“Composing means serving, not getting oneself served.”
According to Emmanuel Nunes there are two types of composers: “those who write for themselves and those who affirm the contrary.” The composer feels more proximity to the first attitude, which is not necessarily an egoistic posture – “for me it is unacceptable to anticipate the listener’s lack of culture. It is quite normal that he is uncultured to a certain point. I do not intend to have cultured listeners as an ideal. Nevertheless, to give them solutions, which facilitate the perception is unacceptable for me.”[1] “Glorified as a genius” by ones and “reduced to an insensible builder of musical structures”[2] by others Emmanuel Nunes, who this year celebrates his 70th anniversary, has lived abroad for 47 years and is one of the Portuguese composers with the broadest international recognition. He has developed a personal style, “quite different from any other Portuguese composer”[3] , having four antecedents strongly perceived as influential to his musical discourse: Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. “In continuity there are always aspects of rupture and vice-versa. If I were to choose one I would say that my posture is connected to continuity. I am profoundly linked to the whole history of western music, since the Gregorian chant until today”[4] , says Emmanuel Nunes in an interview given to the Público journal, published on June 25th 2000, the year, in which he won the Pessoa Prize (Prémio Pessoa). The composer sees continuity in the sense of progress and evolution, in other words, of constant renovation of music. “My idea of continuity has to do with the fact that Bach was not Monteverdi, that Beethoven was not Mozart and so on, successively. There is an invention, which renovates itself through continuity. However it is not possible to invent from nothing. To discover something, which results from lack of culture or honesty in relation to what already exists, is not a discovery”[5] , he stresses.The Beginning [6]
Emmanuel Nunes was born in Lisbon on August 31st 1941 in a family without musical traditions. It was on his own initiative that he began to study piano and solfège, when he was 12. In 1959 he met Fernando Lopes-Graça, who accepted him as pupil, and frequented simultaneously harmony, counterpoint and fugue courses with Francine Benoît at the Lisbon Academy for Music Amateurs (Academia de Amadores de Música em Lisboa). He also attended lessons given by Louis Saguer on 20th century music writing, which then occurred to be of great importance to him. Between 1960 and his departure to Paris in 1964 he had Composition lessons with Fernando Lopes-Graça, who, due to his Communist Party membership, was prohibited to teach by the fascist regime. Between 1962 and 1964 he attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses, during which he was particularly interested in lectures given by Henri Pousseur and Pierre Boulez.Out of Portugal
“The decision [to leave Portugal] was fundamentally caused by the fact that I had the necessity to study and have contact with the whole musical world, not only externally, but also internally and technically, which was not at all possible in our country.”[7] In 1964 Emmanuel Nunes left Portugal and spent one year in Paris in order to prepare himself to study composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen and once more with Henri Pousseur at the Rhine Music School in Cologne (Rheinische Musikschule), between 1965 and 1967. He came back to Paris, where he continued working on his own until 1970. In order to obtain a scholarship of the Portuguese Ministry of National Education he signed up for the Aesthetics course led by Marcel Beaufils at the CNSM (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris). He received his first reward in 1971 after developing with Michel Guiomar a thesis on Anton Webern’s “2nd Cantate” and the evolution of the musical language of that period, work that he did not complete. “What one learns is more important to what one is taught. And only does one learn, when one can. The things that influenced me the most, were my studies on the Second Viennese School and what I heard from Stockhausen. I feel very clearly what I heard from him: he had four pupils per week. Stockhausen used to come, talk uninterruptedly for five hours and we were only listening. This was for me Stockhausen’s great revolution: it does note reside in the technical processes, but in a more general vision of music in itself. Since then, independently of the quality of my own results, I learned to experience 20th century music. Independently of the decades.”[8] Scholarship holder of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation during the 1970s Emmanuel Nunes affirmed himself progressively on the international level, especially in France and Germany. His works were regularly presented at the Gulbenkian. From 1974 to 1976 he conducted lessons for future music pedagogues on initiation of composition in the 20th century at the Pau University (France). Since the 1980’s his pedagogical activity has become increasingly important – he conducted composition seminars at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and was invited by Ivan Tcherepnin to realize lectures and conferences on his music at the Harvard University. From 1986 to 1991 he was teacher at the Freiburg Superior School of Music in Breisgau. From 1990 to 1994 he taught composition and chamber music at the Romainville National School of Music as well as, since 1992, composition at the CNSM (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris). In 1985 he was invited by Pierre-Yves Artaud to give a group of seminars on “L’attitude instrumentale” at the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique), which was repeated in the following year during the Summer Ateliers in Darmstadt. In 1995 he gave lectures at the IRCAM Summer Academy and again in Darmstadt in 2002. In 2004 he was invited to realize a series of lessons, conferences and concerts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Since 1989 Emmanuel Nunes has been developing his activities at the IRCAM, which has provided him with the proper technological means and technical assistance. His work has a privileged position in the French musical life and has provoked interest of such musicologists as Peter Szendy, Brigitte Massin or Alain Bioteau, who dedicated his PhD thesis to his work.[9] 1999 is the year, in which the composer received the IMC-UNESCO Prize for his musical work. In 2000 Emmanuel Nunes won the prestigious Pessoa Prize awarded annually to a person / author of Portuguese nationality, a protagonist of a particularly relevant and innovative intervention in the artistic, literal or scientific field.[10]Pedagogical Activity
