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Photo: Jaime Reis · © Sofia Nunes

>> Jaime Reis · In the 1st 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. ·

Jaime Reis: I started studying music around the age of three at an informal school created by the ethnomusicologist António Tilly, which would come to be called Collegium Musicum – Music Conservatory of Seia. I only realised much later that the schooling methods and typologies offered us differed from other conservatories. The ethnomusicological approach, based on ethnographic premises, anthropological studies, and access to the central musicological studies in Portugal and abroad, was part of our daily music learning. Early on, António Tilly introduced these subjects to us in an adapted form, constantly referring to the bibliographical sources and contextualising the studies presented to us. There one based the music study on the systematisation of the music sciences proposed by Guido Adler, problematising rather than ‘exposing’ it. The classes were rarely expositive, and they tended to start with questions.

Additionally, the school had Macintosh computers with software such as Max and Studio Vision (both by Opcode Systems) or FileMaker. Despite having had a computer at home since I was born, the computers available there were very different. There were laptops, midi interfaces, computers with colour screens, operative systems, and ways of working I hadn’t been aware of.

António Tilly frequently explained the music production processes in diversified periods and contexts. We listened to music examples, analysed excerpts and confronted music practices. Then, I started to understand the music of Frank Zappa, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis, Beethoven, The Beatles, and Carlos Seixas. Generally, I already listened to these musicians at home, approximately since the age of seven (when I started to have more interest in listening to music), thanks to my family records and other recordings I found at the Conservatory, left there by other people. Notably, the father of a friend – the Engineer Gonçalves – and the father of another friend – the Architect Figueiredo – both showed me literature, plastic arts, and music.

At the Conservatory, we listened to many different music practices in general, but one rarely imposed on us their deeper study. We were presented with recordings, scores, and bibliographies. Then, the following week, each student returned to demonstrate their interest in what we discussed. I thought all schools were like that. Only at the university did I understand that this wasn’t common.

Since my mother is from Lisbon, where she kept an apartment during my childhood and youth, we used to travel there to go to concerts at the Gulbenkian and to exhibitions that were on. We did it from one to four times a month, and we frequently spent our holidays in Lisbon. When I turned 12 or 13, we also started travelling abroad more often, visiting European capitals, and attending museums and concerts. ¹

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

JR: I started composing at the age of 12. I didn’t compose tonal music except for academic exercises. I used computers to create electroacoustic and MIDI-sequencer pieces, inspired by what I listened to, and the potential found in the available equipment – from the extraordinary computers at the Conservatory to the personal equipment I acquired or received. Almost always, it was very rudimentary. In a period, which lasted approximately 14 years, I composed without ‘rein’, just for pleasure, for the available technologies and a reduced number of instrumental pieces for a contemporary music ensemble, which I founded at the Conservatory. The ethnomusicologist Ricardo Andrade was also among the ensemble´s founding members. In this period, I composed generally for myself. Only on rare occasions did I organise public performances and show the pieces to the teachers who were curious about what I was doing, including my guitar teacher, Paula Sobral, the composer’s, José Carlos Sousa’s wife and other teachers from the Conservatory who took my scores to their professors at the University of Aveiro, including the composer Evgueni Zoudilkine. I started having direct contact with other composers only from the age of 15, primarily at the New Music Days (Jornadas Nova Música) in Aveiro, where I met Emmanuel Nunes, Miguel Azguime, João Pedro Oliveira, Philippe Hurel, Isabel Soveral and many other colleagues with whom I have an excellent relationship and who became close friends. I kept my interest during the period when I also attended different courses, for example, with Cândido Lima, and, after entering the University of Aveiro, I went to all the events I could, including the Música Viva Festival, the concerts by the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, seminars with Emmanuel Nunes, and all the other ones focusing on contemporary music. When I turned 17, after having begun my Composition and Electronic Music studies at the University of Aveiro, my pieces started to be performed, and I initiated a different phase in my education and manner of composing. ²

· 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? ·

JR: I recall an interview with the visual artist Ernesto de Sousa in which he says something like: ‘I am voluntarily naïve. My life is like a collage.’ It’s how I feel when I talk about these aspects.

