable trait, which makes her so unique.14
João Paulo Santos**: I was a very curious teenager (17 years-old…) and I quickly found myself hanging out with the group surrounding Constança and I can say that I was almost instantly ‘adopted’ by her. After 1978 I took part in all of the projects imagined by her. Different “Vamos Satiear” (1979-1985), the choreographed version of “Libera Me” (1977-1979), the premiere of “Double” (1982) and several performances at the Festival dos Capuchos – “En Rouge et Noir” (1981), “Vamos Satiear… com Erik Satie”, “Uma hora com Igor Stravinsky” (1980).
The premiere of “Double” was somewhat troubled by the technical conditions (stage, light, sound) that the work demanded. On the other hand, “Libera Me” was a powerful experience. I excitedly heard the premiere, and for me it was a great opportunity to collaborate in the choreographed version. Even though the instruments were in the orchestra pit, the musicians’ posture was, obviously, controlled with precision by CC. It was clear that we had to be ‘different’, as theatrical as the dancers on stage!
After her death, for several times, I directed with the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group the mythical “Momento I” (1970-1971). I still feel the innovative power of the work, of the demanded posture, of the commitment that every CC’s work requires.
Jorge Matta: “Libera Me” (1979) was initially created for ballet (for the Gulbenkian Ballet with the choreography by Vasco Wellenkamp), in a totally recorded version. Following the performances’ success Constança Capdeville recreated the work to be performed live. The premiere of this new version took place in 1979, in the same concert hall with the Gulbenkian Ballet and Choir. The text of “Libera Me” makes part of the funeral Catholic rite, however Constança doesn’t use it literally, but only as a compositional stimulus, recreating the idea of liberation. The work makes use of an aleatoric approach (in this case it doesn’t mean the absence of the creator’s choice, but rather it lets the performer decide certain parameters, following the defined rues). The work uses elements of collages and excerpts of the composer’s previous works. In 1981 she explained in an interview given to Diário de Notícias: ‘The collages aren’t already-existing elements, and I haven’t used them as quotations. I took the music material as if it was still to be elaborated. As for the work’s essence – by means of a contradictory material, and taking upon these elements, the aim is to achieve a unification. I used a perfectly opposite music material: Tibetan chant, Gregorian chant, etc. All this was worked to achieve a unification. […]’. “Libera Me” is the birth of something, the liberation through the acceptation of our own limitations. And, as it happens with all my works, it also ends with a question mark. The public needs to have the notion of a whole, but it remains with them suspended until the next work.’
Mónica Chambel: 1) For me, the three most relevant works in Constança Capdeville’s career are: “Diferenças sobre um intervalo” (1969), “Momento I” (1970-1971) and “Don’t Juan” (1985).
The work “Diferenças sobre um intervalo” (1969), for orchestra, was commissioned by Maria Madelena de Azeredo for the Music Service at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. This commission significantly stimulated/ boosted Capdeville’s career as a composer, and the work already has a very particular language.
The piece “Momento I” (1970-1971), for voice, flute, percussion, and violin, was premiered by the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group. In the interview conducted by Miguel Azguime, the composer says that “Momento I” was a turning point in her career, as it establishes a rupture with the previous works. This was the Opus 1. From this work onwards, time and the timbre research become two central elements for Capdeville, elements that she will systematically explore in the following works.
Don’t’ Juan” (1985) was commissioned by the State Secretary for Culture, and it was presented by the recently created ColecViva ensemble. The composer defined it as an ‘anti-opera’ for voice, piano, double bass, percussion, tape, mime, dancer, and lights. It is one of Capdeville’s most paradigmatic music-theatre works. It presents a sequence of 11 tableaux, without dramatic action, focused on the presentation of various characters.
2) The works that marked me the most are, undoubtedly: “Libera Me” (1979), “Double” (1982) and “Don’t Juan” (1985).
“Libera Me” (1979), in the concert version, was the work that introduced me to Constança Capdeville, and therefore it has a special meaning. It was with this work that I discovered Capdeville’s sonic and creative universe. It has left me fascinated that I’ve dedicated my academic activity to the study of her works.
“Double” (1982) and “Don’t Juan” (1985) were Capdeville’s first pieces on which I worked. Together with the Xperimus Ensemble we recreated the works for my dissertation, and the process allowed me to look at them from a different perspective. To understand how the materials interconnect, the amount of references present, and the way how all the materials fit together in the construction of the puzzle these works are, was a hard, yet fascinating work.
“Double” (1982) for voice, piano, violoncello, two percussionists (chess players), mute choir, tape, and lights, was also commissioned by the Music Service of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The work is constructed upon different types of dualities, doubles, and opposing games. For the composer there were two major lines of force to be explored: the scenic-musical, and the visual-sonic doubles, together with the convergence of various interpretations of the time-element.
“Don’t Juan” (1985), as described above, was the work that introduced the ColecViva. In it, music and diverse extramusical elements trigger actions, and it is not possible to describe one element without referring its relationship with the other ones.
Sérgio Azevedo: I think that the pieces from the short piano cycle “Visions d’Enfant” (1958-1959), joined by some other works from the same period, such as the widely performed and well-known “Caixinha de Música” (1950-1952), are very relevant since they come from Constança’s youth (having been written at the age of 15-17?). They reveal a precocious and original talent, already turned towards the Music Theatre (“Maman, j’ai vu dans la Lune” uses a small poetic text attached to the score, which can, but mustn’t be read by the pianist), and towards the at-the-time-rare influences of Satie, Mompou, and Stravinsky.
Then there’s the “Sonata for Trombone and Piano” (1963), a work that came to be published. It’s also very relevant in the initial phase, as it corresponds in a certain way to a kind of ‘end-of-studies piece’. In the context of Stravinsky’s and Hindemith’s astringent neoclassicism, Constança showed her perfect mastery of the traditional ‘métier’, and what’s more, within a rare and difficult format such as this one.
