Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre
António Pinho Vargas
In his activity António Pinho Vargas manages to join various musical universes – jazz and classical contemporary music.
Read more
Read more
I think that luck is a crucial element of every artistic activity… On needs to have luck, starting from the principle that talent and quality exist in composers.[1]
Preface
Various, apparently distinct universes encounter in the work and personality of António Pinho Vargas – jazz, in which he is composer, instrumentalist and improviser, as well as contemporary classical music, in which he is only composer. This variety distinguishes profoundly his artistic path and, undoubtedly, constitutes the essence of his originality in the Portuguese musical world. On the one hand it is possible to listen to him playing on piano his original compositions or improvising on traditional Portuguese music, and on the other, his “contemporary classical” pieces are performed at the Casa da Música, the Gulbenkian Foundation, or at the Belém Cultural Centre. What is the relation between these two universes in the work of António Pinho Vargas?Biographical Part
António Pinho Vargas was born in Vila Nova de Gaia in 1951, in a family where all women did study music: “I was born in a family, which had a grandmother who played piano. There were also my aunts, the two sisters of my father, who studied piano. (...) And my sister, 10 years older than me, and a cousin of her age did also play. Therefore, all the women”[2] , remembers the composer. He graduated from History at the Porto Faculty of Letters. He also completed the Superior Piano Course at the Porto Conservatory and the Composition Course at the Rotterdam Conservatory (1990), where he studied with Klaas de Vries as a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship holder. He attended the courses of Emmanuel Nunes, John Cage and Louis Andriessen as well as composition seminars with György Ligeti in Hungary (1991) and Franco Donatoni in Italy (1992). “Wolfgang Rihm says: «When I begin a piece I do not know how long it will last, in how many parts it will be divided, if in the middle there will be music, which at the departure point was not foreseen, etc.» By making this declaration he proclaims spontaneity associated with the creative act right from the beginning. This attitude remains at odds with the education that I received, in which, on the contrary, it was stressed that before beginning a work everything had already been thoroughly structured. Therefore the Netherlands’ role was fundamental for my education and experience… And when I went there I was already 36 years old, so I knew that I did not have time to spare.”[3] In 1995 the President of the Portuguese Republic, Jorge Sampaio, decorated António Pinho Vargas with the “Comenda da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique” and in 1998 he received the Medal of Cultural Merit attributed by the Vila Nova de Gaia Municipality. Between 1994 and 2000 he was consultant at the Serralves Foundation and from 1996 to 1999 at the Belém Cultural Centre, being, at the same time, one of the founding members of the OrchestrUtopica’s artistic direction. Presently he teaches Composition at the Lisbon Superior School of Music, where he already worked between 1991 and 2005. In 2011 António Pinho Vargas defended his PhD thesis, “Música e Poder: Para uma sociologia da ausência da música portuguesa no contexto europeu” (“Music and Power: For a Sociology of the Absence of Portuguese Music in the European Context”), at the Coimbra University under the direction of Prof. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Prof. Max Paddison of the Durham University. The thesis, published and edited by Almedina, was released in Portuguese bookshops in April this year. In this extensive work the composer realizes a musicological and sociological analysis of the invisibility of Portuguese music not only in the European context, but also in concert halls inside the country. “This absence exists because it encounters a device of power, which shall not withdraw, or even does not see itself as dominant. It perceives itself as natural, as a product of relevance acquired through anterior practices and truly developed during the 19th and 20th centuries, yet never questioned nor discussed, translated and grounded in a universalistic vision of the classical music field.”[4] On the pages of his new publication António Pinho Vargas mentions two decisive factors that created the image of Portuguese classical music’s absence – on the one hand the supremacy of the musical cannon of the central countries, and on the other, the incapacity to establish a political strategy for culture inside Portugal. Nonetheless the composer does also see the positive changes, which since the 1990s are being introduced in the Portuguese music universe. “As far as the general situation and the internal subalternity of composers is concerned, it is possible to detect an important change after the mid-1990s. Along with the big events and the establishment of new cultural institutions there was a breakthrough in the stylistic diversity and in the search for new works on the part of various organizations. Comparing with the previous period, nowadays, internally, there is a superior number of commissions and an incommensurable stylistic and aesthetic diversity, turned (…) towards (…) new emerging tendencies in the context of discussions and post-modern artistic practices in the music field.”[5] António Pinho Vargas, since always strongly connected with jazz, during various years recorded seven CDs with dozens of original compositions. He also composes music for cinema and theatre. Since his Dutch experience he has dedicated himself principally to composition of contemporary music. He has been receiving commissions from diverse institutions and organisations, having his music performed at the most renowned national and international festivals. In February and March 2002 the Culturgest organized an exclusive festival dedicated to the majority of his musical work. On October 1st the Oporto Symphonic Orchestra (Casa da Música) conducted by Christopher Konig gave the premiere performance of his most recent work, “Onze Cartas” for symphonic orchestra, electronics and three pre-recorded speakers. In this work, which is a triple commission of the Casa da Música, the Belém Cultural Centre and the São Carlos National Theatre, the composer used texts by Ítalo Calvino, Jorge Luís Borges and Bernardo Soares. The first Lisbon performance of the piece will take place on November 19th at the São Carlos National Theatre.Between Jazz and Classical Music
