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>> Carlos Marecos · In the 1^st Person Interview (in Portuguese)
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Questionnaire/ Interview

· Describe your family, sound/ music, and cultural roots, highlighting one or various essential aspects defining and constituting who you are today. ·

Carlos Marecos: I can’t say that I had my musical roots in the family. However, my 8-year older brother was a self-taught guitar player. I learnt with him accompanying the post-25 April intervention songs by Zeca Afonso, Sérgio Godinho, and José Mário Branco, among others. Back then, I attended some Portuguese Music Youth ateliers on instrument construction, where, very much in the spirit of the times, we made our instruments (perhaps at the age of 12 or 13).
But probably the origin that defines me today lies in my first attempts to compose alone after my first classical guitar music studies with Rogério Gouveia. He was also my first musical training or solfeggio teacher (as one used to say back then) at the Vitorino Matono Music Institute, which wasn’t an official school then. Some years later, on my guitar teacher’s advice, I attended the Academia de Amadores de Música in Lisbon for better theoretical training. I remember him mentioning Acoustics, the History of Music, and Composition. Despite my taste towards the guitar, to compose I also became interested in other instruments, yet it took me some time to manage to have good ones. I used to play my brother’s guitar, and when I could, I bought a Yamaha DX27 synthesizer, a very simplified version of the DX7 but already polyphonic, which was a luxury for me. I remember putting weights on some of the keyboard keys to create droning, and then improvise, and try to compose upon these references a somewhat melancholic and modal music (without being conscious of it).

· When did you realise that you would dedicate your creative and artistic activity almost completely to composition? ·

CM: Hum, there’s a giant leap between the first and the second question. Still, one can say that when I entered the Academia de Amadores de Música, I had a faint idea of becoming a musician, however, without the certainty that it would be possible. My wife, who also went to the Matono Institute, where I got to know her, joined me later at the AMM since it was an official school that could give us a qualification. Having attended, from the start, unofficial schools, perhaps for not having any family advice or from anybody from the music mean, we ended up formalising the music studies somewhat late. We were very humble and not too ambitious, only wishing to study music to later perhaps be able to teach it at a regular school, maybe in a small peaceful village, where we would live. We felt that we would have been complete if we had managed that. The desire to compose existed within this context, but I still didn’t consider it a profession. Only when I started studying Composition Analysis and Techniques, I developed a more serious interest in composition. And here, the contribution of my professors at the AAM, Eduardo Vaz Palma and Eurico Carrapatoso, was also significant. Then we started to think of following higher studies at the Music School of Lisbon, and my wife encouraged me to attempt composition a little earlier than I had thought.

· Do you follow your path according to a plan (for example, knowing that within ‘x’ years, you will meet the ‘y’ goals)? Or perhaps the reality is too chaotic to create such determinations… ·

CM: A concrete plan hasn't determined my path at all. Reality is somewhat chaotic, but independently of it, it isn't possible to have a very defined plan in art.
The path consists of constant learning, curiosity to know new things, and discovering or rediscovering things from the past. The discoveries show us new ways, inflecting us and our path. We are social creatures, living and having relations with others. Consequently, our artistic creations also have ties with the ones by others, and vice-versa. We make choices, knowing more about where we don’t want to go than where we want to get.

· What are presently your main artistic/ creative concerns? ·

CM: At present, my main concern may not seem necessarily artistic but somewhat parallel. I have realised that the music world suffers from a time management problem. In the words of Joke J. Hermsen’s philosophy, in a world where neoliberal thought rules, one measures time in terms of economy, where the measurable prevails above the imagination.¹ In artistic creation, one needs time for good ideas to emerge, to find what one doesn’t know or even change course.