Finally, and here I think that I won’t be isolated in my judgment, “Libera Me” (1979). Because of the used means, formal ambition, complexity, and richness of references, as well as because of the continued success since its premiere (it’s one of Constança’s few works which has been performed and recorded with some regularity), the score of “Libera Me” seems to reveal the most who Constança was, what she admired, and what was her aesthetic credo. This work joins elements of a concert piece/ sacred music/ music theatre/ rigour and improvisation, etc.
When it comes to my personal taste… By no means do I want to diminish the above-mentioned pieces or intend that the ones chosen now are the composer’s most relevant… Apart from “Libera Me”, which has meant the most to me, I have a special affection towards the piece for speaker and piano “La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France” (1989) to the text by Blaise Cendrars. The piece’s sparse and allusive music, based on fragments of different origin, wonderfully illustrates Cendrars’ modernist text. Another small masterpiece is for me the Christmas music for children “O Natal do Anjinho Dorminhoco” (1964), which, being a work from the initial phase, has a great tenderness, revealing Constança as she always was: an intimate composer, connected with children imagination, which was also the one of many other artists who she admired and with whom she shared, by the way, geographic and cultural ties, such as Miró or Mompou.
· ‘Constança Capdeville got under my skin, above all when it comes to the interpretation, performance on stage and the physical level of music. She’s cleaned my ears from prejudice. While performing, normally the pianist barely looks at the audience, being turned to them with the profile, and then going away. Constança gave me a theatrical dimension, this genuineness of being on stage, talking to people, explaining things, and being at ease’ – said the pianist Olga Prats 15. Did Constança Capdeville’s bet on the new and original ways of communicating contemporary music, contribute to her approximation to the public? ·
António de Sousa Dias*: Yes. CC explored different ways of mediation with the public in terms of proposals. She conceived performances, realised workshops, TV programmes, conferences, etc.
It’s worth noting that at the time CC’s performances had quite an audience. For example, the performance “The Cage” (1987) originated in altercations at the venue’s entrance door, as there weren’t sufficient places for the whole interested audience.
However, this was achieved, in my opinion, through a strategy based on two axes: an axis focused on rethinking the relationship between the performer and the repertoire, changing the functions of their performative attitude (the phenomenological side); and a second axis based on the revision of the relationship between the repertoire and the audience through a critical attitude towards the concert-event.
Filipa Magalhães: In the context of my PhD research, which has culminated with the thesis entitled “«A música já não pode viver sozinha»: da interação rumo à identidade na obra de Constança Capdeville” (“‘The Music Can No Longer Live Alone’: From the Interaction Towards the Identity in the Work of Constança Capdeville”), I have collected a lot of testimonies by the ColecViva members, and by other people who have worked closely with Constança Capdeville.
Many of them mentioned her way of communicating with the public, and, according to the most, Capdeville’s performances have always provoked a surprise effect in the public. Sousa Dias said that there had been great attendance at these performances and that there even had been misunderstandings among the public, since all the people had wanted to attend them but hadn’t managed. I won’t forget Alejandro Erlich-Oliva’s words who told me about an episode in “Don’t Juan” (1985), the first work presented by the ColecViva. This work begins with a piano tuner who enters the stage to tune the piano, looking very serious. He tunes the piano, leaves, and right after João Natividade, the dancer, literally comes out from the inside of the piano. According to Erlich-Oliva, the public becomes awestruck with this scene.16 In some of her works Constança Capdeville was inspired by Buster Keaton’s films. In the works “FE…DE…RI…CO…” (1987) or “Silêncio Depois” (1990), there’s a sequence which the composer designates as ‘Buster Keaton’. In “FE…DE…RI…CO…” the dancer enters through the audience door and runs to the stage as if he was running away from thieves. Obviously, the audience becomes surprised, since at the time it wasn’t common for a music performance to present these kinds of scenes. Let’s not forget that before the 1970s/ 1980s a major part of the presented repertoire was canonical, so the public wasn’t used to them! Thus, I believe that by means of her music-theatre Capdeville tried to get the public closer to her works, so that it could feel as their integral part.
Sérgio Azevedo: I don’t’ think that it worked for the ‘public in general’. This term makes me recall the public that goes to Gulbenkian, to listen to the traditional concert season. It reminds me of the people vulgarly called ‘music lovers’, who are familiar with Puccini’s arias, and Beethoven’s symphonies, and who normally go to the traditional concerts. I believe that these ones haven’t got closer to contemporary music because of Constança. The contemporary music public, or the avant-garde music public, or however one wishes to call it, has always been sparse, particularly in Portugal. The public who went to Constança’s performances, often in small venues such as the ACARTE, was a mix of theatre, dance, music, and other-arts people, very distant from the public who was going to the operas at the São Carlos National Theatre, or the great canonical works at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Constança’s public – the music one, or the one going to concerts because of the music – was the same as in the case of Jorge Peixinho, Álvaro Salazar, Cândido Lima, etc., that is, other composers, composition students, a dozen of curious people and friends. It was possible that one or another media-covered and well-advertised concert or performance, at a lager hall, could have had another kind of public, or even the members of this ‘general one’. But these occasions were rare, and most of them were related to theatrical and not-as-much-music events (as the lot of stage music that Constança wrote). Now, whether within this limited public people became closer to Constança than, for example to Peixinho or Álvaro… then possibly yes, since Constança’s performances were accessible, and not pedantic at all. They were full of humour and craziness, and the music, as I already mentioned, in most cases wasn’t even ‘experimental’ – it was Satie or Kurt Weil and other, even popular names from the history of music, or at least if not popular possessing and ‘accessible’ writing, such as the mentioned Satie.