A short text from 1986, written by one of my favourite authors, Pierre Bourdieu, is called ‘L’illusion biographique’ ³. It alludes to the difficulty of tracing a biographical path and problematises the fallacy of presenting a ‘life story’. Even in a more restricted sense, if one takes the referred ‘path’ as a professional one, I consider it inappropriate to dissociate biographical, family, health, and other aspects, from the vision we create about others and our relationship with them. Other elements also promote the change in the factors inherent to a path, such as the permanent analysis one makes about the realities surrounding us, touching the different dimensions of each individual. Based on this analysis, we tend to generate forecasts, confronting experiences, and expectations, generating a living and dynamic dialogue adaptable to the world.

As a teacher, I am compelled to reflect on these issues. Students often ask me about my personal life in multiple aspects and ask for advice on their decisions. I am not an authority on the subject, but I understand the need to show the possible trajectories a student intends to trace. Such questions also foster reflection and evaluation of our actions’ relevance throughout life.

I enjoy outlining life in its complex web of relations as if it were a music composition. And even though I know I have no control over most of the constituent elements, I choose to reflect on them and outline proposals. It serves as a direction and helps to know where to aim. It is not a plan structured in a millimetric way, but rather life guidelines in which I imagine what I would like to be doing in X years, according to my lived experiences.

When a debate in this sphere happens, I ask myself and my students: what kind of life do you imagine yourself having in 10 years? How should you manage your personal life, composition, and general way of life? Considering our present lives, we can predict what our needs are and will be, what we would like to do, what we think we would like to do, and the strategies to achieve it. It is not a matter of outlining concrete objectives but pointing to a path, allowing us to combine what we like and can do. There is no need to create a dichotomy between what we can do and what we want. However, as is evident for many artists, sometimes we must balance our activities, either in the time-management plan or in the management of other domains. For example, since I started my teaching activity, I’ve chosen to do it within a maximum of three days a week. I don’t consider the activity secondary, but teachers must concentrate on scientific research and artistic practice, making them professional. It allows them to generate their knowledge and experience to share in the academic context.

Due to many life chances, some very unfortunate, I have a much better life today than I ever imagined. More than a fruit of our effort in one direction, the present has the arbitrary lightness of fate.

· What are currently your most important artistic/ creative concerns? ·

JR: In recent years I have been reflecting on aspects such as:
– ‘time’ in its multiple meanings: metronomic time; absolute time; natural duration; reaction time; and many others, which I have been working on for seven years in the cycle, “Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue”;
– sound spatialisation in various aspects, including the dome-shaped immersive systems I have used since 2009; multiple compositions and two texts have emerged from this work; ⁴
– new ways of conceiving and organising materials, as I have explored in the essence cycle, in pieces such as “archétype.énergie.” (2021) and “nœud.navire.” (2020-2021), among others. ⁵

· What are the differences between the instrumental (acoustic) and electroacoustic composition? To what extent the circulation between these two practices has enriched the music from the last decades? ·

JR: A central aspect in my compositional thought clings to the idiomaticity within its various meanings. This subject is far from new, but I had the opportunity to write about it in an article published in 2020 in a Polish journal. Having piano music, mine and by others, as a basis, in the article I exemplify what I consider structural or in-structure music characteristics.

Instead of thinking of a dichotomic vision between instrumental and electroacoustic composition, some questions can help contextualise my music practice.

In the referred article, I begin raising questions, such as: is there a difference between structure and structuring elements in a work or music practice? And how can one methodologically approach this distinction? I want to know if these concepts are part of an abstract construct or perceptible to the ear. I’m interested in reflecting on which auditory perspective we would be referring to, for example: a creator’s and music production perspective; a music reception perspective, for instance, in a sociological sense; or a music psychology perspective.

It is typical to find references to the idea of an idiomatic style in an extensive propensity of senses and their materialisation in the music practices. Part of these perspectives contributes to the creation of music styles and the development of an individual métier.

In the mentioned text, I propose a vision of the piano as a protagonist in the structure and as the structuring element describing compositional situations. Yet the base idea is to allow extrapolations to other contexts, instruments or means different from an acoustic instrument. There’s another reflection on the constructed instrument, resorting to electroacoustic means, their implications, limitations, and extrapolations in music creation.