Painting, writing, or composing means, above all, daring to wait. To wait for the body to relax completely, that the spirit finds peace, and the soul is free from worries and other noise. First, we must eliminate expectations and the most evident and normalised representations. For that, it’s necessary to persist in waiting. We must allow our spirit to clear all the images converted into clichés. In this sense, waiting means emptying, as if the new work needed to first create its space within a place still wrapped in shadows before emitting a new light that it has inside.²

When one finishes elaborating on a work, one also needs time and conditions to prepare its presentation and its birth. What has dominated music is the organisation of a too-calculated time for all the creation phases, starting with the deadlines to concretise the works supported by institutions or the state. The time available to create, which can’t prejudice the obligations ensuring livelihood (since creation usually doesn’t provide it), is very short worldwide, without the necessary space for careful presentation. The creator’s care in elaborating their work deserves all the attention in preparing and assembling its public performance. As José Saramago used to say (in reverse order but with the same intention, I believe): ‘let’s not lose time, but let’s not hurry.’ When born, the artistic aim is always fragile, and one needs to treat it with all the care. I know that perfection doesn’t exist, but we need to have the intention to try to achieve it while preparing the presentation of a work, and for this, one needs time. I haven’t accompanied many artistic events that touch perfection, but when this happens, my sensation is that these productions emanate time. Due to their approximation to an ideal, one feels the ‘smell’ of time.

· How do new electronic instruments open new paths, and when can they become embarrassing? ·

CM: Philosophically, I would say there’s no difference between instrumental and electroacoustic composition. It’s simply music for a different ‘instrument’. Over time, musical instruments have evolved with the development of technology. A 19^th-century piano already had much more advanced technology than the first pianos, and the same is happening with electroacoustic tools, digital instruments, and related techniques. I am more interested in mixed music (instruments with electronics) than purely acousmatic music because it presupposes the existence of a performer as an interface between the composer and the listener. With the electronic component, this performer has the support of technologies of our time that can expand our creative palette.
Without any doubt, the electroacoustic component has enriched composition in many ways. Still, I’m not interested in the technology to amplify a piece of music that could be acoustic and transported to large spaces. I’m also not interested in the technological tools that certain computer ‘skills’ enable, as they eventually amaze the audience with their possibilities alone. What interests me is this technology’s contribution to the transformation and development of musical language. More than the use of ‘flashy’ electronic tools with technological extravagance, I’m interested in the energy that the electronic component gives us, the spatiality and inclusiveness that it offers with multichannel systems, whether on fixed media or in real-time, and preferably in a mixed music context. I am also very interested in timbre manipulation, whether through the creation of unfamiliar sounds or the manipulation and distortion of the instrumental timbre.
In opera, for example, current audio-visual technology can combine cinematographic techniques with theatrical techniques on stage. The simple amplification of a singer makes it possible to whisper in a given scene with a natural timbre and to make this whisper audible as in cinema and without the typical operatic emphasis necessary in a large hall without amplification. The technical means make it possible to hear the intimacy of a character and thus bring the theatre language closer to the cinema language. With all the other electroacoustic-music components, this philosophy opens up many possibilities.

· In 2020 and 2021, you participated in dance projects created in collaboration with the choreographer Sofia Silva – “Tríptico” and “Interior Presente”. What is the importance of interdisciplinary creations in your path? ·

