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>> João Quinteiro · In the 1^st Person Interview (in Portuguese)
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Questionnaire/ Interview

· When did you understand you would dedicate your creative and artistic activity to composition? ·

João Quinteiro: I began studying music formally quite late. Despite having started playing the guitar still in childhood and having the creation been, under distinct manners, always inevitable (since I remember I have always needed to improvise or organise sounds into music, and during my teenage years, I wrote a lot), only at 16, it became evident that my path would involve studying music. Even so, the initial plan wasn’t to compose music but to play an instrument.
I have spoken a little about it in the first interview. Still before beginning higher education, when I was studying at the Conservatory of Viseu, I was lucky enough that José Carlos Sousa decided to open a Free Composition discipline, which I attended during my last two years at the Conservatory. The meeting between my need to create, which was often disoriented, and, at the time, the discovery of the music and formal thought of the first-generation Darmstadt composers radically opened a universe of possibilities and creative realisation. It quickly became the answer to many questions that, at the time, made me anxious.
However, I don’t know if it was this moment when I decided ‘to dedicate the creative and artistic activity to composition’. I’m not sure if this (singular) moment has ever happened. Despite focusing on music composition, I was developing my path at diverse moments, some confirming, others negating. The path’s lived balance, the experience that each following ‘option’ gave me, meant that, at each step, the path led me here.
The contact with people who marked me by reflection, counterpoint, or opposition made me think, question, and broaden my perspectives, enthusiasm, and need to create. The rigour and demand of Emmanuel Nunes, the discovery of the music by Lachenmann and Nono, the contact with the generosity and the restless search for beauty of Beat Furrer, my conversations on the music thought and stance with Pedro Figueiredo, Isabel Soveral, and Miguel Azguime, the friendship and admiration for the dedication of performers, such as Henrique Portovedo, Marco Fernandes, Clara Saleiro, Francisco Cipriano and Mrika Sefa, Paulo Amendoeria, Rui Antunes (I’m not mentioning many musicians I admire otherwise the answer wouldn’t end) – these have been the elements of confirmation and, at the same time, of personal questioning not only if I am doing what I want to do, but if I am or am not competent so that what I want to do has the level, which I think it should have. This confirmation should be a dialectical and continuous process. For me, it occurs in many distinct moments, but particularly in the relationship with people who make me always discover a little more about myself, frequently not by ‘influence’ but because they defy my curiosity to the point of taking me to a place where I still haven’t been. To conclude, I don’t aspire to have a definitive moment when I decide to dedicate my creative activity to composition. I prefer to move forward, from one experience to another, from one work to another, from one contempt to another, and, within this process, to keep discovering, not if I will be a composer, but if I still am!

· Do you follow your path according to a plan? For example, do you know that within ‘x’ years, you will realise the ‘y’ aims? Or do you think the reality is too chaotic to create such determinations? ·

JQ: In my case, the answer to this question is both. And probably that’s why neither of the two hypotheses fits appropriately. I don’t particularly like plans. My father too often quoted Agostinho da Silva to me, ‘Don’t make life plans, since it can spoil the plans, life has for you.’ ¹ I don’t want to repeat myself, but I make the ‘plans’ from confirmations and experience. Some push me towards one side through the challenges they pose and the stimuli they bring. Other ones, through the unexpected, move me towards another side. I don’t want to seem like I am pointing towards a form of nihilism; it’s the opposite. Regarding the plans, I can only say that if or when I have them, they always belong to a lived, questioned and constantly changeable process.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t say ‘plan’ when it comes to many of my works, but I often write by cycles or sets of pieces that relate autonomously. Nevertheless, these relationships and the process of composing these works go hand in hand with the revelation of the appearing opportunities or difficulties. To make an example, 2024 is a year of finalising three of the cycles. I have recently concluded my “Canção III – Pairs: á propos de l’intériorit’e” which is the last from the set of four songs that I decided to write in 2019. I am finishing my first opera project, which involved the creation of ten satellite works, which I started drafting in 2015. Later, I will compose the piece “Dynamis”, the last one in the set of four works I began in 2010. When deciding what was essential for me to do, particularly regarding the composition elements connecting these works, at no point did their creation process involve “fulfilling a plan”. These works exist in cycles because they share genetic elements that make them close and familiar with each other. However, the process of making them what they ought to be occurs gradually, and in the moments, the circumstances inevitably turn them to happen.
To conclude, as an example, the eight-works set I began in 2009 about the pagan sabbaths still only has three works written. I don’t have the slightest idea (nor do I have plans!) regarding the moment I conclude them. I know, however, which genetic elements each one will contain.

