In focus

“One thinks of Luís Tinoco’s music as of a painting full of colour and movement. His expression enjoys challenges. He develops concepts and, if it is necessary, subverts and disturbs them. He works with instruments as if he encountered identities. The sounds dialogue, confront each other, expand, contract, superimpose and move away. If a musical work could have and immediate correspondence in painting, it would certainly be by Luís Tinoco.”^[1]

Maria Augusta Gonçalves, Jornal de Letras, March 2006

Luís Tinoco was born in Lisbon in 1969 in a family with strong musical traditions – his grandmother, Maria Carlota Tinoco, was Vianna da Motta’s pupil, pianist and piano teacher, who together with her husband organized the cultural and musical life of Leiria. On the other hand his father, José Luís Tinoco, despite not having an academic education in music, was a self-taught musician (his activity area was architecture and visual arts), who, nevertheless, also followed a musical career, essentially in jazz, playing piano, double bass and making part of a formation, which in the 1950s and 60s gave impulse to the first generation of jazz musicians in Portugal (Hot Club). “My first musical memories are linked to my grandmother, and also to my father. To my grandmother because it was with her that I began to learn piano (…). I remember sleeping under the piano while she played, and studying with her. (…) From my father there was, obviously, a very strong influence, and not only as regards to what I am today, but as a music listener. It was with my father that I also began to try to improvise. My father used to play harmonic sequences on the piano, and my brother and I would sit on his lap and improvise melodies that we played three-handed – my father two and us one!”^[2]

Luís Tinoco’s grandmother motivated him to continue classical piano studies with Elisa Lamas, yet it was the universe of composition that he felt more attracted to. “Composition appeared because, at the level of classical piano teaching there were many things that I found quite boring: the studies of Czerny, Heller and Hanon, all this school irritated me immensely! Apart from Bach, there were few who gave me pleasure of serious studying… and I ended up having a tendency to sit more and more at the piano in order to play my own things…"^[3]

Before studying composition in a more regular way, Luís Tinoco was divided between music, visual arts and cinema. “I tried out various situations [cinema, visual arts, jazz lessons with Mário Laginha] until, at a certain point, I decided that what I was doing lacked substance. (…) And I felt that, if I did conventional composition studies and studied orchestration, if I studied composition in a traditional way, this would perhaps provide me with the tools and the vocabulary in order to later develop what I was trying out, but had not yet found the way."^[4] Luís Tinoco graduated from Composition at the Lisbon Superior School of Music under the supervision of António Pinho Vargas, Christopher Bochmann and José Carlos Bonaccorso and, posteriorly, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the National Centre for Culture completed his Masters Degree in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The London experience was important to him, on the one hand, in view of "the pragmatism of the English, especially of my teacher, Paul Patterson. (…). On the other hand, I had come from Lisbon (…) from that quite chaotic life I have already mentioned – moving from this to that, and not achieving anything (…). I think that a great thing, during my two years in London, is that was to be able to write regularly and to hear my music played beautifully. Suddenly, I had entered into a more professional world of music."^[5]

Recently Luís Tinoco completed his PhD studies at the University of York, while exercising, simultaneously to his activity as composer, the function as teacher at the Lisbon Superior School of Music and in other educational institutions. In the context of programming and promoting new music one should emphasise his collaboration with the Antena 2 (RTP), as author and producer of radiophonic programmes dedicated to new music (“Geografia dos Sons” or “Geography of Sounds” – a programme devoted to new music from all over the world) and assuming the artistic direction of the Prémio Jovens Músicos (Young Musicians Award). Luís Tinoco’s music has been programmed by national and international orchestras and ensembles: Arditti Quartet, Apollo Saxophone Quartet, Drumming Percussion Group, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Lisbon Contemporary Music Group, Ensemble Lontano, Seattle Chamber Players, Galliard Ensemble, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Remix Ensemble, Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble, Soloists of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, OrchestrUtopica, Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, Orquestra Gulbenkian, Albany Symphony Orchestra, El Paso Symphony Orchestra, Montpellier National Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, among others.