CM: My interest in interdisciplinary creations stems from my feeling that the conventional way of presenting concerts in traditional venues with their label has become somewhat weary.
The mere presence of another artistic discipline, combined with live music, makes a considerable difference in bringing a unique interest and focus to an event. Dance has always intrigued me, and I have worked with several different choreographers before working with Sofia. Since 1994, I have written eight pieces for contemporary dance.
Music for dance is an exciting challenge since dance and music can have an abstract language. Instrumental music doesn’t provide us with a clear dramaturgy, as vocal music does with sung text, which transports us to an apparent dramaturgical universe. On the other hand, if instrumental music has a dramaturgy or narrative, that narrative is constructed from exclusively musical characteristics, even if the inspiration or title suggests extramusical elements. In music, discourse reaches us through sound, and the musicians carry it. The same applies to dance if desired; the bodies on stage don’t necessarily have to represent human images but abstract objects in motion or at rest. However, the presence of a body on stage often leads the choreographer to give it the function of a character, as in dance theatre, although with the advantage that when focusing on movement and its relationship with music, this character can be more abstract, and the narrative can be more open than in a theatrical text. All these nuances make dance and music privileged partners, as they have always been. Much more could be said about their relationship, discussing how the two artistic disciplines relate to each other, whether dance follows an independent music movement or vice versa, whether they have points of contact, whether one supports the other, or whether they mutually closely relate to the elements they have in common, such as rhythm (there is so much to say about it), fluid and articulated gestures, simultaneous moments, counterpoint, textural layers, what is in the foreground and what is in the background, solos, and other elements that support or share the same spaces. All of this is fascinating to me. More than seeking a complete art form with all artistic disciplines, as it’s often in opera, what interests me is to seek a special relationship between two or more artistic areas at a given moment.

· How would you describe the timbre of your music? Is it possible to find your youthful musical interests in it? ·

CM: Timbre is a crucial element in my music. But it wasn’t one of my concerns in my youth, at least not consciously. This concern is a consequence of the study and fascination I later acquired for the constitutive elements of timbre and the timbre-as-harmony relationship, given its evolution throughout the history of music. What might already be in my first compositional experiences was the search for poles – more or less clear, more or less static, etc. In listening, these poles give us musical references that function as points of support or rest between various phases of musical discourse. When these references are vertical, i.e., harmonic, they can work as a kind of gravitational attraction in the low register, making some high-pitched sounds associated with each other, as if ‘orbiting’ around the bass references. In this case, we can say that we enter the timbre domain, that is, its harmonic component and the relation of its harmonics to the fundamental. From this point of view, and intuitively, there was already a contact point with the timbre in my youth, but its broader exploration with other components has come later.
Nowadays, I write music that matches an abstract component I created, working together with natural structures directly related to the physical nature of the sound phenomenon. The abstract component primarily consists of scales that are not repeated in the octave and maintain a characteristic interval pattern. And the natural structures can be treated as spectral ones, within the most varied dimensions, such as the periodic, harmonic, and inharmonic components, in addition to the work with the noise, that is, with the aperiodic components. I establish the relationship between both in countless ways, but I can give two examples:
– In predominantly horizontal writing, I can have two counterpoint lines (created from the mentioned non-octave scales), where each of them may be reinforced with the harmonic component of a natural timbre through other instruments in the texture, realising what Gérard Grisey called ‘instrumental synthesis’.
– In my writing, I usually create a musical gesture with my abstract structures in the central register. And the extreme zones (high and low) are the places for the spectral structures that may share the texture with the abstract component. As they interact, it is possible to acoustically ‘illuminate’ the abstract structure (in a more harmonic engagement) or ‘grey out’ the abstract gesture with inharmonic components or noise.

· What are the extramusical sources that can serve as a starting point, inspiration, or support for your musical composition? ·

