Entrevista a António Ferreira / Interview with António Ferreira
2003/Aug/21
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Approaching
Composition
I don’t
know when I became a composer. The whole process happened, I wouldn’t say
naturally, but in the course of life in general. What I can say is that in
around 1981 I felt a desire, coupled with a huge curiosity, to go ahead with
the idea of composition. I used to spend my holidays with friends in Holland,
and in 1981 I got hold of a record, the old vinyl type, produced by INA-GRM of De
Natura Sonorum by Bernard Parmegiani. I remember that when I listened to it on
my return to Portugal, I couldn’t understand what it was all about. I didn’t
feel angry, just thoroughly intrigued and spurred on to
find out what it was.
I had an
intuition that there was an order there, some kind of calling, a desire to be a
composer, but this was completely different from what I had thought music
was. Rather pretentiously, like
all young people of 19 or 20, I thought I had already heard a lot of music and
already knew the most avant-garde and most “way out” things. But this was completely different. That was the point at which the
difficult beginning got under way: looking for books hidden in the most obscure
corners of Buchholz book shop in Lisbon; or trying to get anyone who happened
to be travelling abroad, to get some book or other; reading book
bibliographies, such as the little book by Michel Chion: La Musique
Électroacoustique, which appeared in the collection Que
sais-je? of the Presse Universitaire de France in 1982. That book helped me enormously, since
it had critical appraisals of many pieces that had been written up until
1980. It had a bibliography and a
discography and bit by bit I began to think “How amazing! Here are people who
use a whole lot of machines, or a whole lot of things that I thought had a more
functional use, or a more reproductive use”. Because what I knew of music was, in fact, music of a more
popular nature, or rock, or music of a so-to-speak more
classical/academic nature, but supposedly this music showed a different way of
being performed, but which went on to use techniques of pop
or rock to make recordings and discs. This was a field in
which it appeared that the means used were not simply those of reproduction,
but those of synthesis and creation. This was my first big paradigmatic
leap.
It was a
shock to discover that there was a structure there, and that it was not
something old-fashioned. Structure is always present in one way or another, I
think that’s inescapable. Obviously, the rules change and the means of musical
expression change, and that is the whole point. There, what I felt was that
there was structure, and there were rules which I could not recognize by ear,
because the surface of the music was completely hidden to me. It was this leap
that the person who had made the recording, in this case Bernard Parmegiani,
had made, and that I felt I was also in a position to make. And by making this
leap, maybe I could expand my own way of hearing and listening, and so improve
it. The thing is I have a certain notion of a person’s individual
perfectionism, in individual terms, not in social terms, which I think only
produces disasters and problems. However, I thought that perhaps I could
progress further, stretch a bit more.
Reasons
for the interest in electronic music
I can make
two suggestions, one more prosaic, the other more detailed. The most prosaic is
that as a man, overgrown boy that I am, there is a tendency, I wouldn’t say
innate, but a great tendency to like machinery and gadgets. In one way or
another, and with one or two exceptions, whether it be cameras – cars are the
most obvious case – whatever it be, possibly collecting bones, men like to
fiddle about with objects, and make things. There are those who say, like some “creators” (in quotes
because that’s yet another polemic word) that the works they create are their
children. This is not really true,
because, in contrast with a woman who, when she has a child, quite apart from
the pains of giving birth, also has at least ten, fifteen or twenty years
caring for that child, a male creator makes his work and can then forget it
completely. That work then goes
off on its own, leaving him free to be courted by the “muses” to create new
works. However, the thing isn’t
really quite as clearly defined as that.
This is the prosaic part, another part is for reasons, well I am not
quite sure what reasons, maybe family reasons, given that my father is an
engineer – perhaps this fact has been influential in an unconscious sort of way
– and I chose to study Chemical Engineering. The reasoning behind my decision to do this course lay in
the fact that I had a great love of perfumes, and I still do. I wanted to study
organic chemistry, bio-chemistry, or the “chemistry of rare earth” as they call
it, which is directly linked to these areas. When I was at the Instituto
Superior Técnico – I began in the 1979-80 academic year – one of the
subjects we studied in the first year actually involved computers. And I, who
up until then had had nothing to do with computers, found myself making
programmes to do this or that. There was another programme in which one had to
simulate a game of chess, and I found it highly amusing that one should be able
to feed in a variety of different pieces of information. It was a coded language, but it was
also a language with syntax, it didn’t exactly have semantics, but it did have
syntax, and this gave rise to certain actions in a system, or in an electronic
circuit, or whatever, from which there emerged a result. That was what
fascinated me. When later on I
found out that there were other people who were already using – not computers
because at the time they were extremely expensive and extravagant machines –
the idea of machine, the idea of a machine, of having
a syntax, that would later produce a result in music, these two ideas began to
come together, with the prosaic part on top acting as the icing on the
cake.