Nowadays, we don’t pose the same questions which, for example, Pierre Schaeffer made in the final of the 1940s, on the possibilities of musique concrète, to a large extent in opposition to the composition for acoustic instruments. We use technology developed until the end of the 19^th century, as is the case of many acoustic instruments, or the one presently in its full development, as is the case of the AI algorithms easily employed in music creation via the MAX/ MSP or the SuperCollider. Despite this fact, the questions one can raise are, in my understanding, different from those one should raise. To be more concrete, I refer to an idea that Emmanuel Nunes used to call the supermarket of possibilities ⁶, to refer to tendencies of the students and the professionals in approaching music creation, particularly regarding the electroacoustic means, having frequently found what he considered ignorance manifestations of the music dimension’s priority.

In my opinion, this tendency has gained emphasis because of the dissociated form in which one generally realises the teaching, with a lot of difficulty accompanying the present-day changes and complexities, not necessarily in music but in general. The influence of the industries is more substantial than in any other period of humanity. Particularly for the younger generation, which hardly experienced the world without the effects of the referred industries, the unbinding from the algorithmic ferment feeling surrounding us via critical thought, assumes an elevated and complex social, emotional, and intellectual burden. The significant difficulty is perhaps not the reflection of this decoding realised in an individualised manner but of its lack of relevance and its consequences on the music result and, naturally, within the social sphere of the communities where we act.

· What are the extramusical sources which, in your case, can be the starting point, inspiration, or support for the music composition? ·

JR: Despite having composed, more than once, using extramusical phenomena as the base, such as biological, aerodynamic, and other models, I don’t take them only as a source of inspiration. They have more to do with the form I know and live a given phenomenon. I also have pieces inspired by literature and other arts, which likewise involve how I live and have lived a given work or artistic experience. The way I incorporate these elements in the work is not a ‘transcription’, algorithm, or ‘passage’ from a non-musical element to a musical one. On the contrary, I generally create analogies between the phenomena I find in ‘reality’ and the musical ones. For me, ‘reality’ means the physical world where I experience the phenomena either through direct experimentation or my reading of the scientific imagination and method on the way how a particular physical element occurs and how one describes it, when it’s not tangible for me, inasmuch as it’s not observable in its whole plenitude. These analogies always assume music relations with an acoustic meaning perceptible in different degrees, sometimes showing the ongoing musical process in a more or less obvious way. However, as I often say at conferences, in papers and other moments when I have the possibility to share these aspects: I could explain the composition processes of any of the pieces concentrating only on the music. What makes me talk about biological or other models is purely deontological, as I wouldn’t feel honest if I didn’t reveal the departure point. ⁷

· To what extent the new electronic and digital instruments can open new paths, and when can they become constraining? ·

JR: I would say that sound and music technologies always have a fundamental role in how composers work since there’s a minimum of interaction with the world, which’s constructive and involves us with others. Still, I know that a lot of people choose not to or can’t be in permanent contact with a permanently changing field. This isolation amplifies a ditch between the general, current, and inherent-to-music-practice change within classical music or another genre and a separation attitude inconsistent with a conscious will to realise something new. This isolation isn’t only due to the alienation of a creator in the technological aspect but also the lack of opening towards knowledge, learning in general, basically, to the absence of study. For me, this learning must be, one way or another, continuous throughout life. Although I find it strange for a composer not to have the slightest interest in what happens in their field, which by itself tends to be limited in terms of interveners, entities and production, in comparison with other music practices, I recognise it as their right with a concrete function, for example, the decision of not having an interest in getting to know more and knowing what one wants, giving preference to use one’s time to work on music. There’s a situation I consider serious which involves this field. It’s the fact that musicologists, in general, the so-called ‘programmers’ and musicians commonly don’t know the slightest about what’s happening in the 21^st century in music production developments, either at the technological or any other level. With due and rare exceptions, I empirically verify this fact daily in Portugal and outside. I appreciate and valorise the study with a historical approach, but overall, our time needs more attention. I feel there’s a lack of balance between what one knows about the present and what one could know, not only in musicology. Simultaneously, I also notice more and more students, young musicians, musicologists, composers, and people from other areas, with a lot of interest in modern music developments. The lack of access to information isn’t a base issue in the 21^st century. In my opinion, what seems to be problematic is the predisposition towards deep learning and permanent energy for updating each one’s core. The proliferation of superficial studies on all kinds of subjects does not seem to work as a knowledge base allowing for deepening.