CM: More than saying which extramusical sources serve me as a starting point, I think it’s significant to mention that these elements exist in my path, influencing the final musical result. However, this influence may or may not be evident for the one listening to the music.
For me, the extramusical elements can influence the creation, interpretation, and communication with the audience.
At the level of creation, some extramusical elements can work as inspiration. The association between these elements and music can occur symbolically, for example, in the search for signs of classical antiquity or of our time. One can also have an extramusical idea from an emotion triggered by reading a poem or observing a landscape. This emotion can serve as ignition and a starting point for other musical ideas and the need to compose.
All these elements influence the created music gestures and different musical elements and parameters. However, they are never descriptive. Sometimes this relation is perceptible in the result. Other times it isn’t.
Then at the level of performance, the knowledge of the extramusical elements can make part of the means that the musicians use better to transmit the composer’s musical discourse to the listeners. The musician is always the interface between the composer and the listener. So, they must know the composer’s language within its essential elements and functions. It is not enough to debit the notes and rhythms without understanding what one’s ‘saying’ and the intention. But when it comes to the extramusical elements, I think the musician can know which ones they were or not. Sometimes I like to reveal which these extramusical elements have been. Other times I find it interesting not to influence the musicians and to wait for their interpretative proposal.
For me, the public presentation of a work is always a communication act. Music is sufficiently abstract to let each listener have a personal interpretation, different from one person to another, becoming emotional for various reasons, which is the richness of this art. On the other hand, if the audience knows a small extramusical detail which inspired the composer, their interpretation of the piece immediately becomes influenced.
I enjoy playing with this fact. If I want the listener to have various possible readings, it’s enough to name the piece with a number, for example, Op. 25 or music for piano four hands. However, if I give the title prelúdio sobre o mar (prelude about the sea), I immediately and clearly influence the listener with an extramusical concept. I can also have more enigmatic titles, such as um sino contra o tempo (a bell against time), or another, ligamos os motores damos aos remos (engines on but we also row). In both cases, there’s something more open, which, more than influencing the listener, will make them wonder how to find the relation between the music and these phrases. Most probably, each listener will create their diverse reading from the stimulus given by the title.
And then one can also have the programme notes. They can explain the extramusical elements that were the initial inspiration, reinforce the symbolic elements, or reveal some technical aspects.
Thus, the extramusical elements have some presence in my music. Sometimes they are stimuli that make me begin a composition with its own direction. Other times they’re cultural symbols or references influencing some musical or symbolic elements that can help the interpretation live the same universe as in the moment of creation. Without any doubt, they’re a communication tool between the composer, performers, and listeners.

· In your opinion and according to your aesthetic stance, what can a music discourse mean? ·

CM: For me, a music discourse exists when one manages to communicate something to the listeners where, in a more or less abstract way, they tend to decode, from an emotional point of view, a personal reading of the creator’s purpose. Sometimes the intention can only be the search for beauty or pain. But communication efficiency needs to exist for this to happen, first in the music writing and then in the performance. This efficiency occurs when the composer, using simple music elements, manages to make a synthesis in a complex whole, capable of containing the potential to generate in every listener an abstract imaginary space with the power to stir emotions. The Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou says that what interests him is to offer dreams to the audience. It is a point of view in which I recognise myself – to share dreams. They always include the presence of the real with the unreal, a part which we find familiar and another one which’s strange or even impossible. And this helps us to navigate between the safe and the unknown.

· In what sense do invention and research constitute indissociable music creation and, more generally, art elements? ·

CM: Research and invention are indissociable elements of artistic practice and music creation since research and creativity are fundamental in the search for novelty. One can’t forget the knowledge of tradition and its support in searching for the new without inventing the wheel. On the other hand, the invention of tools, research and experimentation don’t guarantee a work of art. Apart from giving us something new, a work of art must stir emotions, touch, and surprise us when present. It needs to make us live.

· How do you listen to music? Is it more of a rational or an emotional process? ·

CM: Listening to music is undoubtedly a more emotional process. However, it is quite rational when I compose. Despite this, I never forget to reflect on the result I got, above all, observing and experimenting, through the listening of excerpts on the piano, with the computer or even with other musicians, when necessary. I consider the composition work something that one can perceive as artisanal. When taking risks, a little, sharpening the edges, brushing up, thinking of the formal balance, and managing time is essential. Only then is it possible to consider the piece’s elaboration finished. This improvement and observation work is emotional. However, one also retouches purely technical issues without importance within this process. Then, the piece is born only in the public presentation, and my listening is strictly emotional.

· In the 2016 MIC.PT interview, the composer João Madureira said that ‘music is philosophy, politics, and a way of inhabiting the world’ ³. Do you feel close to this affirmation? ·

CM: One can deduce that I agree with this observation for the reasons I have enunciated in the previous answers. Art music reflects on itself and invites the listeners and performers to search for the more essential explanations for human beings, such as looking for the reason justifying our existence. I have always remembered a phrase said by a person on the street regarding the music heard in that public space: ‘This music makes me want to live’.
On the other hand, it is also evident that art doesn’t exist separate from the world, being a very peculiar way of inhabiting and contemplating it and giving us hope.