· What are your present artistic and creative concerns? ·

JQ: This question could take me to two different places. The first is a personal one, for which I have a short answer. I avoid formulating too definite artistic concerns that impose themselves too much onto what the works can become. I’m concerned that the works challenge and develop me as a reflection and creation process. I also want them to challenge the musicians, as bodies that give them life, to challenge and defy the listening, the reflection and the experience of the ones receiving them. Nevertheless, I prefer that in the lived diversity of processes and relationships established with each intervener of this equation, each work reveals towards which particular defiance it points.
Now, not looking from a particular but a field perspective (and I don’t know if it constitutes a concern), I recurrently think of two relationally distinct things, which start with a recent experience lived in the last years. On the one hand, I think a lot about Machaut, listening to his music in search of where the profane and sacred meet. I know that it might not seem like a present concern. Still, I increasingly believe that for me, and without compromise and condescension, the experimentation, challenge, and artistic and musical creation point towards the place of rediscovering expression, which throughout the 20^th century was essentially an object of savage colonisation of the spirit by the hands of the commercial industry (a little like the Roman Christians did to the music in the medieval times). I find it fundamental to take beauty, expression, and fascination to the place of creation without involving, in any shape or form, concessions regarding the positioning of the object as a mechanism of disquiet. I aim to actively fight with the evident rumination of the expression and reencounter the place where expression fulfils itself as an alluring listening challenge.
A second present concern, directly related to the first one, is a certain abandonment of the reflection process associated with composition, which I have occasionally found in other composers. Sometimes, it seems excessively uninterested in reflection to the detriment of ‘sound for the sake of sound’. I understand that the music experimental prime matter one, fortunately, finds in the point of maturation and sufficient self-confidence, so we can all explore while exploring without empty modesty or intellectualisation. Nevertheless, I recurrently encounter an impoverishment of the thought-work relationship within an almost classical spirit of ‘doing for the sake of doing’. Not coincidently, it seems that, as in the classical, it often finds the materialisation in poorly orchestrated objects which point towards little more than a ‘strange contemporary’ artifice. I’m essentially concerned with this subject because of the impoverishment of the produced objects, recurrently depending on the excellence and creativity of the performers more than the works themselves.

· To what extent has the circulation between the acoustic and electroacoustic universes enriched the music creation in the last decades? Is there any influence of these two practices in your music? ·

JQ: Regarding the first part of the question, I admit to being neither the ideal nor the sufficiently mature person in the electroacoustic universe to give a worthy answer. Regarding the second part of the question, coincidently, the last work I wrote, “Canção III – Pairs: à propos de l’interiorité”, is the first one where I use electroacoustic sound elements due to the challenge posed by the Nada Contra Duo. If it hadn’t been for the enthusiasm to write for these two particular musicians, I would not have accepted the challenge to explore an element I have always consciously chosen not to integrate into my works. Perhaps it has been a form of catharsis to solve questions suspended in me for a considerable amount of time. Has the influence of these means existed in my music up to this point? Apart from spatialisation, which I have been exploring for a few years now, and listening to some composers that I appreciate (Luigi Nono, Emmanuel Nunes, Mark Andre, the electric guitar in Billone and Bedrossian), I think that this last work has opened a possibility for future works to integrate the electroacoustic component, and, in this sense, it is an answer to keep for the future!

· How could you describe the timbre of your music? Can you find your youth music interests in it? ·

JQ: In my work or that of any other person who composes music, it seems that the timbre is a certainty. I admit that I will go past the youth interests and their specific relationship with the timbre simply because, in my case, I don’t find any direct relation between one thing and another. However, I still feel young enough for my youth interests to be the same ones I have today! I think the question concerns the importance of the timbre as ‘colour’ manipulation, which it has or doesn’t have as a structuring agent in my music. The most straightforward answer is that in my music, the timbre is a consciously nuclear parameter determining the result of the objects, frequently overtaking at a great distance the importance of parameters, such as the defined pitch or the absolute determination of durations.
For me, and in many works, the timbre is the first manifestation of a particular energetic activation revealing or evidencing the body that sounds. This evidence of the body, of the sound as active liberation and the diverse richness of the timbre as the unlimited field of discovery and possibility – are elements of first order in my process of exploring materials.