In my case, there’s no constant search for everything happening in classical music or other practices. However, I’ve conceived my professional life to deal daily with other creators, scholars, and performers, which makes it easier to accompany the change phenomena, allowing me to feel more in contact with the world. In the concrete case of music and sound technologies in general, some elements have fascinated me since I started composing. When I think of it, I recall the 1963 article by Max Mathews, often quoted by John Chowning, referring that there are no theoretical limits to the computer’s performance as a source of musical sounds. It’s evident that when I started composing, I knew nothing about Max Mathews, but I was interested in expanding my creativity. What fascinates me isn’t the idea of knowing that I can do everything but rather that I still don’t know what I’ll be able to do. My work with electronic means has favoured this idea. From time to time, I have had contact with relatively recent technologies allowing me to experience music in ways I haven’t considered possible. To be more concrete, I mean my work with ultra-directional loudspeakers, also known as ‘parametric loudspeaker array’ (PLA), among other terminologies. Since I started working with this technology in 2010, when I used it in a piece commissioned by the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, my way of conceiving the space has changed. I hope I can permanently ‘change’ and ‘renovate’ myself. ⁸

· Do you prefer to work isolated in the ‘tranquillity of the countryside’, or in the middle of the ‘urban confusion’? ·

JR: Generally, I work in any circumstance. However, to compose and to dedicate myself to scientific activity and other tasks requiring more concentration, I prefer to work with restricted access to the mobile phone and internet to avoid being contacted in the moments when I’m working. I like working outside where I live, Lisbon, going to a more isolated place. But I also enjoy working at my studio – Lisboa Incomum – and realising residencies in studios that offer something different. When I was intermittently at the ZKM (Karlsruhe) for around two years, or when going to Annette Vande Gorne’s studio, Musiques & Recherches (Belgium), I can enjoy moments of increased concentration.

· Please choose and highlight three works from your catalogue, and explain your choices. ·

JR: 1. “Fluxus, Vortex – Schubkraft” (2019) is a piece for a guitar quartet that exists in two versions: one purely acoustic and another version, slightly different in the instrumental part, which also has electronics composed for a dome-shaped spatialisation system.

One characteristic of the acoustic version is fundamental – the sound of the two guitars sounds like it has emerged from an electronic source, even though the sound is purely acoustic. This apparent ‘fusion’ between the acoustic and electroacoustic universes is not just a sonic peculiarity: it is a deliberate exploration of unexploited potential, not only in acoustic instruments, in this case, the guitar but the composition itself. The boldness of using instruments innovatively leads not only to unprecedented results but also to a new artistic grammar, a new language, and, therefore, a new meaning... This confluence between the two, usually separated worlds is essentially dynamic, like a fluid in motion, a flow, a vortex, in short, like a transformation...

Commissioned by Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany) and the Aleph Guitar Quartet, who’s its dedicatee, “Fluxus, Vortex – Shubkraft”, is a piece that I had the opportunity to compose calmly, allowing me to explore distinctively a language that I had been developing since the early days of the “Fluxus” cycle.

2. “Sangue Inverso: Rosa do Deserto & Inverso Sangue: Azurite” (2022). Fruit of a piece I wrote for the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group on its 50^th anniversary; the Group and the composer Clotilde Rosa are its dedicatees. “Sangue Inverso: Rosa do Deserto & Inverso Sangue: Azurite” results, as all the “Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue” pieces, from overlapping of two independent works: “Sangue Inverso: Rosa do Deserto” – for piano, flute, clarinet, violin and cello; and “Inverso Sangue: Azurite” – for viola and oboe, which also exists in version B, for viola and performer.

In “Rosa do Deserto & Azurite”, the exploration of temporal relations differs from other “Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue” pieces. Here I explore the idios time, the particular time of each gesture in its physical, gestural, and acoustic nature, along with the relation of the receptor’s dependence, triggered to take an active position in the temporal unfolding of the work.

“Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue”

‘This piece is written for an ensemble of seven musicians. “Sangue Inverso” is structured in seven movements and quite symmetrically; so is “Inverso Sangue”. “Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue” integrates the seven movements of “Sangue Inverso” and the seven movements of “Inverso Sangue”.

Each movement, either of “Sangue Inverso” or “Inverso Sangue, can be performed individually. “Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue” implies that movement no. 1 of “Sangue Inverso” must be performed with movement no. 1 of “Inverso Sangue”, and so forth. When the pieces are superimposed, although one adopts different tempi in each piece, there are specific moments in which they coordinate and synchronise.

This structure configures a simultaneously simple and complex construction. It’s all about the connections between the singular and the collective or, more precisely, about the permanence and the role of the single, even if integrated into the collective. In any harmonious human construction, overlaps and interdependence enhance the significance of each singular entity, distinct identity, and idios – in no way do they lessen their import.

Underneath those structural and semantic features, “Sangue Inverso – Inverso Sangue” also refers to the central concept of time. Though ultimately connoting eternity, one seizes time in this piece in several ways: as absolute durations and those dependent on the performer, modulations of tempo and within tempi or rhythmic contractions and expansions. All of these inflect the perceptions of interwoven flows as caused by – or reflected in – pitch, tempo, timbre, or textures.

The titles of each movement are as revealing as the structure of the piece itself. Each one bears the name of a symbolic element that, in a synesthetic mode, conjures a wealth of references – colours and sensations, values and vibrations, ideas and ideals.

In sum, the complexity of the musical cells and the relations between the cells to elaborate the piece are the foundation upon which a symbolic, semantic, and indeed significant construction emerges: from novel patterns, new paths arise, from new arrays unknown adventures...’ ⁹

3. “Magistri Mei: Bruckner” (2020) is an acousmatic piece for a dome-shaped system where I explore the idea of ‘spatial polyphony’. My interest is expressed in this quote from my paper “Exploring polyphony in spatial patterns in acousmatic music” (2022):

‘Recently, I’ve composed a new acousmatic work with a strong personal interdependence between gesture and spatial polyphony. Inspired by ways Anton Bruckner uses to convey polyphony, I have been developing ideas of polyphony that I try to explore not only through traditional polyphonic development but mainly through sound spatialisation connected to musical gestures expressed in spatial patterns that travel through a dome-shaped sound system. It happens in the piece Magistri Mei – Bruckner (2020), for 16 channels in a dome distribution, composed within the frame of the project “Embodied Gestures” by the Tangible Music Lab, using new musical interfaces, developed by Enrique Tomas and Thomas Gorbach for this research project, that were used in the conception and creation of this piece, alongside with algorithms, regular patterns and gestures materialised in sound objects in a counterpoint of spatial polyphony.

Bruckner’s sovereign mastery of counterpoint can be observed in the predominantly polyphonic textures like the ones of the first three movements and in the massive fugue with chorale which forms the bulk of interrelatedness of the breakthrough provided by the “Finale” of his “Fifth Symphony” (1876), where the chorale theme ‘breaks through’ at the end of the exposition space (Hawkshaw & Jackson, 2001; MacDonald, 2010). The idea of space polyphonic breakthroughs in the organization of the layers was decisive to achieve the desired result: multiple layers that are briefly described in eight procedures, conceived in connection to specific energy models ¹⁰ and that lead to what I consider audible distinct spatial patterns: – False polyphony ¹¹ in patterns (through changes in amplitude, timbre, and so forth);
– rotations in the lower ring of loudspeakers;
– opposite direction rotations in the medium ring of loudspeakers;
– internal geometries (triangular and other shapes, mainly in front);
– spectral suctions/ explosions, usually from the bottom to the upper loudspeakers;
– simultaneous interpolated actions in the three rings of loudspeakers;
– points/ localised actions; – spirals, usually from the bottom to the upper loudspeakers.

Although the perceptual features are less accurate with the discrimination of a sound source within height, when compared to our much more acute sense of space in a horizontal plane, particularly in front of us, the possibility of having sound patterns that travel above the audience allows an important feature of distinction between patterns.