On the other
hand there are people who regard electronic music as being in step with the
present day. Because of all the machines which have come into being since the
beginning of the twentieth century, all the mechanical machines, the existence
of electricity, which allows for the possibility of continuous sound, with what
the English call drones and which in traditional western
music we can relate to pedal notes, to sounds that endure, that are
continuous. However, I think our
society has gained a continuous background noise, due to the motors which are
always running, the rheostats, the light bulbs, with their 50 or 60 Hz of
electricity. There is always a background noise. In fact, when there is a huge
power cut, which happens in Portugal from time to time, the silence which
results is incredible, whether out of doors or indoors. The dozens of little
rheostats, dimmers and motors which are always running, continually produce
this noise. Now, this continuous
sound is not really a natural sound because all sound has a tendency towards a
transient evolution, and for reasons of physics, they cannot be sustained for
very long. They appear and they disappear. Maybe that is one of the
reasons. As far as sonority from
the aspect of tone-colour is concerned, well,
I’m not too sure about that. If it has to do with the
present day or not. Maybe
it does.
Well it’s
like this: as anyone that writes, paints or indeed does anything else, will
tell you, when works are thrown open to the general public, control over them
is lost from that moment on. And that is something which is part of my personal
research, to find out what other people think about this. It’s not questions,
it’s not interrogations, and it’s not provocations, because I’m not the sort of
person who likes to provoke, but it’s somewhere there between question and
provocation. I really like to see other people’s reactions. I am a human being,
polite in talking to other people. Regarding a CD, people will say: “This is
horrible, this is incredible, this is like this, like that and like the other”,
and I make notes and try to establish a pattern, and I have to say that so far
I have found absolutely no pattern whatsoever. For example, most of the people
I knew in the eighties, in another area coming mostly from rock
and pop, who continued to make music after the interregnum in
which I was doing nothing, moved on to and are now in a fashion of glitch and
noise, doing things like Rafael Toral, and Nuno Rebelo, who also came from other
areas. These people like my first CD much better than the second. They say
“your first CD is unique, you surpassed yourself with it, and it remains
completely up to date”. As far as they are concerned, it is up to date, it
works perfectly. This second CD is good, as Rafael Toral told me, but it is
more musical, so to speak. I said to him, “Great, as far as I’m concerned, the
first CD was a youthful work, and in this second CD I felt a far greater desire
to form a structure and to want to create”. And so, I managed to do that, but in other people’s expectations, people who have almost
taken out political sanctions against it, as well as against the system and
academia, actually the other CD, with the name it has – which had
nothing to do with what was done up until now – I can see that it fits far
better into the spirit of those people. I actually think that it is those
people who are about ten years behind. When I want to stir up a controversy, I
say, “You are ten years behind the times, so in another ten years’ time you are
going to like my present CD”. But by then I hope I shall be in another phase, a
completely different one, if I manage it.
As far as
the first CD is concerned, I’d like to mention something which has to do which
what I was talking about a little while ago. For example, in December, João
Paulo Feliciano rang me at home, inviting me to put one of my pieces of music
into a stand, under the auspices of Experimenta Design,
which in this case consists of a huge lorry containing a sort of exhibition of
Portuguese design and which will go travelling around Europe. So, they had
reserved a small stand that was supposed to
house my piece. A person would go inside and it had a lighting system
controlled by the sound, and there the person would be immersed in the system
and listen. The piece they wanted was from my first CD, called This Is Music
As It Was Expected. Yet again they said: “Very good,
that CD, very all sorts of things, it’s really good that you brought out
another edition, it has a this, that and the other sound” and I said, “Right,
yet another thing I did fifteen years ago, when I have things now!”, but things
of today don’t have a chance. For a certain group of people further distanced
from it – but it’s very difficult categorizing people into this and that – but
sometimes people like certain things more, and if you want to like certain
things which are possibly more complicated, you have to learn how to do it,
unfortunately! Now I think that the general public have to learn, because they can’t,
as they use to be able to, listen to a work by Palestrina in the same easy or
intuitive way as they do to a work by Wagner. The tonal structure is quite
different, but there are things in common which people used to be able to grasp
without having to learn anything – now the public is almost invited to learn. I
think it’s a bit heavy, but I can’t see another way of doing it. But this is
just to say that in this piece, I afterwards managed to talk to them, and so
only the voice of my composer friend Rodney Waschka II was used, who recites a
text I wrote called Do Princípio e do Fim,
[“From the Beginning and from the End”], and I managed to make a bridge, a
connection between the two.