· In the Interview given to the MIC.PT in May 2005 the composer Virgílio Melo said: ‘Constança Capdeville was one of those almost-a-little-Zen-like phenomena… I haven’t learnt anything with her, but she knew how to open what each person had inside – in this case the not learning has been positive. In this sense she was an extraordinary person’ 17. What was Constança Capdeville’s approach as a pedagogue and what was her importance and contribution regarding the creation of new generations of composers in Portugal? ·
António de Sousa Dias*: Her importance can be mainly verified in the preparation of a change of mentalities and paradigms related with the form how music itself is treated.
Constança Capdeville didn’t teach a great number of composers. In any case she participated in the education of many who were formed between the mid 1980s and 1990. Her lesson style certainly influenced her students in some way. Let’s not forget that she also taught performers, and musicologists, among others, having affected diverse music professions, whence I think that her truly indelible mark is more present than we think.
Virgílio Melo’s affirmation lets us discover one of Capdeville’s teaching marks. Constança followed a method whose fundaments can be found in “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by Jacques Rancière, where we are presented with Joseph Jacotot’s method. This method allows for the possibility of a master not to know what the disciple needs to know. Sometimes there’s a tendency to confuse this method with the maieutic one, but there is a fundamental difference residing in the absence of the exercised power (the master is on the same level as his disciple) – the master doesn’t order, or conduct, but helps the disciples to confirm if they are achieving what is proposed.
In the case of Constança we were being invited to a permanent questioning of the proposed music gestures and this, even in the cases of studying previous systems (for example the tonal harmony), enabled us to understand the reasons for certain ‘rules’, and the motives allowing for their suspension.
Even more so, this method assumes the rule that the freedom is not something to achieve, but rather a datum, and that intelligences are equal. This attitude poses various problems, above all in a context where what’s required is a rapidity of results, of assimilating pre-arranged methods, up to an institutional level where the education system is strictly hierarchical. And this is interesting and rather surprising in the case of Constança, and in a certain way in the case of some composers from her generation. We were treated as equals, in the sense that we were listened to in an egalitarian and never condescending way.
Filipa Magalhães: Despite having left an indelible mark on many people, with regard to her music aesthetics and way of creating, and when it comes to the teachings and affective relations, Constança Capdeville has remained an exceptional figure within the Portuguese contemporary music culture. As composer she doesn’t have either predecessors or successors, and, despite her influence on many people connected with music creation, no one has actually continued her work. However, it’s important to emphasise that composers such as António de Sousa Dias, Carlos Alberto Augusto, or Miguel Azguime, have absorbed some of Capdeville’s principles either when it come to the presence on stage, or regarding her opening in the use of the sound and of the music cannons, in the search for a major freedom on stage within an iconoclastic sense. Nowadays, when one listens to her music, one understands that it is not dated. The music thought, and the performative practice are up to date. The only outdated aspect concerns the technological means, although one should say, in defence, that it was the technology used in that time and that, due to the very fast technological development, it has become obsolete, creating problems both when it comes to the preservation of the works, as well as with regard to the musicological study.18
However, and despite the difficulties regarding the recovery of Constança Capdeville’s music-theatre, I would like to emphasise the increasing interest and curiosity of the students to get familiar with the composer’s works, to later include them in their curricular programmes. Some believe that ‘Constança Capdeville’s works can improve the student’s musical capacities’, and that ‘some of the composer’s music-theatre pieces and moments could work well in the music students’ development, given their sensorial nature, and the association of the words with the music’ (Jaime Casal).19
João Paulo Santos**: I was never her student, but I think she played an important role in my development. She knew how to open the eyes of those that were close to her, to the problems that weren’t part of the music teaching universe (are they nowadays?). In my case, above all, she changed the way I approached being on the stage, the way of organising a concert. She brought my attention to the theatrical dimension required by in any appearance on the stage. Indeed, that was the role she played in a generation of musicians who socialised with her.
Sérgio Azevedo: I’m sorry if the referred composer hasn’t learnt anything with Constança. It’s probably his loss, and not hers, as I have learnt a lot with her (and not only about music, as I mentioned in the other answer). By the way, Constança’s approach was extremely captivating and challenging. For example, when she was listening to a piece that I took to the lesson, and that I played on the piano (at the time, during the first year at the Music School of Lisbon, I wrote more for piano as it was easier to control the results), she didn’t tell me immediately what was less good, but she made me think about it. For example, she would say: ‘I think that the piece’s final doesn’t work’; or: ‘There’s something in the piece that doesn’t convince me. Think about it and try to understand it’. So, I went home, and thought it through. On the following lesson I discussed with her the possible problem, and occasionally I took an alternative idea. It was in this discussion that I confronted her, and where the great part of the learning laid, as she refused to give me recipes and solutions. It was a great form of respect since it meant that Constança treated me (a mere student without any experience) as a real composer. It was up to her to help me to understand the problems and their origin, and to make me find a solution which was then discussed. And then, yes, while more objectively concretising her ideas on the type of problem and its solutions, Constança explained to me the reasons of her objections, or even of her praises. She wasn’t short on praise when she understood that I had reached not only the “illumination”, so to speak, concerning what was wrong with the piece, but also that, in certain cases, I had found a good solution. Now, if the student didn’t have great ideas or artistic capacity, then obviously Constança couldn’t do much. But this happens with all the teachers. Generally, not the ones who want but the ones who can, become composers or artists. A teacher who points out the problems and gives right away the solutions, actually doesn’t teach much, being limited to substituting the students, writing and thinking for them. Even though the imitation of the process is something that here and there the teacher can use, this method can’t turn into something daily and habitual. To make the student think, and resolve the emerging problems, complementing it with examples by the masters, auditions of frequently, surprisingly original works (we used to listen to different music, from Kurt Weil to Xenakis), was for me very important. From this point of view, either Fernando Lopes-Graça or Constança, were for me the examples, since, more than teachers, they were above all masters. Unfortunately, when the new generations of composer emerged (including my generation), Constança was already ill. This illness, joined with her natural fragility (although with lots of internal strength), diminished her impact in the teaching when it comes to the formation of new composers. I think that she hasn’t left many disciples, and from this point of view António de Sousa Dias was and still is her closest student, probably followed by me, given that I still worked with her on the music theatre performances, and I got to know her up to a certain point, within the professional intimacy. Then of course she was teacher at the Music School of Lisbon (ESML) of other colleagues, such as Carlos Caires or Eurico Carrapatoso, distinguished composers, but who probably never had that personal and professional proximity, which António had with her, and which I managed to have a little. This relation was cut short by her premature death, when there was still so much she could give.