· In your MIC.PT interview from December 2019, you said: ‘I compose because it’s inevitable. There’s this sudden presence of objects that are sounds, which create tremendous pressure and occupy an enormous space of my mental availability.’ ² What are these objects, and how could you describe the pressures they create? ·

JQ: Well, the answer to this question can imply elevated levels of abstraction. To a certain point, I’m not interested in them being anything other than abstraction.
Some days ago, at a lecture, I was invited to talk about my life as a composer; they asked me if I had already lived through a phase of the absence of creative ideas. What came out of me, perhaps too simply, was an immediate ‘no’. Maybe also due to two circumstances – the first one being that I write very slowly and the second that I have an excessively occupied life – what happens to me as a rule is the opposite. I don’t have the time I want and need to achieve on time the sonic ideas that exercise this pressure mentioned in the previous interview. And then, I don’t mean the synaptic materialisation of sonic ideas, which seems an inevitable condition of the option to create music (this pressure of the objects which emerge, nobody knows why and how). For me, what is essential is a specific relationship with the time that the sonic idea needs between the moment it unexpectedly emerges and the required maturing through the process in the search for the ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘when’, which are associated with it as a thing transitioning from the idea to the autonomous being which is the work.
Regarding the pressures they exercise, I cannot describe them beyond admitting that I feel lucky to be surrounded mainly by people who don’t get the frequent states of distraction and alienation wrong.

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

JQ: It depends a lot from one work to another when they exist (on many occasions, the presence of extramusical sources doesn’t occur). I think the best way to address this question is through the opera I am presently finalising. What comes to my mind is, for example, the creation of each character. In almost all the cases, the characters were subjected to an extended and complex process (not to say, a chaotic one) of continuous discovery and revelation of the traces composing the individual psyche of each one of them. Every character has elements from the poems by José Mário Silva, a starting point for the libretto. Apart from this, there are also elements that, throughout time, kept appearing as belonging to each character, sometimes as if I have decided little or nothing about it. They were the profile traits – some of them found in other works, others in people with whom I share life, and others in me. They appeared as an evident resonance in each character, more than my rational decision to construct an object. Making things more concrete, to escape the excessive abstraction a little, for example, the Eurydice character starts with an initial image suggested by José Mário’s poem but also includes many aesthetic elements which I took from the series of “Eurydice” paintings by Bracha L. Ettinger, just as I also involved landscape elements which I found alongside the Pineios river in Greece (where the snake that took her to the underworld bit the original Eurydice). Apart from this, a lot of elements of the character, her corporeality, the circumstances that cover her, and, consequently, her vocality and the way it musically unfolds, I discovered in the people who made me feel that something from ‘my’ Eurydice they had inside, people who don’t even dream that I used their expression ‘lamellae’, as identity revelation of this (or other) characters. In addition, I discovered many elements by resonance in myself of tangential, contrapuntal, or antagonistic traits that belonged to the identity of each character.
Addressing the question and now not only regarding the opera, the extramusical sources, when they exist in my music, can be of any kind if they resonate with the essence that the work needs to be.
I admit that the frequency I come across works that directly reference specific sources without any effective relationship of excavation or revelation with them afterwards, confuses me. This form of propaganda colonisation or appropriation of external sources can be dangerous, not to say poorly deceitful.

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

JQ: I admit I was about to skip this question, but the ‘constraining’ part particularly seduces me!
As I said, I recently accepted the challenge to write my first work with electronics. In the work’s presentation, just before its premiere, I shared what for me was one of the difficulties in the initial development of composition materials: to answer the question ‘what sound results from the body of a MIDI keyboard’, there’s the most evidently simple answer – ‘none’. It was a constraint for me since, as I’ve already said, the sound resulting from a stimulated body is a nuclear starting point for my work, ideas, imagination and creative ‘pressures’. A MIDI keyboard or a virtual oscillator needs a distinct answer to this initial question. In the process of exploration and search of what has interested me in the creation of “Canção III”, I understood that mainly a MIDI keyboard had three distinct functions: the first, to canalise the static noise, the second, to canalise the ‘paraphrasing’ and tradition-and-memory-activating elements, and the third function, a mechanism of tactile transformation, allowing for a performed transformation of the resulting elements, in this case, the percussion. This bodily and, once again, tactile side of performance was the trigger that allowed me to overcome some constraints that the electronics element still implies for me.