Aesthetics and technique is one and the same thing. In other words, there is no technique separated from an aesthetic idea, but sometimes one needs to separate the artificial collages between one thing and another.[6]
António Pinho Vargas, artistic name used since 1980, assumes various influences in his musical language, which “extends itself from an unequivocal atonalism to neotonal passages”[7]. This fact, certainly, has to do with his experience as jazz musician, who, by definition, is interested in different musical typologies. “In opposition to the majority of musicians, who work both in the classical and jazz music field, António Pinho Vargas always maintained a clear separation line between these two worlds (...)”[8] , emphasizes António Curvelo in an article dedicated to the composer in the Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Music in Portugal. António Pinho Vargas’ jazz activity is marked not only by his participation, as pianist, in different musical formations, from jazz-rock and funky to free jazz, but also by extensive investigation in the field of jazz history. Admirer of Keith Jarret’s, Chick Corea’s and Paul Bley’s pianistic style he became one of the most important and original jazz figures in Portugal. Nevertheless the jazz phase ended in 1996, when António Pinho Vargas dedicated himself principally to classical contemporary composition. After various years without performing he has recently come back with concerts for piano solo, having recorded and released two CDs, “Solo” (2008) and “Solo II” (2009), containing 36 of his compositions written between 1976 and 1996. One more CD was released only this year, “Improvisações” (“Improvisations”) – live recording of a total improvisation concert realized at the Superior Institute for Technology (Instituto Superior Técnico) in 2009. The piano solo repertoire is characterized by the search for his genuine sound and includes not only original compositions, but also improvisations on motives by other musicians. Apart from that, António Pinho Vargas frequently resorts to traditional Portuguese music, which he includes in his work “through the exploration and / or adaptation of popular melodies and rhythms (songs from Alentejo, percussion of the Douro river mariners, etc.).”[9] Although António Pinho Vargas intends to maintain jazz and classical music distant, the influence between these two universes is unquestionable. It was through jazz that in the mid-1970 he discovered 20th century classical music, whereas the sonority of the genre sometimes resembles the style of such composers as Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen. “At the time this was for me a kind of blur, in which I oriented myself with difficulty. Still I understood certain relationships and since, in fact, I was trying to improvise sometimes à la Cecil Taylor’s, in other words, with extreme violence, clusters and permanent chromatics I realized that this kind of music had something to do with it.”[10] Jazz experience, which demands active participation in concerts, either in formations or as a soloist-improviser, also influenced his way of composing and approaching the score. “I should say that now, from my individual perspective, I think that the fact of having been on stage many times in order to play improvised music (…) allowed me to have a vision of music as being made or created in that particular moment, on stage (…). I got to approach the act of performing as creative in itself. And, that is why, what exists today in my life, as a direct result of those long years of experience, is a sort of little confidence in the score.”[11] In his aesthetic stance António Pinho Vargas, the composer, distanced himself from the modernistic paradigms, assuming an attitude against the systems, of a creative liberty, and resorting to the use of various techniques, which marked the history of 20th century composition and music. The defence of “historicity” of the “musical objects” led him to give more importance to the discourse in itself rather than to the vocabulary or material being used, valorising, in this way, the optionality of its use – everything depends on the expressive effect, which one desires to obtain. This critical and reflexive attitude towards music also reflects itself in his theoretical work, above all, since the second half of the 1980s. “…History exists and is present in its whole. It includes John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen, but, in fact it also includes Bartók and Debussy, it includes everything! (…) I think that these [musical] objects exist nowadays. And they can be used. Still the question is to be posed according to a different criterion, concerning the quality of the discourse and not the quality of objects, of which it is created. The objects in themselves do not guarantee the quality of a piece. There is no politically correct material, which assures the quality of music”[12] , emphasizes António Pinho Vargas. Nowadays, there are two coexistent universes in his musical activity – composition and improvisation, the latter having been revived recently with the composer’s reappearance on stages, performing solo piano concerts. The post-modern attitude towards composition of not valorising music in terms of its provenience, results, in fact, of the totality of António Pinho Vargas’ artistic experience – composer, musician, instrumentalist and jazzman. This implies that these universes, as a matter of fact, do not remain in a relation of contrariety, but of a mutual influence, which on the one hand can give origin to new artistic values but on the other proves the diversity of his work.