Something new, with new material, and I have to say that as far as I
know – because it has already been to Barcelona and to Paris and other cities
are in queue after that – it’s
really quite a big success. People really liked it, and it has worked very
well. Present day things, the CD called Músicas Fictícias,
which from my point of view is already outmoded, the things which I do now are
perfectly in step with what I want to do, although, once again, I am now
thinking that the time has come to move on to other situations or rather, to
some extent I have found a way of producing pieces which are acceptable abroad.
They work very well at festivals, and now I could go on doing this, but my life
is always very eclectic. As soon as I begin to form a habit, I try to break it.
Now I am again trying to break it, which is somewhat difficult because I still
haven’t seen very clearly in which direction I should be going forward.
Well, if I
only knew. To think of it, that is really my question too. Let’s do it like
this: when in 1998 I was able to
re-launch myself in composition, it was quite clearly a question of technique.
Macintosh computers had become sufficiently fast for me to be able to recreate,
to a certain extent, the studio in Holland in my house, just as I had imagined
it. And in fact, that is what I did, and my first pieces, (which don’t exist,
no-one has heard them yet,) disappeared, and have a flavour of the eighties
about them. Then I did what I thought I should do, which was to listen to what
was being done now, in various fields, and I found out that it had changed a
bit in terms of sonority and attitude. Things are more elastic, fresher. So I
went through a certain period of readjustment and adaptation, because in this
field of electroacoustic music the only way I can see for a person to learn is
by listening, either that or by exposure. There is no formal way, you can make
descriptions, with better or worse metaphors, but it is simply by hearing.
There is no other way. It’s a question of listening, to tens and hundreds and
hundreds of CDs until you begin to understand how the sounds are linked
together. How do they make the transformation of A to B, what are the
connections between one sound and another, how does a sound with a metaphorical
image and another sound with another metaphorical image move from one to the
other. At that point, I began to understand, I began
to set about applying technique again, and that is my situation today. I
see now that it is a process I could have continued to practise, but being in a
precarious situation – I am not connected to any institution, and unfortunately
I have no commissions. Because when someone has regular commissions they find
themselves in a system for producing material – I can take risks, because I
have nothing to lose. So, I’m not just going to stay where I am. I already had my system set up and I
could now have got on with my career, but no.
There
is also a fundamental contribution from a technical and aesthetic reflection
which makes its mark and points out directions. There is a collection of texts
by the New Zealand composer Denis Smalley which I really enjoyed reading in
which he elaborates a little on theories by Pierre Schaeffer and others, to
which he gives the name Spectromorphology. Or rather: morphology is the form,
and the spectra are the sounds. However, he found that the sounds have a form
given by their spectre, by their composition. And that form, that
transformation of form, is one of the ways of giving progression to a structure
(in this case electroacoustic or acousmatic music)
so that the progression can be made, in order to provide contrasts, to have
points of rest. However, making a
structure is, in fact, creating a form. This was an area which emerged at the
end of the eighties but which has been, I wouldn’t say validated, that’s not
quite true, but developed by a number of composers. It began with Jonty
Harrison, who was also a contemporary and colleague of Denis Smalley and, later
on, by his pupils – mostly English: Peter Stollery, Natasha Barrett, and Andrew
Lewis, who are now all well established. They all composed a set of
electroacoustic pieces, which I feel have a poetry and a force which I had not
heard since I heard Bernard Parmegiani’s first record in 1980. In certain
respects, this has been the area on which I have concentrated to relearn and
find out how I could do that. I think that this I have managed to do, both from
the technical aspect and also from the aesthetic aspect, from how to connect
the sounds and how to order them, I think I’ve more
or less succeeded. Now I feel that I should move on from that aspect.