· How do research and invention constitute inseparable elements of music creation and art? ·

JQ: I can’t even understand how invention and research are separable from creation. It seems that here, as in many other complex perception knots of the music universe, the problem is semantics. Here, I don’t even mean the vanguard or radical exploration. However, I think they are particularly distinct stances regarding Art creation (not only music) – the implied lack of responsibility in creating objects which only regurgitate dated ideas and, by contrast, the stance to open the works to discovery and individual-perspective identity. I don’t even put it as a negative critique of any compositional stance in this phase. I think, more and more, that each one should compose no more nor less than one wants.
Nevertheless, I emphasise that semantics can be dangerous since we give distinct practices and stances the same names. Especially when I hear the rhetoric presenting 19^th-century and early 20^th-century aesthetics as ‘new music’, it is crucial to understand that it impacts the works and the spirit of the one consuming music and the entities themselves, which very often give value to these simplifications to feed easy and immediate profits. It has never been the mission of artistic creation. It is a little like the poor and dated separations implied in the ‘erudite’ or ‘classical’ concept, which are terms present in our everyday life but refer to a reality that hasn’t existed for a considerable time. Separations like this one, nowadays, put the burden on fallacious criteria of aesthetic separation, while it doesn’t concern absolute objects but a stance towards creation.
There’s no problem in realising any music. There should be space for everything that contributes positively to life. The problem frequently means using ‘vanguard’ or ‘exploratory’ or ‘creation’ because of the seduction these terms imply regarding objects not concerned with them. Today, the barriers to artistic creation don’t fit what happens in ‘this place’, with ‘these instruments’ or ‘in this academy’. The passive and repetitive stance to produce aesthetic exercises is present today in commercial-tradition music, tonal classical and romantic music, and post-tonal music. Sufficient time has already passed for it to be noticeable. It wouldn’t be a problem if it were evident to create a distinct stance pointing towards the challenge more than to the hedonistic satisfaction and pleasantness of immediate rentability.

· Is there an opposition between the ‘profession’ and ‘vocation’ in your activity? ·

JQ: It depends on the reading one makes of this question! If one applied profession and vocation exclusively to compositional practice, my answer is ‘no’. However, I admit that my professional composition practice directly relates to the construction of the vocation and creative stance, sincerely in a way disconnected from the rentability or sustainability creation can give me. It is a complex problem. During the seven years I have been part of the direction of the Portuguese Association of Composers, it has been our effort to make the entities regulating and promoting creation in Portugal and our foreign partners aware of the profoundly precarious situation of composition as a professional activity in Portugal. To this extent, for many years, I have been a teacher because, since I started composing professionally, I have understood that I didn’t want my sustainability and creation to be directly co-dependent. Here, there sometimes is opposition. It is very frequently difficult and demanding not to give in to tiredness to manage these two distinct professional activities simultaneously. It is crucial for me to feel competent and to respect the functions I have in any activity. It often means reaching a specific endurance limit, but it is not optional.

· Choose and highlight three works from your catalogue and justify your choice. ·