· Do you agree with the affirmation that Constança Capdeville was a great advocate within the Portuguese music sector? Please explain your answer. ·
António de Sousa Dias*: Yes. Her importance for the music sector can be verified in the three strands dividing her activity: creation, performance, and teaching. Apart from this, Constança had a strong institutional sense insofar as she always worked with institutions (the schools – Santa Cecília Academy, Conservatory, Music Science, ESML; and other ones – JMP, APEM, FCG-ACARTE, RTP, etc.). (In this respect see: Serrão 2006, pp. 17-20; Serrão 2020; and Magalhães 2020).
Thus, beyond the creation, it is through the interpretation of less known works and authors that she contributes to the musical environment: Satie, Cage, among others are divulged by Constança through concerts, television programs, etc.
Perhaps in a less evident way, she also contributed for a major opening of the music sector: through the participation in music reformations, elaborating education programmes, etc., where what’s noteworthy is the inclusion of music material coming directly from the works, what at the time wasn’t usual in Portugal; the training of musicians with impact in the musical scene, as for example Rui Vieira Nery, João Paulo Santos, Luís Madureira, among others and, also very important, the seminars he organised on improvisation and creativity, where I would highlight the seminars held by ColecViva at ACARTE under the theme “O teatro musical e o intérprete hoje” (“The Music Theatre and the Performer Today”) between 1986 and 1988.
Within this opening towards other music areas, such as musicology, Constança also influenced the sector given the participation, until her death, in the Music Science Department. There she was in charge of the disciplines related with 20th -century music. Her openness to the 20th-century currents and the will to be permanently informed also had the impact in the training of students who, at the time, didn’t have easy access to music materials such as scores and recordings. And Constança made them available.
Mónica Chambel: Without any doubt Constança Capdeville was, without any doubt, a great driving force within the Portuguese music sector. As a pedagogue and composer, she has marked the Portuguese artistic panorama and the following generations of composers and performers. Her creativity, erudition, empathy, and presence are regularly referred by colleagues and students, on whom Capdeville has left a profound mark, both at an artistic and personal level.
Her music-theatre works, visionary in nature, today fit in the development of multimedia and in the multiple forms of incorporation of various disciplines in artistic creation. This visionary character is highlighted by António de Sousa Dias, who refers that the exploration of then somewhat excessive or provocatory territories proves the timelessness and the enlightened spirit of Capdeville’s proposals. And this exploration and creativity was shared with her students. In the different institutions where she worked, one can find innumerable testimonies from students who had contact with the composer, learnt with her and who mention the mark that she left on them. Emanuel Frazão remembers that Capdeville challenged them to search for an original and innovative way of relating to musical creation. Sérgio Azevedo mentions her capacity to read the students’ soul, and her free pedagogical attitude that encouraged creativity. Olga Prats remembered the openness to all the means capable of functioning as expression. For Maria João Serrão, after the approximation made by Capdeville between theatre and music, the national artistic sector changed.
Composers such as António de Sousa Dias, Carlos Alberto Augusto, and Miguel Azguime, have absorbed a lot of Capdeville’s premises, namely when it comes to the use of the sound and the cannons, and the search for greater freedom on stage. Through research that integrates new technologies in the articulation of sound with image performance, they have developed new forms of theatricalization of music and sound.
Nonetheless, for Maria João Serrão, Capdeville’s work has also a major influence in theatre, and she highlights independent theatre groups such as A Cornucópia or O Bando as good examples of integrating music in theatre. Looking at the development of this integration, it is in the work of Ricardo Pais that one can find a more effective and structuring participation of music and of the plastic arts in the theatre performance constructed from the staging, according to the principles enunciated by Lehmann. In his works from the first decade of the 21st century, the culmination of all this development, Pais crosses the speech, singing, dance, video, and music, exalting all the games of misconception of which the theatre never seems to satiate itsel.f For the creator, theatre is a multidisciplinary experience, rich in contrasts, where music has a unifying role. Currently, there are continuously emerging creative projects that have been affirmed by a position of rupture and that privilege the disciplinary crossing in the construction of the scenic and musical space.
· The pianist Olga Prats said: ‘Constança fell from another galaxy, and she was here for a short time. Portuguese music wasn’t prepared for her. Only now do they talk about her, students of students, what would Constança do. But it’s necessary to revive her works. They had a luminosity and a variety, with the music in the centre… it wasn’t only movement, but rather the movement came from the music’ 20. How to revive Constança Capdeville’s work? ·
António de Sousa Dias*: With a smile, I would say that CC’s work can be revived in the simplest manner: performing it, disseminating it, and studying it.
Her work is not just a set of pieces: it is also an attitude that should be perpetuated, not as something to be commemorated, freezing it in time, but as a permanent update, activating it.
With this I want to say that it seems to me that in the end of the Portuguese-music 20th century, Constança Capdeville would be one of the figures with a clearly 21st-century mentality. The consciousness of the performance as a privileged vehicle of a music expression based on the confluence of means, the complexity expressed in a dynamic articulation between components where they interact and are codetermined not within a hierarchical and falsely determinist dependency, and the opening to what is today accepted as performance – all this makes of Constança and of her work an obligatory waypoint to understand the ‘Constança Luminosity’.