For
example, my work Canções Cativas [Captive
Songs], which earned this name because it cost me a lot of work to get the
structure right. I don’t know why, whether it was because I was concerned about
other things, other problems, but it was very hard work creating a structure of
the sort I wanted for the material I had. Hence the name “Captive Songs”,
because the songs were held captive inside the musical material. I spent a
great deal of time reordering them, replacing them and rewriting them. That was
a composition that I took a long time reordering because I had just constructed
certain sound complexes, often lasting several seconds, sometimes as much as 30
seconds, and then I wasn’t managing to link them together. I even thought of
making a collage by contrasts, but I was no longer interested in a surrealist
aesthetic. I’m not going to do that again, because I really had to hear a whole
lot of things over again, think again, and then take a new look at the musical
material. I discovered, for example, that certain low sounds could easily be
crossed with the drone of a motor, which could be the origin of a pedal point
of a sound aggregate that filtered another object. So, from there I started
more or less to create the structure. It was the first piece in which I felt
all the aesthetic problems and all the questions and solutions proposed by
Denis Smalley in an article in 1986. Therefore, this is a piece I would
salvage.
The
metaphor is a figure of style. I’m not quite sure if it was first defined by
Aristotle, or someone else like that. As a figure of style, it is a person
speaking about something using terms taken from something else. It is a
transferral. Right from the
outset, there is the idea of progression from A to B, that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that in music, as we understand it, (with tonal
instruments) there is a large divide between day to day sounds and the sounds
of music. This separation was made especially clearly from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries onwards. And so, when someone talks of instrumental music
they are of necessity always talking in metaphors. People have tried to get
away from that, but when it comes wanting to say something, it always ends up
by being in metaphors. One speaks of metaphors of density, of masses, or, as I
have suggested, of structure, of clarity, of progression, or of movement.
Because the idea of movement in music is a metaphor. The idea of height, of
rising and falling tones, that’s another metaphor. Therefore, so-called
traditional music lives through metaphors. In electro-acoustic music, the field becomes more peculiar,
in that when someone writes a composition, instead of saying “it sounds like
the birds” they can introduce a live recording of actual birdsong. One can play
with the literal aspect of the sounds but also, by using transformations, one
can play with the metaphorical aspect of the sounds too. I think that while in traditional music
a person can play with the metaphorical aspect of the sounds – though the music
itself is always manipulated in terms of metaphor – in electro-acoustic music a
person can play not only with the literal aspect but also with the metaphorical
aspect, which comes from the past. This produces another level of tension, a
level of differentiation which one can use creatively.
When I
spoke in terms of metaphor, and gave those examples of structure, form, etc.,
those are only the metaphors to describe music in technical terms; I should
have said that whether we are describing music in technical terms, or in
poetical terms, we are always using metaphors. Therefore, the so-called
technical language of music is a metaphorical language, although it has become
customary. Also, in addition to all this, if someone wants to say something
further, they have to have recourse to other metaphors, of a far more poetic
nature. Or rather, the person making the description has to be more inventive,
he has to use other words instead of using a vocabulary that is already really
established. In actual fact, technical vocabulary is a metaphorical vocabulary
and the other becomes a more poetic vocabulary. In the field of
electro-acoustics, the technical part has nothing to do with metaphor; the
technical part really is a technical description. Someone says: “I did this, I
connected these wires, I used this programme, I used this process “. That’s one thing, now as to the
transformation of these structures. These structures make sound and these
sounds are transformed into something else: let us call it music; I have
decided to call it music. And this transformation, this transition, in which
there is the poetical part, and also, as I was saying, the metaphors. There are
sounds which one may use and which appear in their literal aspect, for example
in the case of birdsong. Quite simply, the sound of recorded birdsong in a
concert hall creates a completely new context for the concert hall. It creates
a space which comes from the outside but which does not exist, so immediately
the metaphor becomes doubly poetic.
In other words, reality, literal reality, becomes poetic by means of the
composer’s action and by means of the music. To me, this is music working.