When the polyphonic density is increased, the enhancement of a layer is usually achieved by a gesture. Almost all the sound material was made by the new musical interfaces developed for the referred Tangible Music Lab project. I mainly took short samples from works by Anton Bruckner and created hundreds of play-sequences having in mind energy-movements, using the new instruments and thinking about them as sound bodies. Although, as it is usual for me while composing, I have ruled out from the work most of the created play-sequences. However, one of the most notable perceptive features that would allow me to create distinguishable layers was the contrast between such play-sequences made with such a sound body, in contrast with others created by algorithms or using other simple programable interfaces (many of the algorithms were created in SuperCollider, both in ways that a sound sequence could be triggered by command lines or in lines that were, for instance, controlled by the MouseX/ MouseY). This contrast, made by hand, created peculiar gestural spaces ¹², to use Smalley’s terminology (Smalley, 2007), that would emerge back to the surface and play a role in the memory, connecting a layer that was previously presented and had started to dive, into textural sound masses that would arise through and be more easily distinguishable to the ear by the contrast to other ‘play-sequences’. The importance of the physicality of the gesture in the sound result and its perception has also been tackled by Brümmer (2017) and Vande Gorne (2018) in the context of acousmatic music.’ ¹³

· In terms of aesthetics and techniques the history of Western music is full of births, ruptures, deaths, renewals, continuations, discontinuations, other ruptures, and so on… Making a ‘futurology’ exercise, could you project the future of Western art music? ·

JR: We live in the most challenging period humanity has ever experienced. Some decades ago, tracing historical lines on humanity’s particular aspects, including the communities’ way of life, in a plural and diverse world, outlining influences of turning points associated with colonialism, cultural imperialism, globalisation, and other phenomena was possible. The scientific literature by authors such as Roland Barthes, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Stuart Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Bourdieu, Margaret Mead, and Bruno Nettl, to mention only the most famous ones made it possible to decode some of the realities in a clear, tangible, measurable way, and with verifiable degrees of objectivity. Perhaps due to the shortage of my knowledge, I consider that a significant part of the most recent literature lacks tools for modernity. We are living in this tremendous complexity, where one uses the old tools to incite one’s spheres of influence, of industrialisation, sales capacity, and management of economies, concurrently with other hidden ones we know superficially, but whose velocity of studying these tools exceeds, in my opinion, the deep study a human being can realise.

The music practices, even within our microcosmos, which in Portugal we tend to call ‘contemporary classical music’, are the mirror of this complexity in which we catch a glimpse of superficialities, past and present, consciousness and unconsciousness (in the naïf sense), action and lethargy and a series of other poles constituting the plurality of the field. Yet, they don’t seem compatible with the formulas of the fast changes we experience daily. The contamination of means, the influences in all directions and the hybridity eliding borders between artistic languages create something yet risking the obliteration of other fields that could grow within their autonomy.

The in-depth domain of specific fields, particularly electroacoustic music, but not only, is in itself part of each composer’s individual development. Yet music as a field loses when the focus is this development per se, or it takes refuge in superficial, often extra-musical conceptualisations. I don’t find it positive.

When analysing programming tendencies in some music of our time, within this microcosmos of ours of modern classical music, I regularly confirm that the interesting hybridity results from an effort in the development of a conceptualisation that often doesn’t have to do anything with the music aspects, or even with the sound. If, on the one hand, many of these conceptualisations are naïf, puerile, fruit of absence of study (not necessarily lack of skills), on the other hand, they can result in deliberate and consciously desired actions to destroy the plurality of music practices in the name of the referred plurality. It seems like a paradox, but it’s not. If the mist becomes the focus, we risk losing the detail of diversity’s beauty generated throughout centuries within what we call music.

I wish there were a fomentation of cultural diversity and politics, allowing for its intensification and proliferation. I expect that just as in biology, one understands the importance of genetic variability, in the other sectors of society, one will comprehend the consequences of a sterile world in humanity’s habitus.

In this sense, I globally appeal to all the interveners in our field to become active not only in music creation and production but also in its study, promotion and other actions allowing for a better comprehension of this practice by broader sectors of society.