Emmanuel Nunes has become an important pedagogue, having taught many Portuguese composers from younger generations, such as João Rafael, Pedro M. Rocha, Pedro Amaral, Ricardo Ribeiro or João Madureira, among many others. In the process of music teaching he does not give much value to the transmission of “truths”, but encourages his pupils to encounter “the truth in itself” of what they create, departing, in fact, from their own ideas. “(…) the path from idea to real object is vast and arduous: what I try to do regarding the possible «failures» in realization is not to correct, but, yes, to indicate how to follow their own interior paths. We should struggle to understand what in us corresponds to what we compose. If there is no projection of the composer’s individuality in his score and, a posteriori, of the score in the composer, it is not worth it! And my function is to help to recognize this projection and to show the way of realization concerning this or that mental scheme, which the student still does not know.”[11]The Work
Emmanuel Nunes created his exclusive world of sounds with audible echoes of the close and distant past. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez are among the composers, whose influence on him was the strongest, nevertheless, his musical roots go even further discovering a balance between the polyphonic tradition, which encounters its culmination in the work of Bach, and the romanticism of Schubert or Mahler. Just like the late romantic Austrian composer Emmanuel Nunes has a special inclination for monumental forms, in which he explores the laws of harmony and the complexity of acoustic phenomena. In his music, developed already in the post-serial period the listener can discover, step-by-step, a mixture of expressive exaggeration with objectivity of construction composed of abrupt rhythms, ruptures, enigmatic perspectives and a tendency for almost obsessive repetition. According to Rui Vieira Nery his music can be characterised by “a great sense of control over writing”, in which there is “an established balance between formal contribution and emotional impact.”[12] The work of Emmanuel Nunes can be divided into three phases – the first one with preference for open forms and spatial distribution of instruments; the second one is characterised, on the one hand, by the use of electroacoustic means in real time but also pre-recorded, and on the other, by an ample exploration of instrumental techniques; the third phase is a synthesis of agogical, temporal and spatial aspects of composition. Apart from that it is possible to distinguish in his music two predominant factors – the first one, which is joining the works in cycles and the second one, which is revision or development of existing compositions, giving, in this way, life to new versions, but also creating a form of complementarity.[13]Nachtmusik I (1977-78)
“Nachtmusik I” for five instruments belongs to the cycle entitled “A criação” (“The Creation”), which concerns a musical language oriented to the issues of rhythm. The work is constructed from a group of eight notes, which create “an exhaustive web of intervals (...).”[14] . The intervals impose determined rhythmical characteristics exploring, in this way, articulations, tonics, which do not concern the world of tonality, but which evolve and create more or less evident gravitations.Quodlibet (1990-91)
Even though Emmanuel Nunes was influenced by the theory of “open form” his compositions have a highly controlled structure in order to obtain determined expressive values. Like Karlheinz Stockhausen, since the beginning of the 1990s, he resorts to sonorous spatialization using groups of acoustic instruments with or without electronics in real time. One of his most emblematic works, “Quodlibet”, was composed in its essence for the acoustic conditions of the hall at the Coliseu de Recreios in Lisbon. “At the end of the 1940s and at the beginning of the 1950s I (re)encountered myself frequently in a concert hall [Coliseu de Recreios] with somewhat unusual dimensions (...). I went there to see grand spectacles of circus or soirees (…) [and] at the end of the 1950s (…) to listen to prestigious performers of classical music or to see opera spectacles (…).”[15] During that period Emmanuel Nunes had an excellent opportunity to explore the acoustic values of the hall. In “Quodlibet” the musical material emerged from an attempt to reencounter in his music a predominant “constant”. Therefore, creating a kind of musical autobiography and telling us his own history, Emmanuel Nunes included in this work his earlier pieces written between 1965 and 1989. “This work takes the spatial exuberance to its extreme limits, through a symphonic orchestra with seven fixed soloists and 28 mobile musicians, who spread themselves in different configurations around the auditorium (horizontally and vertically). Its composition coincides with the moment, when Emmauel Nunes works at the IRCAM with spatialization through real time electronics, developing a method of writing, in which, to maintain a balance, the instrumental part is reduced, since the spatialization is operated by means of informatics.”[16]Lichtung I (1988/91) e II (1996)
The group of these two works is a project, to which Emmanuel Nunes dedicated 10 years of his activity, exploring the treatment of electronics joined with a large chamber ensemble. To some extent the “Lichtung” cycle complements “Quodlibet” not only because both works “search to explore a common field through fundamentally diverse means, but also, because the first one is a resume of Emmanuel Nunes’ work until the beginning of the 1990’s and the second one reveals itself as a departure point to what the composer will develop in the following decade.”[17]Das Märchen (2008) “This story is about everything and about nothing.”