I think
that in all of my works - with the exception of the last which no longer has it
– whether it is Canções Cativas or A Horizontal do Vento,
from 2002 and 2001 respectively, there is always a part, an area within them,
which is more sono-photographic, or phonographic. There is now a group of
people who are very active on the internet, who devote themselves to
phonographics. When I heard
that word, I thought they were old 78 vinyl records, but they say they are
photographs with sounds. So, they have a recorder, and make recordings and then
present them just as they are. They say they are unedited, but it’s not quite
the case, because as soon as someone chooses to record something, it
automatically becomes a point of view. There is always the person’s point of
view, however small that is. But it is also true that they make no
transformations since they do not want to use systems or complicated machinery.
In the
majority of my compositions, I use a sono-photographic part in order to
contrast with the more abstract and detailed structures, with more technical
pirouettes, preceding and succeeding them. In fact, that is how the structure
comes into being, and sometimes it uses previous sounds that are transformed, but
it also uses sounds that have not been directly transformed. In a piece which
was to have been performed in Évora in 2002, but which never was, a 13 minute
piece called Les Femmes Harmoniques, there was
a long structure. There was a gesture made by a synthetic piano, but of a
perfectly tonaI character, that blended in with a structure that lasted five or
six minutes, almost at the extreme limit of audibility, but where there were
dozens of small sounds, natural or others. I had imagined that this would be performed
live, in a large space, in the Temple of Diana in Évora, with its huge
exterior, on a summer’s evening, so as to re-contextualise the entire space.
There were sounds of water, sounds of animals, of insects which I imagined
lived there, but then too there would be the sounds of cars passing slowly by
from one side to the other, and also the sounds of human beings, of people
talking, though very quietly. This was my idea, to give the impression of
reality from the use of illusion, which is a real question of metaphor.
Specifically
here in Portugal, for a period of six or seven years of hiatus, I worked on the
control of noise and sound pollution.
It is a preventative measure and purely a question of setting the
levels, just as they are dictated by machines that we call sonometers, within
the legal limits. There is no
other reflection beyond this, in fact practically it can hardly even be that,
but at International Congresses that I attended, I saw that as far as I know at
the moment, there is concern to rethink this rather legalitarian and incomplete
approach somewhat and to go in for the idea of sound ecology. In other words,
to think that not all sounds are bad, nor that all noise, even that which is
produced artificially, is necessarily bad, and that perhaps one should try to
create a balance that produces a whole soundscape. I think it is a bit difficult, but it is a breath of fresh
air, over and above the idea of simply measuring the levels and controlling
them. In legal terms, however,
when there is a complaint and one gets involved in these procedures, one can’t
make long explanations.
We can
close our eyelids and select the images we want, but our ears hear 360º without
eyelids, all the time. If we are
hearing continuously, our attention eventually wanders. It is natural that we only hear a noise
if it is very loud, or if it comes up behind us as if it was a danger. Meanwhile, with images, since we have
eyelids and a bi-ocular, bifocal vision, focussed ahead like all predators, we
have a tendency to focus. Maybe
because of this we take more notice of the abundance of images, but I think
that as well as this being a civilisation of image, it is also very much a
civilisation of sound. I think a
person loses half the story if he doesn’t connect to the sound. It’s like in the cinema, where I see
lots of interviews with directors, and then I see the composers or the sound
designers always saying that the sound element in cinema is treated like a poor
relation. Even in big productions,
they have about a week in which to do everything, and it is all based on the
question of image, on the frame, which has great importance. But it is the sound
track which gives a film its context, so that one can see things which are not
there, the context all around, the complete atmosphere. Without that, most productions get
nowhere, only a little story remains, all very well….
Approaching
composition nowadays
With the
works as they stand now, there is a sense of balanced synthesis, with life and
expression, between my technical know-how and my ability as a composer tout
court from the order of the structures and the choice of
sounds, dynamics, processes and development. For some time my technical ability
was as a rule, greater than my capacity for composition. I spent some
considerable time getting this aspect up to the level of real technical
ability. I think that now they are well balanced. I think that perhaps I still
have to work on my capacity as a composer and let my technical capacities stay
as they are, also because they cannot go much further. Once a person knows how
to programme, the machines remain the same. But it is necessary, as a composer,
to have more ideas to employ and also to look out for new things that I can do.