· Does the opposition between ‘the profession’ and ‘the vocation’ exist in your activity? ·

CM: Since my activity involves teaching and composing, this ‘profession-vocation’ opposition doesn’t exist. Sharing knowledge, guiding research, preparing pieces for presentation, and caring for their birth is part of the composer’s vocation. Indeed, teaching is also a subsistence need. At the same time, it is an extension of the composer, who likes to share knowledge, raise questions, make others think, reflect together, and share special moments of appreciating artistic objects.
On the other hand, I must say that we live in times pressured by neoliberal thought, where one treats the teachers as part of a profit-generating machine. They are a target of exploration, yes, exploration, at work, carrying out duties beyond their obligations. This pressure diverts the teachers from their essential function, which should be formative and not bureaucratic. It reduces the possibility of having more time for the students to share artistic activities, breath with them, and live completely creative moments.
One also needs to say that nowadays, at schools, the informatisation and digitalisation of the bureaucratic processes don’t save us time. The role of informatics should also be to speed up bureaucratic tasks. Yet if we think lucidly, it’s not what’s happening. With informatics, the schools are losing and not gaining time. In some cases, this loss is gigantic. Those who think otherwise should reflect more on this subject.
For this reason, the bureaucratic component also makes part of my profession, and here the ‘profession-vocation’ opposition exists. But in fact, it shouldn’t belong to it, so, during the years I have still left as a teacher, I will undoubtedly fight to influence education and change this time-management behaviour.

· Do you prefer working isolated in the ‘tranquillity of the countryside’ or in the middle of the ‘urban commotion’? ·

CM: In creative terms, when writing a piece, I prefer working in the tranquillity of the countryside, perhaps because the country moves me away from the school bureaucracy. But I also like working in a city environment, above all when assembling pieces, either mine or by my students.

· What distinguished your pedagogical approach towards Music (Composition, Performance, …) students? Can you identify any characteristic trait in the new generations of musicians in Portugal (composers, performers, …)? ·

CM: I don’t want to sound repetitive, but one of the essential pedagogical indications that one nowadays can give to students is that they do less to do better, dedicating more time to activities more critical for their formation so that they can do them well, evaluating in a serious and in-depth way what is possible to realise. In the students, I see a legitimate pressure to start to work early or to get dispersed in too many activities, illuded that these can give them future benefits, without the notion that it’s impossible to have brilliant artistic results without time. Working with students, I feel that the first contact is usually excellent, but frequently one doesn’t properly deepen the work. I also think that the leading cause of this activity excess doesn’t have the primary origin in the students, but rather in the schools which have gotten used to filling their time with activities since early. Even though all these activities are positive, they bump into each other when excessive. I should say that today young musicians are much more prepared than 20 or 30 years ago. Nowadays, there are brilliant musicians in Portugal, but that doesn’t mean that the system is perfect; far from it. If we all knew how to manage better the time of what we do, we could have much better artistic results and in a much healthier way.

· Please select and highlight three works from your catalogue and justify your choice. ·