JQ: I will present three works, each for very different reasons.
The first piece, entitled “Khatib’s Heart” for baritone saxophone, three percussionists and two guitars, had its first draft written in 2009, and then I completely recomposed it in 2015. The piece hasn’t had its premiere yet. I chose this piece, in the first place, to illustrate the point I made in the previous question. My need to create this work didn’t start with a commission, a request, or an expectation of concrete performance but simply out of my need to compose. This work requires considerable logistics between an ample percussion setup and the two guitars, which sound exclusively spatialised in the hall and not from the stage. I will undoubtedly be delighted when it is possible to hear it for the first time, but I didn’t write it as any other work (either commissioned or supported), putting the means ahead of the need to create. Secondly, this work also adds something to the question concerning the extramusical materials. The starting point for this piece was a newspaper clipping, which I kept in 2008 and which described the assassination of a seven-year-old Palestinian boy in an Israeli raid. Khatib’s parents donated the boy’s heart for a transplant to an Israeli girl. Now, when I think about it, I believe I mentioned it in the 2019 interview. This work has two quotations from two lullabies and a passage from Carlo Gesualdo’s “Tenebrae Responsories”.
The second work is “dois rios” (2019), related to a poem by Luís Miguel Nava. This work is part of three pieces for prepared piano and solo performers. The first one from 2014, “A Sombra”, has never had its premiere and the third, “O sol e a cinza”, I am still about to write. “dois rios” was a commission by the International Spring Music Festival in Viseu, for a premiere by the Sigma Duo. I remember that the piece made many important things converge at the time, primarily focused on the city of Viseu. On the one hand, it meant coming back to the poetry of Luís Miguel Nava (a Viseu poet), who, since very early, has become essential to me. On the other hand, this poem resonates with something I feel towards Emmanuel Nunes, to whom I dedicate the piece. And, finally, there’s the commission by the festival connected with the Conservatory in Viseu, a place which was crucial in my path, and the city itself, which, despite the distance, keeps having great importance in my life. Apart from this, I also chose this piece for the process of its realisation. It is highly demanding from a performance perspective, as many of my works are. I remember that the performance preparation process was quite difficult and marked a lot by two distinct terms which, I admit, greatly displease me: concession and idiomatic. Like any other repertoire, there are more demanding and more immediate works, and it refers exclusively to the performance practice, not having an aesthetic weight but only mechanic and digital. The difficulty and simplicity of a work don’t determine its relevance, but they determine, without any doubt, the success of its realisation by the musicians. The challenges that the experimentation poses extend (significantly) to the musicians, who are either mentally and physically available or not, and the margin to be in the middle of these two poles is concise. But the same happens with Brahms, Mahler, or Liszt; nobody discusses the need for months of preparation to perform Brahms’s chamber music, although if one asks for more than two or three rehearsals for some premieres, we find ourselves in the field of difficulty and compromise regarding what the works need to reach to be what they are. This situation is even more complicated because it happens very often in the face of the minimal space that experimentation music occupies with regard to the sustainability of the musicians who commit to it.
The third work I chose is “Penélope, meio-dia” (2023) for spatialised harp and actress, commissioned by the DME Project and premiered in the context of an artistic residency with the harpist Salomé Pais Matos at the Lisboa Incomum. The choice of this work is, in fact, first and foremost due to the enormous pleasure it gave me to write it and also as a counterpoint to what I said about the previous work. I consider myself particularly lucky. Some time ago, when talking to Pedro Figueiredo, he told me (somewhat playfully!), “Have you noticed, every time you speak of the musicians you work with, all of them are always incredible!”. And it is true, at least for me, including him on this list! In recent years, I have been fortunate to always work with people I deeply admire and to find in almost all of them an availability and extraordinary interest in the commitment they dedicate to my music. Returning to “Penélope” – it is a highly demanding work, either technically, regarding endurance, or still spatialisation. In Salomé’s approach, I found an immediate dedication and an enormous opening to look for solutions and discover an always surprising musicality. During the residency, the process occurred with the entire Lisboa Incomum team, people with the most extraordinary generosity and commitment. Now that I think about it, regarding this point, I admit that I could luckily talk about other people and spaces. I felt the same, at a very high level, from the Nada Contra Duo, who have recently premiered my “Canção III – Pairs: á propos de l’intériorit’e”, just as many times already, the enormous pleasure of being received at the O’culto da Ajuda, where the relation between rigour and generosity is always of the highest order.

· What are you working on now, and what are your artistic projects for 2024, 2025, 2026, and so forth? ·