João Paulo Santos**: Between 1980 and 1984, I was in Paris with a scholarship, but when visiting Portugal, I usually had long conversations with CC. Precisely, two of the recurrent themes are very illustrative of my relationship with CC and of her impact in the music of our country.
One of our fierce discussions was about how CC wrote her scores. I was very critical of her writing style that relied on the performer’s personal reading, always someone very close to her and whose qualities and faults she assuredly knew. The writing was so ‘personalized’ that I feared – and today I have the confirmation that I was right! – that in the future the ‘way’ of interpreting her work would be lost. By relying only on the score, it was difficult to imagine the necessary ‘Constança’ dose to give life to her ideas. I witnessed it several times, namely during the repetition of “Libera Me”, at Festival dos Capuchos, directed, not by Jorge Matta, but by a Hungarian maestro who was surely clueless on how to deal with the score. I remember being called, as a piano performer, to pass the baton of the mode d’emploi, necessary to decode those mysterious and, ultimately, not very objective signs. More recently, along with António de Sousa Dias (another initiated in Constança’s Mysteries!), we manage to resurrect “Tibidabo” (1989), left uncompleted by CC. Certainly, we didn’t commit any sacrilege by ‘inventing’ or ‘guessing’…
The other usual discussion theme was in the origin of the creation of ColecViva (of which I didn’t make part), and consequently about the composition of “Don’t Juan” (1985). If I’m not mistaken, CC had a work (preferably an operatic one) commissioned for the Contemporary Music Encounters – which she used to call ironically ‘The Contemporary Music Jostles’. The programming of contemporary music inside a ghetto within the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation season didn’t please her at all. In the eyes of Constança Capdeville, I represented the opera genre – having a bad reputation in those years. An opera required a libretto or at least a theme. I remember how Constança Capdeville escaped cleverly when I tried to corner her – how I would like to have seen CC’s music-theatre genius creating a performance, no matter how peculiar, that we could classify as an opera! Confrontations, suggestions – I remember telling her about E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Prinzessin Brambilla”, a work about doubles, images, and reflections of which she was so fond of – endless and friendly discussions… We came up with a concept, a set of elements (music, text, voice, dance, light) that corresponded to her aesthetical desires.
I have hard time telling what we should do to promote the decoding of her way of composing to the generations that didn’t know her. For the ones who socialised with her, especially, during the 1970s till her death, she was certainly a central figure in the development of the idea of being a musician, of making music. Her composition style was problematic, but today, with so many different and possible techniques, perhaps we can find visual ‘tips’ that can clarify the gesture, posture, presence (which are so important) of the musician when performing Constança Capdeville.
Maria João Serrão: Both in terms of the personality, as well as because of the created works, one doesn’t easily forget the contribution given by Constança Capdeville to our cultural/ artistic universe. She didn’t serve the aesthetic or music purposes of the time, but she recreated her own objectives, as we believe it is today, of general recognition, since the authenticity lived within herself. If one would like to hear or commission a creation to Constança, whatever genre it was, one would need to keep an attitude of expectation, curiosity which would only be satisfied in the moment of presentation. However, this way of being didn't prevent her from listening to ideas, or suggestions by the ones surrounding her, and whom she trusted out of friendship, or out of the artistic value that she recognised. Yet the result was always unpredictable in its totality.
This thought relates to the question: ‘How to revive Constança’s work?’
On various occasions I’ve heard the music or theatre professionals expressing their desire to stage the composers’ works. However, at the same time they indicate some difficulties in concretising it. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult above all if the intention is to be close, as strictly as possible, to Constança’s ideas. One can focus on some of these difficulties, but the one that seems to cause the holdback has to do with the intermittence of excerpts from one work integrated into another one, or with the order alteration of certain interventions, or still with the inclusion of new elements not foreseen at the rehearsals, and which not always are in the original score.
My intention wasn’t to exaggerate in this observation, which emerged as I was studying C. C.’s scores while preparing my doctoral thesis. Then I could consult not only the scores, but also the handwritten indications of the previous plans, the map of the all-nature interventions of which the works consist, the drawings, the quotations, etc. But I believe that it is still possible for someone, individually or in a group, to develop a project with the intention to ‘revive Constança’s work’, preferably while the artists and/ or the musicologists who worked directly with her, are still with us, available to develop this challenging mission.
Mónica Chambel: The difficulty of performing Constança Capdeville's works clings, essentially, to the dispersion and complexity of the materials and the lack of recordings. Although the composer’s written materials are easily accessible, the performance of some of her works has a more complex approach. What makes the performance difficult is the existence of scores with unconventional or figurative music notation and without a clear articulation between the different parts, the complexity of articulation of the several elements involved, and problems related to the location of part of the materials necessary for the performance. There are also some works that have not been performed since their premiere. For these reasons, commercial recordings are also almost non-existent.
I think that reviving Capdeville’s work involves two aspects – research and performance. In recent years there have been several researchers looking into Capdeville, namely regarding her biography (Serrão 2006; Ferreira 2007), the recovering of electronics materials, mainly the tapes (Magalhães 2016; Magalhães and Pires 2018), or who propose concrete performative frameworks for some of her works (Sousa Dias 2012; Benetti et al. 2019; Marinho et al. 2020). All this research allows us to immerse into Capdeville’s creative universe, and to revive the interest in her works. It can also point paths for the performance since it reveals and crosses information coming from several layers. And the research is also important, since being familiar with the composer’s assets and collecting memories is fundamental for the recreation process. The composer’s and the performers’ notes are significant sources of information for the construction of a global vision of the works.