Jaime Reis, May-June, 2023
© MIC.PT

FOOTNOTES

¹ From the MIC.PT Interview with Jaime Reis, realised in 2016: LINK.
² ibidem.
³ Bourdieu, Pierre. “L'illusion biographique”. In: “Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales”. Vol. 62-63, juin 1986, pp. 69-72.
⁴ Reis, J. (2016). “Short overview in parametric loudspeakers array technology and its implications in spatialization in electronic music”. In: International Computer Music Conference (pp. 242–248). Utrecht. · Reis, J. (2022). “Exploring polyphony in spatial patterns in acousmatic music”. In E. Tomás, T. Gorbach, H. Tellioğlu, & M. Kaltenbrunner (Eds.), “Embodied Gestures”. TU Wien Academic Press.
⁵ I have described some of the conceptualisations inherent in these works in: Reis, J. (2020). “The (idiomatic) piano in the structure and as a structural element in (my) music”. Aspekty Muzyki, 10, 265-285.
⁶ Nunes, Emmanuel. “A virtualidade do tempo real”. Unpublished text written in December 2001 for a meeting about the reform of the Composition Course at the Music and Dance National Conservatory in Paris, translated by Artur Morão and revised and published by Paulo de Assis in: Nunes, E. (2011). “Emmanuel Nunes – Escritos e Entrevistas. (P. Assis, Ed.)”. Porto: Casa da Música – Empresa Diário do Porto, Lda.
⁶ Nunes, Emmanuel. “A virtualidade do tempo real”. Unpublished text written in December 2001 for a meeting about the reform of the Composition Course at the Music and Dance National Conservatory in Paris, translated by Artur Morão and revised and published by Paulo de Assis in: Nunes, E. (2011). “Emmanuel Nunes – Escritos e Entrevistas. (P. Assis, Ed.)”. Porto: Casa da Música – Empresa Diário do Porto, Lda.
⁷ From the MIC.PT Interview with Jaime Reis, realised in 2016: LINK.
⁸ ibidem.
⁹ In: Reis, J. (2020). CD: Solo and Chamber Works; ensemble Fractales, Ana Telles, Aleph Guitar Quartet. Munich: NEOS. Booklet – pages 9-10. Tradução para português: Jaime Reis.
¹⁰ I use the term ‘energy model’ as a token from Vande Gorne’s work, that draws from the work of Pierre Schaeffer (descriptive vocabulary of listening), François Bayle (certain concepts defining acousmatic sound), and Guy Reibel (play-sequence and the importance of ‘gesture’), and that connects to a specific musical universe, usually a physical model, working as an ‘archetype’ (a fundamental concept in conducting acousmatic listening) and that consists of creating a sequence by applying a musical idea in relationship with the model (Vande Gorne, 2018).
¹¹ It’s an analogy to the homonymous term that refers to the connection one can make in the frequency range giving the illusion of multiple voices when listening to a single melodic instrument, such as in a Telemann fantasia. Here the term is used in the sense of having a recognizable spatial pattern with a sub-pattern that can either create a localized action or a construct of, for instance, a sub-pattern of a distinct geometry that allows to both listen to the original pattern plus the new one.
¹² The intimate or personal, source-bonded zone, produced by the energy of causal gesture moving through space, as with performer and instrument, or agent and sound-making apparatus (Smalley, 2007).
¹³ References present in the quotation: Brümmer, L. (2017). “Composition and Perception in Spatial Audio”. Computer Music Journal, 41(1), 46–60. https://doi.org/10.1162/COMJ a 00402 · Hawkshaw, P., & Jackson, T. L. (2001). Bruckner, (Joseph) Anton. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Sadie, S.). Grove Music Online. Retrieved from http://www.grovemusic.com · MacDonald, C. (2010). CD booklet: Bruckner – Symphony No. 5. Residentie Orchestra The Hague, conductor: Neeme Järvi. Essex: Chandos Records Ltd. · Smalley, D. (2007). “Space-form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound” (Vol. 12). Cambridge University Press. · Vande Gorne, A. (2018). “Treatise on Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media”. Lien – Musical Aesthetic Review - Musiques & Recherches, IX.

Jaime Reis · In the 1st Person Interview (in Portuguese)

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