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
In January 2008 the São Carlos National Theatre premiered Emmanuel Nunes’ first opera, “Das Märchen”, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, “Conversations of German Immigrants” (1795). The composer worked on this project for many years – “with intervals since 1982.”[18] The premiere performance, staged by Karoline Gruber with Peter Rundel as conductor, was transmitted on January 25th 2008 directly to 14 Portuguese theatres. The opera was a coproduction of the São Carlos National Theatre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Casa da Música and IRCAM. “One leaves this opera like a dream. It is all very odd and happens very slowly. If it functions as we wish, I believe that the public can enter into a nearly meditative state”, related the British tenor, Philip Scheffield, to Jornal das Letras. The opera’s action takes place in a dreamlike universe “with thousand things happening at the same time.”[19] “It is a work, in which the non-realistic and fantastic dimensions are fundamental. The story has an autonomous reality and a symbolic dimension, which are both very important to me”[20] , explains Emmanuel Nunes. Right in the beginning the characters start to sing in an imaginary language, which resembles German. At the time of the premiere performance the work created not only lots of expectations, but also controversies and a discussion on art’s function in modern times. After the premiere performance Pedro Boléo wrote in the Público (January 27th 2008): “The São Carlos Theatre was full at 8 p.m., at the beginning of the world-premiere performance of Emmanuel Nunes’ new opera. Two hours after, at the intermission, there were a lot of dropouts. Around half of the public left the concert hall. (…) What remains after «Das Märchen», is a perplexity. It takes to extremes not only the contradictions of this art, which desires to be pure (but in the end is so impure), but also the problems of opera’s function in our times, as the social representation of power.”[21] This work can be understood “as a reflection on art and its autonomy”, making references to the romantic ideals “of an autonomous art” developed by Goethe and Schiller, who “defined, in this process, the position of artist, the conditions of the «free game of imagination» and the qualities of the genius creator.”[22] Like in the Wagnerian Gesamntkunstwerk (“The Ring of the Nibelung”) Emmauel Nunes plays with mythical figures, magic, circles, earth, fire and gold. Pedro Boléo accused this opera of containing too much “symbolical elements, things to see, to listen, to read.”[23] Emmanuel Nunes desires to create pure art and to show the artist’s genius according to romantic ideas, an attitude, which nowadays seems devoid of context due to social and financial implications. Is “Das Märchen” an example of megalomania? Is it a joke? Or perhaps in 100 years’ time someone will discover it as a manifestation of genius?Some Reflections of Personal Nature
It is not easy to write an “In Focus” article about such a complex figure as Emmanuel Nunes. While reading his writings and listening to his music one can feel the weight of the “profound” thought, the rich musical and philosophical baggage. One feels intimidated, as one does not know how to approach, in few words [only three A4 pages (this “In Focus” has already seven)], such a vast work, full of symbols and complex musical structures. During my research on the composer I came across some problems and now I would like to give them some more attention (very shortly in order not to tire the potential reader) – the question of the artist’s / composer’s role in modern times, that of his / her capacity to communicate with audiences and transmit ideas, that of art’s function in general. Even though my nature is more emotional than rational I am quite far from the romantic ideas applied to art (and transmitted in “Das Märchen”), which in my opinion, nowadays are not valid – this has to do, obviously, with the political and social changes experienced by the world, since the end of the romantic period. With the explosion of democracy the concept of “genius” being able to lead people to a certain absolute, to the mystery of things, became devaluated. To my mind, what is important today lies in the craftsmanship and talent, which let creators transmit their ideas, emotions, their ways of seeing / listening / understanding the world, their individuality. Art (music) should show us the plurality, the spirit (Zeitgeist) of our times, and, in this sense, teach us tolerance. There is one more important problem, which also exists in the thought and work of Emmanuel Nunes and deserves some time of my contemplation – namely the relation between the work and its creator. The artist gives life to a work of art, nevertheless, there is a moment, in which the work gains its own life – in other words, follows its own paths, which the artist also has to follow. Quoting the words of Emmanuel Nunes: “It is, in fact, a paradox, but not a contradiction, since the terms do not eliminate themselves. It is a paradox because of the following reason: on the one hand, what we compose has to have an interior almost biological life, a vital energy given by the composer; but as one follows, so to speak, the personality – the work’s interior life –, the composer lives also this life. And here is the paradox: we should leave the work to let it live, but we are the ones, who bring it to existence, so one is at the same time the creator and the creation and oscillates between these two dimensions.”[24] Raising a polemic with the words of Emmanuel Nunes one should stress that apart from the act of creation, from which a work is born, it is also fundamental to maintain its circulation, its transmission and reception – and this indispensible role belongs to the domain of performers and audience. It is obvious that the creators have an almost physical connection to their works, but let me conclude at the end of this “In Focus” that nowadays, romantic geniuses and prophets do not exist. Art is not religion, but one of the basic needs of all human beings.JSz