On the other hand, it is necessary that the works are once again present on Portuguese stages. As Sérgio Azevedo said, it will be a monumental endeavour to recreate these works, to assemble these puzzles. Nonetheless, research can help to fill in the information gaps in the available materials. Moreover, for João Paulo Santos, this side that Capdeville left undefined should be a stimulating act, and the works can be recreated in other ways. The potential of Capdeville’s materials is immense, and their intermediation emerges as a multivalent locus for creative possibilities in the performance, as a generating element. Since some of the materials are degraded or missing, the performative challenge is bigger, but there is room for their reinterpretation and recreation. As a matter of fact, and almost paraphrasing Capdeville, among performers and researchers ‘the moment has come to work together for the same purpose’.
However, I would also add a third aspect that I think is important to revive the composer’s works, that is, their edition and publication. This task will be difficult given the format of the existing materials (from loose notes and papers, to clippings and magnetic tapes), but it would certainly make the works more accessible to performers. It is necessary to understand in what ways the materials can be edited. If there is no edition, the works hardly circulate among musicians, and therefore do not reach the public.
Sérgio Azevedo: Constança’s work has this particularity, as, by the way, other works from the same period have – it is highly improvised and worked in the moment with the performers, not only at the level of the music theatre, but also when it comes to the more ‘traditional works’, let’s say; that is, it also happens in the case of more rigorous writing. She worked with the musicians, changing in the moment the things that at another concert could be made differently. Except, she knew how they could be made, and the musicians who used to work with her also knew. Sadly, and typically for Portugal, 30 years after her death, still almost nothing is published in terms of revised scores – notated, copied into music notation software, enabling the music to circulate. And this is wished-for. Without circulation the work doesn’t exist. It’s as if one wanted to admire a painting which is kept in a museum depository. The painting needs to be displayed, either at permanent, itinerant, or other exhibitions, and the music needs to be played at concerts, also recorded, but essentially, performed live. Mainly because, in Constança’s case, as I’ve already referred, the theatrical, spatial aspect, and the beauty of the performers’ gestures are intimately connected with the music itself. So, when it is reduced to a cold recording, this music loses – as by the way other music does to (some more than the other one) – a great part of its captivating aspect. Thus, and independently from the most valuable, pure musicological, and biographical research (in Constança’s case the latter one lacks a lot, mainly regarding the early years), or from any other work, the preparation of scores aiming at concert performances seems to me essential so that Constança’s music can again make active part of the Portuguese and international music universe, instead of being almost and only a name, whose “Caixinha de Música” (there it is, published and circulating among pupils and teachers) is played within the first piano levels, and very little elsewhere…
· Can you imagine the history of music in Portugal without Constança Capdeville? ·
António de Sousa Dias*: A history of music in Portugal without Constança Capdeville would be possible, but it would be another history, certainly poorer and less stimulating.
Constança Capdeville was not only important (and influential) for her works, but also as a participant in the musical life in which she took part (see previous answers). In fact, after her disappearance, she will have been somewhat marginalized, for a while, with only fleeting appearances, but which are now expected to become increasingly visible, both by the musicological studies that are being carried out on her personality and work, and by the renewed interest in the fruition of her works, by their inclusion in concerts or even re-staging of performances.
Fortunately, his legacy extends beyond sparse successions, in a subtle meshing with our musical reality, in its longings, in its promises for the future.
Filipa Magalhães: Without Constança Capdeville the history of music in Portugal would have certainly been poorer. Capdeville is one of the most eclectic and iconoclastic figures from our history of music. I would even say that she is a fascinating figure, but her history is still to be made. She is a composer that hasn’t always been well comprehended, and few people understand and know her universe. I believe that perhaps only the ones who’ve contacted her directly, can really understand it. There’s little knowledge about her works, and a tendency to always perform the same repertoire by Capdeville. But this is understandable since the other works, and particularly the music-theatre, are still not ready to be played as they require an archival treatment. There’s missing information. It is necessary to perform a work based on ‘archeological musicology’ to join the ‘puzzle’ pieces.
A major part of the documentation is dispersed or already lost. This fact is directly implied in the recovery of her work, and consequently affects the performance. For this reason, it is important to rely on the people who collaborated with Constança Capdeville. The testimonies of the people describing their experience help us to enter the composer’s universe, and it was this work that I aimed at doing in my PhD research. Time goes by, the materials keep becoming obsolete, the people are losing their memories, and all this makes it difficult to develop the research, assembling the ‘puzzle’, and consequently, to have new knowledge about Capdeville’s work.
Capdeville’s music-theatre works are complex since they ‘touch’ different artistic spheres. They join various elements. They don’t have a narrative, but many of them employ idiosyncratic and unconventional languages (graphic and prescriptive scores), or scenic aspects that are difficult to understand through the existing documentation (e.g., scripts). There are almost no video recordings, and these ones would facilitate the works’ reconstruction process. However, one doesn’t intend to canonize or determine these music-theatre works. One intends to give them back some coherency being faithful to the composer’s intention, and to make them known to the academic and non-academic community, to the audience, and to the society in general. We know that this is a problem with a lot of the repertoire posterior to the 1950s, due to the specificities that it presents. Nevertheless, it is fundamental to make Constança Capdeville’s legacy known, since her works continue to pose various challenges on the musicologists, archivists, musicians, or performers, ….
Maria João Serrão: It seems to me obvious that Constança Capdeville’s artistic legacy, her pedagogical career, and her interventions in the mentioned areas, allow us to affirm that her influence in the Art and Culture was of extreme importance for Portugal. What reinforces this conviction is the quality of Constança Capdeville’s music personality. It makes her worthy of thorough studies since she’s undeniably contributed for the recognition of an originality and the contextualisation of Portuguese music in the framework of the European contemporary music creation.
In addition to having multiple qualities in terms of sensitivity, she was an example of creative freedom and of a limitless imagination, always based on the human-being authenticity. These features were of deep influence both for the great part of her pupils, who now prove it, and for a major part of the people who had the privilege of being in contact with her, either professionally or personally. Still today, her example proves to be valid, above all for the ones who can penetrate deeply into what she tried to inform us about, knowing that this search demands time and dedication.