In December 2010, at the Culturgest in Lisbon, Luís Tinoco premiered "Paint Me" (review available on the New Music Review Lounge), a chamber opera with libretto by Stephen Plaice, staging by Rui Horta and musical direction of Joana Carneiro. Recently, in December 2011, the Casa da Música presented the premiere performance of "Os Passeios do Sonhador Solitário", based on a homonymous tale by Almeida Faria. On April 28 at the Small Auditorium of the Belém Art Centre, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the direction of Daniel Reuss, gave the premiere performance of “Descubro a Voz” – a piece composed by Luís Tinoco from a poem by José Luís Tinoco. In August, at the 18th Edition of the Festival Europa Cantat, which will take place in Turin, the composer will premiere a new piece for mixed choir, “Ink Dance” on a poem by Yvette K. Centeno. His present and future projects include the recording, by the Gulbenkian Orchestra under David Alan Miller, of his second CD, which will be released in 2013 under the Naxos label with his 4 orchestral works written between 2002 and 2011 ("Round Time"; “Search Songs”; "From the Depth of Distance"; and "Canções do Sonhador Solitário"), as well as the composition of new orchestral works commissioned by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra – "Cercle Intérieur" for spatialized orchestra. The work’s world première performance will take place on November 24 at the Citè de la Musique under the direction of Pascal Rophé.

Luís Tinoco’s scores are published by the University of York Music Press.

Between Various Musical Languages

“The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man [sic] and time.”^[6]

Igor Stravinsky

Luís Tinoco’s work evokes John Adams’ post-minimalist music, not only in the harmonic structures and repetitivity of certain motives, but also in the “romantic” elaboration of melodic lines, so characteristic in his recent works. From the post-modern point of view, his music, which has a natural connection with the tradition, above all, in what concerns harmony e melodic developments, "can be perceived as a journey through the memories, which fill the sonorous landscape of the 20th century: Igor Stravinsky, György Ligeti, [Harrison Birtwistle, Louis Andriessen, Toru Takemitsu, György Kurtág, Magnus Lindberg], from jazz to electronic music."^[7]

The String Quartet, one of his first pieces composed in the academic context and, with which he won the Fernando Lopes-Graça Composition Prize, already represents the embryo of such characteristics as texture, notation, rhythm and timbre, which Luís Tinoco will develop in his future work. In what concerns the formal construction the composer organizes his discourse trough panels, in a "polyptych of situations, which I intended to be quite visual and narrative – to have a line, a starting point, a development and a finishing point."^[8] One should emphasise that for Luís Tinoco the external stimuli, such as images and texts of various genres, frequently function as departure points for the music.

The composers that influenced him most are those who come from a line of what he used to listen to during his youth: Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartók and Alban Berg, etc.; nevertheless then appeared composers such as György Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, among others – greatly for having been inheritors of the music, which he also appreciated. "And, at the same time, I did not stop listening to Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans or Herbie Hancock. So there was a congestion of information rather than a digestion. I was always, even when involuntarily, absorbing things from very different sources. (…) Jazz for me is a matter of digestion. Since it is a kind of music that I listen to regularly, sometimes some things appear spontaneously in my work, but that I cannot even identify as being jazz. I do not think it has that validity, because jazz basically depends on improvisation, and my connection to composition has always been through writing, never with the spontaneity, which I so much admire in true jazz musicians – that I have never had."^[9]

Luís Tinoco resorts frequently to literature, however not "as a matter of programmatic content, but rather as a departure point, as a gesture – a notion that is extremely present in my music – and, sometimes, the gesture appears as a small phrase from a poem."^[10] This can be exemplified in pieces, such as “Verde Secreto” for piano and saxophone or "A Way to Silence" for ensemble. Another source of inspiration comes from his fascination towards oriental cultures and the idea of the circularity of time, which is explored in his piece for orchestra "Round Time". "This notion of cycles that keep repeating, and our ephemeral passage within those cycles, because everything is continuous – this kind of contemplative attitude, which has to do with natural phenomena, cycles that renew themselves, and so on – all that fascinates me. It fascinates me visually and, if you like, even calligraphically. There is a whole series of visual elements in Chinese and Japanese and other cultures, than attracts me a good deal. When I used the title «Round Time», I was, in fact, writing a piece full of circular processes, in which the starting points are taken up again and become points of arrival."^[11]