JQ: As I mentioned, I am finalising my first opera, which I have been working on since 2015 and will have its premiere at the end of May this year. Beyond its dimension in my life scale, the conclusion of this project will also be an essential step to finalise my PhD, which has progressed, I admit, slowly!
Regarding composition, I have some lined-up projects; for example, this year, I will begin an extended set of solo pieces, which I will be developing throughout the following years. Still, as I already said, this year, I will also write the ensemble piece “Dynamis”, commissioned by the Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, concluding the set of pieces initiated in 2010 on some instinctual life aspects. For 2025, I have a project with the percussionist Nuno Aroso, whom I immensely admire, and the Clamat collective. Still, in this case, for now, I won’t say more than that it provokes my most incredible enthusiasm for the possibility of working with Nuno for the first time on a large-scale project. In 2025, I will also begin a new set of works for large ensembles. I already have the drafts of the first one, “superfície e interioridade da pele”, with the premiere planned during the ISCM World New Music Days 2025 in Portugal.
Nevertheless, beyond creating new works, presently I’m involved in the development of the Concrète [Lab] Ensemble, a project I started together with a collective of performers, exclusively dedicated to exploration and invention music, and which, despite being in an initial phase, already has some exciting projects planned. Now, we are preparing a monographic concert with the music by the composer and friend Eduardo Patriarca. It will occur at the end of April in Vila do Conde. We will also realise a cycle of concerts with solo and chamber repertoire. The first concert has already occurred, and we will conduct the project in 2024 at the Cigarra Cultural Association. At the end of July, we will also record a CD with five premiere works written for the ensemble.
The Concrète [Lab] project has been vital to me at various levels. On the one hand, it allowed me to create a platform of development and canalisation for the regular practice of innovative music with the infinite potential of the performers integrating the group (I emphasise the regular practice!), what is something scarce not only in the national but in any other context. On the other hand, at a personal level, this project has put me in a new, very challenging position of conducting. I admit that I don’t see myself as a conductor (in the complete meaning of the term and the métier), but at the same time, it has been an enormous pleasure and challenge for me to have this conductor’s role. Regarding this group, I feel as if we are creating a family!
Finally, to conclude the project’s question, in the context of the Portuguese Association of Composers, we are working on the organisation and programming of the third edition of the CROMA – Contemporary Music Cycle. This year, we are trying to extend the festival’s format to include more concerts and activities. For this project, which until now has had the participation of composers such as Pierluigi Billone and Franck Bedrossian, I have joined the composers Pedro Figueiredo and Nuno Henriques in the artistic direction, two people with whom I have already worked for many years and whom I estimate more than I can describe. The CROMA project, despite ‘coming from our body’ in a very literal manner, also opens the door to join composers, performers and the audience for one week in an environment of exchange and communication, which seems essential for a field ostracised and kept marginal too often, under the convenient cover of elitism.

· In a 2020 interview, composer Georg Friedrich Haas said: ‘The new art creators act as yeast in the society’ ³. In your opinion, what is the role art music plays in society, and how can one increase the importance and impact of this role? ·

JQ: It is probably one of the most complicated and simultaneously most essential questions regarding the mission to create art since it points concretely towards art’s role. Without a lot of hesitation, I agree with Haas, not only in terms of the analogy, which directly places the one who creates art in the role of extending the social tissue but even more because of what he says later in the interview, establishing a direct relationship between art and political stance of extending the action field concerning the other, particularly regarding the open fight with all the force taking the human experience towards fear, hatred and closure to the other.
Despite being a dangerous field, it is increasingly necessary, especially considering that we have been experiencing a progressive ascension of political and governmental powers, which without hesitation point to retrograde, antidemocratic, and savagely capitalist values through continuous populist brainwashing. We are experiencing it at this very moment in Portugal. I admit that I’m scared of the facility with which so many people have ignored the recent 20^th-century history lessons and with the facility with which power using hatred discourse and fear politics has gained an extended dimension.
Regarding the artistic creation, in the face of this, one has nothing more than believing in the dimension of human potential. It’s important to emphasise that it doesn’t concern a necessarily conceptualised closing but a creative stance potentiating the individual field experience, challenging the amplitude so everyone can follow their experience and reflection path. It means believing that we don’t need to brainwash art and, consequently, thought and feeling, but on the contrary, the opening to growth should highlight this potential for openness. Above all, it seems fundamental to understand that generosity doesn’t mean an individual compromise. Still, on the contrary, challenging the field fertilises the spirit and enriches the amplitude of the experience, in this sense, offering a collective return. It’s crucial that the ones who see these forces for what they are and, above all, the ones who, due to fragility, are the target of this kind of rhetoric, actively fight with all the forces that cyclically arise and point towards the place of smallness and life’s impoverishment. In this sense, art must be generous and not condescending.

João Quinteiro, February, 2024
© MIC.PT

FOOTNOTES

¹ A phrase attributed to Agostinho da Silva. Translation to English: Jakub Szczypa.
² Interview with João Quinteiro conducted by the MIC.PT in December, 2019, and available at: LINK.
³ Interview with Georg Friedrich Haas conducted by Filip Lech in June 2020 and available on the Culture.pl website: LINK.

João Quinteiro · In the 1^st Person Interview (in Portuguese)

João Quinteiro · Playlist