Throughout the 20th century, various reflections of thinkers, musicologists, philosophers who were occupied with the themes concerning music and other arts, were sometimes close to Constança Capdeville’s stage realisations, giving them a sense which we wouldn’t always discover without these attention calls. This circumstance has also been helpful, so that the Portuguese can understand, more profoundly, the sense of the legacy that Constança has left us.
An example of this are Michel Poizat’s words about opera: ‘This is the function of the music in the opera: to make use of the language, to grind it, to work it exhaustively in order to use it for purposes that are different than the ones concerning the simple meaning of the sense: mainly so that the voice, the pleasure object, can emerge from it’.21
While valorising the recognition of the composer’s whole contribution so that the creation and the pedagogy in the areas to which she was dedicated could evolve, we can’t forget how our other great artists have also been great innovators and excellent pedagogues, who’ve fought and still fight for this evolution to be as effective as possible. For this purpose, one also needs to quote the following testimony by Jorge Listopad:
‘Constança Capdeville was the fundamental and marginal point, allowing for the intervention of the ancient force mimetics but producing a short-circuit of the Greek alea, game of chance. She created the vertigo. Disciplined and spontaneous, anarchic, and emotional, in multiple combinations, this Portuguese of Catalan origin also created an attitude, a moral. She will be missed in the future as she is missed today, one year after, at the tribute concert to her memory’.22
This recognition was also given to Constança Capdeville by the Portuguese Government, which distinguished her with the Medal of Cultural Merit in October 1990, and posthumously, with the Commander’s Grade of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword (June 1992).
Sérgio Azevedo: I will say something that will seem somehow abusive, all the more coming from the mouth or pen of an ex-student and at least a fervorous admirer of the composer and teacher… Although Constança was a unique personality, having developed the aspects of the Music Theatre in a continuous way and even with quite a success among the public, I think that the History of Music in Portugal, namely the 20th century one, is founded on the three essential figures: Luiz de Freitas Branco, Fernando Lopes-Graça, and Jorge Peixinho. Without diminishing any of the other composers that we’ve had, and perhaps adding to the list the name of Emmanuel Nunes, who nevertheless ended up making a major part of his life outside Portugal, from a historic point of view and when it comes to the reach and influence of the respective careers and personalities, these are the three names without which one couldn’t have written the 20th century, Portuguese music history. Practically all the rest comes from some of these names, and some of their influences.
However, the History hasn’t been solely made by Napoleon, Einstein, Gandhi, or Hitler, but also by Chamberlain and Poincaré, Glazunov and Sorolla, and by many other, even less historically relevant figures, yet very often, more interesting as personalities, creators, or thinkers. Satie has certainly been less important than Beethoven, but without him the history of music would have been much poorer (and with less wit…). From this point of view, that is, understood from this historical-necessity perspective, this question is answered just as I’ve done it. If it was posed in another way, I could answer instead that Constança – despite the relatively reduced work in terms of the opus numbers, and having been very strongly connected with the music theatre that very often involved music that wasn’t hers, and due to her creativity, personality, originality, and the spiritual force of her presence, and even due to the fact of being one of the few women composers in our music history –, wasn’t only an essential figure, but the history of music would’ve been much poorer (and certainly less interesting and with less wit) without her presence.
November 2022
© MIC.PT
| · Constança Capdeville · “Caixinha de Música” (1952) · Olga Prats (piano) · [Miso Records · MCD 008] · · Constança Capdeville · “Visions d'Enfant: Quand je serai soldat; Maman, j'ai vu dans la lune; Humble danse des petits canards” (1958-1959) · Olga Prats (piano) · [Miso Records · MCD 008] · · Constança Capdeville · “Libera Me” (1979) · Gulbenkian Choir, Jorge Matta (conductor) · [Portugalsom / Strauss · SP 4030] · · Constança Capdeville · “In Somno Pacis (One For Nothing)” (1981) · Opus Ensemble: Ana Bela Chaves (viola), Bruno Pizzamiglio (oboe), Olga Prats (piano), Alejandro Erlich Oliva (double bass) · [Portugalsom / Strauss · SP 4030] · · Constança Capdeville · “Amen para uma ausência” (1986) · Pedro Wallenstein (double bass) · [Miso Records · MCD 008] · · Constança Capdeville · “Valse, Valsa, Vals; Keuschheits Waltz…” (1987) · Olga Prats (piano) · [Miso Records · MCD 008] · · Constança Capdeville · “Di lontan fa specchio il mare” (1989) · Powertrio (Eduardo Raon [harp], Joana Sá [piano], Luís Martins [guitar]) ·“Di Lontan” · [Clean Feed/ Shhpuma Records · CF356CD/SHH018CD] · · Constança Capdeville · “La Prose du Transibérien et de la Petite Jeanne de France” (1989) · Manuel Cintra (recitante), Nuno Vieira de Almeida (piano) · [Miso Records · MCD 008] · |
|---|
* Note · António de Sousa Dias: Some references I use here (as indications for ‘internal consumption’):
· Magalhães, Filipa (2020). “A obra de Constança Capdeville: itinerários artísticos, sociais e afetivos” (“Constança Capdeville’s Work: Artistic, Social and Afective Itineraries”). Azevedo, A. F., Furlanetto, B. H., Duarte, M. B. & Augusto, C. A. (eds.) (2020). “Geografias Culturais da Música, do Som e do Silêncio” (“Cultural Geographies of Music, Sound, and Silence”). Guimarães: Lab2pt, pp. 275-300.
· Serrão, M. J. (2006). “Constança Capdeville – Entre o Teatro e a Música” (“Constança Capdeville – Between the Theatre and the Music”). Edições Colibri. ISBN: 9789727726707.