Another aspect, in which the Orient serves as an inspiration point, has certainly to do with the questions of instrumentation and orchestration, which in Luís Tinoco’s music acquire a richness of colours, shadows and textures, evoking, in a certain way the impressionist approach of Claude Debussy. "Orchestration is perhaps one of the aspects that gives me most pleasure. Composition is extremely tiring, and somewhat boring, and I avoid it as much as possible up to the moment when the time to hand in the score of the piece is dangerously close. When I am already inside, there is no way out, and in having to solve the problem, what I really enjoy is the colour. And here I think the East has things to teach. In fact, Debussy already said at the Universal Exhibition in Paris that the gamelan made western percussion completely ridiculous."^[12] In this context it is also worth emphasising that percussion plays an important role in major part of orchestral pieces, stage music and in various chamber works of Luís Tinoco.

And, last but not least, in order to give the final touch of brush to the image of Luís Tinoco’s music one should make reference to humour and irony (probably on of the influences of Igor Stravinsky and Louis Andriessen), which distinguish themselves, on the one side, in the choice of non-musical means (for example texts) concerning the present, but on the other, in the aesthetics of music in itself, with such provocative examples as “Sundance Sequence” and “Spam!”. The first one is a work for which “the composer delivered a text based on a true event from outside London: an epic of a pig (Sundance), which ran away from a slaughterhouse, and of its capture. In the midst of its adventures the pig tries to exorcise its fears singing fragments of «Rituel» by Boulez harmonized in a Holywood style and, in the final, it dreams with fragments of Chick Corea’s «Ritual», harmonized in Darmstadt style!”^[13] On the other hand “Spam!” from 2009, a cousin-piece of “Sundance Sequence”, concerns the phenomenon of spam, with which all Internet users are being confronted every day. "… I can still remember the first time when I came across with this phenomenon, in emails from people writing from various parts of the world (…). At the beginning, I confess, I was a little embarrassed and sought to click delete as soon as possible. Then I passed through a phase of indifference until, finally, I began to consider the possibility of using this «literature» for musical effects. I started, therefore, to join the emails, which I received in my mailbox as spam, links for YouTube videos, pdf files of journal pages with inconceivable news, etc., and to add them to a folder with cuts from journals and magazines containing news with journalistic value equivalent to the nutritional equivalent of spam (Specially Processed American Meats, according to Monty Python). Besides, this is an endless process and, I consider the piece as such a work in progress, which in the course of time can result in longer versions with new movements."^[14]

Luís Tinoco's Official Website University of York Music Press Luís Tinoco on YouTube --- 1 Luís Tinoco's Official Website: Press; English translation: Jakub Szczypa 2 Interview to Luís Tinoco conducted by Teresa Cascudo;mic.pt, 2003 3 Interview to Luís Tinoco in: Sérgio Azevedo, "A Invenção dos Sons. Uma Panorâmica da Composição em Portugal Hoje", Editorial Caminho, Lisbon 1998, p. 503; English translation: Jakub Szczypa 4 Interview to Luís Tinoco conducted by Teresa Cascudo;mic.pt, 2003 5 ibidem 6 Quoted in DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0130493465, Ch. 3. from Igor Stravinsky' Autobiography (1962). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., p. 54. 7 Teresa Cascudo, “Contemporá/âneas”, January 16 2007, available in: Luís Tinoco's Official Website - Press 8 Interview to Luís Tinoco conducted by Teresa Cascudo;mic.pt, 2003 9 ibidem 10 Interview to Luís Tinoco in: Sérgio Azevedo, op. cit., p. 507 11 Interview to Luís Tinoco conducted by Teresa Cascudo;mic.pt, 2003 12 ibidem 13 Cristina Fernandes, Público, March 24th 1999, available in: Luís Tinoco's Official Website: Press 14 Luís Tinoco in programme notes to “Spam!”