CM: Hum, the answer is complicated since all the pieces made sense when I wrote them. To answer, I need to highlight three or four works with which I have the most vital emotional relationship and within my language. Thus, I highlight five pieces written between 2003 and 2022:
– O Fim – Ópera Íntima (2003-2004), a chamber opera whose CD recording I like to relisten, and which I’m conducting with lots of pleasure, in another context and with other musicians.
– Caminho ao céu… (2003), my wife’s most preferred composition, of all of my pieces, making me reflect considerably on it in future work. I recognise how in this piece, in a straightforward and stripped manner, one can become intensely emotional while listening to it.
– terra (2009) is a piece where I explore my full reflection on the interaction between non-octave scales and the spectral structures within an only-strings instrumental set, where one wants to establish a peculiar relation between predominantly melodic music and different ways of thinking about harmony. Here I aim to interrelate the simple or counterpoint lines with chords constructed of many sounds as relatively independent objects. Sometimes these chords emerge by surprise, sharing the same space with the melodies, illuminating them in different manners, with diverse intensities and colours, instead of functioning as harmonies sustaining melodies.
– terras por detrás dos montes (2011) for solo piano is a piece where my present music thought could subtly receive some traditional Portuguese music elements within a language that is not tonal, modal, or atonal. Some melodies from the interior of Portugal inhabit this piece, sometimes in a submerged, powdery, distorted, worn-by-the-elements manner. Other times this inhabitation is filtered, more transparent, and purer.
– A Casa do Cravo (2019) for piano and electronics represents my use of electronics in mixed music. It is a piece inspired by the Alentejo landscape, the emptiness, silence, and bells that interrupt the silence. There are also the memories of April 25, 1974. Nonetheless, it’s not a piece about the ‘hot summer’, but rather the contemporary Alentejo land and landscape, a region which intensely lived the revolution period, keeping these moments in its memories. Since then, many utopias have dissolved into thin air, but the memory of thousands of people on the streets remains. These people could experience freedom and lead their lives in an exaggerated, greedy, but genuine manner. Everything was very urgent… As Sérgio Godinho says in one of his songs: ‘To wait so many years turns everything more urgent’.
– branco, branco, branco… (2022) for soprano, saxophone, accordion, and string quartet, based on the phrases from José Saramago’s Blindness, is a piece addressing one of the most recurrent themes in art – suffering and resilience. It’s sometimes bitter and emerges in the context of suffering. Within a certain lyricism, there’s anguish, distress, fear, pain, death, violence, and sadness for the interrupted life, for something uncontrollable, the consciousness of what one can do to survive. Like Saramago’s book, this piece suggests discovering beauty during the chaos and finding hope for happiness in the moments of resilience.

· Could you reveal what you are working on and what your future artistic projects are for 2023, 2024, 2025, …? ·

CM: I don’t have any scheduled new-creation projects at the moment, even though an orchestral piece and a new opera with particular characteristics are germinating in my head. I’m waiting for an opportune moment to compose them. Then, I prepare the circulation of some pieces, trying to give them the best possible conditions for presentation. At the Music School of Lisbon, I also develop intense research work with an ensemble and students’ works.

· What alternative paths could you have taken if you hadn’t followed the composer’s path? ·

CM: The alternative paths could always relate to artistic creation, the fields which in some way I have already tried within interdisciplinary works connected with my music or music research projects I oriented. I could have been a light designer, sound technician, costume designer, photographer, or director.

· Regarding aesthetics and techniques, Western art music history is full of births, ruptures, deaths, rebirths, continuations, other fractures, etc. Making a ‘futurology’ exercise, could you project the future of Western art music? ·

CM: Making a ‘futurology’ exercise doesn’t probably matter, but I wish that Western art music’s future is a space for aesthetic and technical diversity. From a social perspective, I wish we wouldn’t have to think that art needs to become a mass product with economic concerns, as any other product. For that, we all need to take art as an investment essential for a sane society’s well-being and mental health.

Carlos Marecos, May 2023
© MIC.PT

FOOTNOTES

¹ Joke J. Hermsen (2017), in Melancolia em tempos de perturbação (Melancholy in Times of Turmoil), Quetzal, Lisbon, 2022, p. 182. Translation from Portuguese to English: Jakub Szczypa.
² Joke J. Hermsen, op. cit., p. 83. Translation from Portuguese to English: Jakub Szczypa.
³ Interview with João Madureira conducted by the MIC.PT in October 2016: LINK.

Carlos Marecos · In the 1^st Person Interview (in Portuguese)

Carlos Marecos · Playlist