· Serrão, M. J. (2010). “Capdeville, Constança”. Salwa el-Shawan Castelo-Branco (ed.), “Enciclopédia da Música em Portugal no Século XX” (Encyclopaedia of Portuguese Music in the 20th Century). Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores/ Temas e Debates.
· Sousa Dias, A. (2012). “Algumas considerações em torno da obra de Constança Capdeville” (“Some Considerations Around Constança Capdeville”). Revista Glosas 6, September 2012, p. 34-37.
· Sousa Dias, A. (2020). “ColecViva: «teatro-música» como performance” (“ColecViva: ‘Music-Theatre’ as Performance”). C. Madeira; F. M. Oliveira; H. Marçal (Eds.) (2020) “Práticas de Arquivo em Artes Performativas” (“Archive and Performative Arts Practices”). Coimbra, University of Coimbra Press, pp. 303-321. ISBN-13 (15) 978-989-26-1954-5; doi 10.14195/978-989-26-1954-5; online version: LINK.
** Note · João Paulo Santos: I’m not sure of any of the dates that I mentioned. They can’t be very far from reality, but…
*** Note · Pedro Wallenstein: While I worked with Constança (+/- 1987/1992), ‘theoretical’ conversations or scholarly demonstrations never took place. Instead, she proposed catalysts for the creative act, which were, in themselves, object of reflection and springboard for the artistic gesture.
What struck me the most was that she rendered each project a teamwork dynamic: total freedom to suggest and to intervene, without ever compromising her moderator role (one of my favourites mottoes: ‘that is very good… but it doesn’t work for me’).
Most of the answers that I give come mainly from a pragmatic and vivid experience, and so, they are necessarily subjective.
1 Maria João Serrão, “Capdeville, Constança” in: Portuguese 20th Century Music Encyclopaedia, volume I (A-C), directed by Salwa Castelo-Branco (INET-md), Círculo de Leitores/ Temas e Debates, Lisbon 2010, p. 236. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
2 Mário Vieira de Carvalho, “Prefácio” in: Maria João Serrão, “Constança Capdeville. Entre o Teatro e a Música” (“Constança Capdeville. Between the Theatre and the Music”), Colibri – CESEM-UNL, Lisbon 2005, p. 18. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
3 Maria João Serrão, “Constança Capdeville. Entre o Teatro e a Música” (“Constança Capdeville. Between the Theatre and the Music”), op. cit. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
4 Gil Miranda, “Constança Capdeville” in: “Dez Compositores Portugueses. Percursos da Escrita Musical no Século XX” (“Ten Portuguese Composers. Music Writing Paths in the 20th Century”), coordinated by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Dom Quixote, Lisboa 2007, p. 308. Translation to Enslish: Jakub Szczypa.
5 Filipa Magalhães – private communication.
6 Maria João Serrão, “Constança Capdeville. Entre o Teatro e a Música” (“Constança Capdeville. Between the Theatre and the Music”), Colibri – CESEM-UNL, Lisbon 2006, p. 17.
7 Filipa Magalhães – private communication.
8 Filipa Magalhães, “A obra de Constança Capdeville: itinerários artísticos, sociais e afetivos” (“Constança Capdeville’s Work: Artistic, Social, and Affective Itineraries”), in: “Geografias Culturais da Música, do Som e do Silêncio” (“Geographical Cultures of the Music, Sound, and Silence”), edited Ana Francisca de Azevedo, Miguel Bandeira Duarte, Carlos Alberto Augusto and Beatriz Helena Furlanetto, 275-299, Braga, Portugal: Laboratório de Paisagens, Património e Território da Universidade do Minho/ Lab2.PT, 2020, p. 299.
9 Maria João Serrão, op cit., p. 18.
10 Group formed in 1985 by Constança Capdeville to perform her music-theatre works, initially constituted by a pianist, singer, double bass player, dancer, and a mime. Sometimes the composer herself also participated in the execution of her performances.
11 Filipa Magalhães, "Reflexões em torno do teatro-música de Constança Capdeville" (“Reflections around Constança Capdeville’s music-theatre”), “Dramaturgias 11” (2019): 88-102, p. 94, LINK.
12 Fragments from a private recorded interview to Constança Capdeville by Maria João Serrão (January, 1991).
13 Transcription of an interview excerpt with Constança Capdeville, presented in the context of “Percusros da Música Portuguesa – Constança Capdeville” (“Portuguese Music Paths – Constança Capdeville”), presented by Jorge Matta, and realised by Nuno Garcia for the RTP 1, November 12th, 2008. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
14 Filipa Magalhães, “«A música já não pode viver sozinha»: Da interação rumo à identidade na obra de Constança Capdeville” (“‘The Music Can No Longer Live Alone’: From the Interaction Towards the Identity in the Work of Constança Capdeville”), PhD, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, 2020, p. 281-82, LINK.
15 Olga Prats in the interview for the Vogue, whose excerpts are available on Manuela Paraíso’s blogue “Mulheres na Música Portuguesa” (“Women in Portuguese Music”): LINK. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
16 Conversation with Alejandro Erlich-Oliva conducted by Filipa Magalhães in Lisbon, December 2, 2018.
17 Virgílio Melo in the interview given to the MIC.PT in May 2005, and conducted by Miguel Azguime at the Miso Music Portugal (Parede): LINK. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
18 Filipa Magalhães, “A obra de Constança Capdeville: itinerários artísticos, sociais e afetivos” (“Constança Capdeville’s Work: Artistic, Social, and Affective Itineraries”), op. cit.
19 Words by Jaime Casal, student at the Music School of Lisbon (ESML), from an e-mail sent on May 13, 2022. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
20 Olga Prats, op. cit.: LINK. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa..
21 Michel Poizat, “La Voix du Diable. La Juissance Lyrique Sacrée”, Métailié, Paris, 1991, p.230.
22 Jorge Listopad, fragment from the article published in Jornal de Letras, 1993.
