Interview with Carlos Zíngaro (Full Version)

 

 

Carlos, I’d like you to tell me a bit about the various different situations in which you find work; because it’s clear that when you compose for the stage, for instance, you use electronics and not necessarily the violin as an interface. When you perform on stage, in a more improvised context, it works the opposite way. I would like you to explain to me how you work according to each compositional situation.

 

To begin with, I have to say that it’s very difficult for me to separate or create a dichotomy between improvisation and composition, as when I’m improvising, especially on my own, I’m composing. All my composition work, or at least most of it, scores, etc., stands inevitably, as with so many other composers, on trying things out, experimenting, improvising. The difference lies in the fact that when one improvises, as you know, it all happens in real time, one can’t correct it, recycle it or re-use some of the elements, whilst composing is exactly that. What pleases me about the compositional side conventionally called improvisation is the risk factor, the spontaneity. It’s a fact that for a long time now I’ve only seldom used scores, with parts for the other performers. I don’t feel I’m a composer of works; this never worried me, my work lies in the interpretation of myself.

 

 

So, you only use scores when you compose for other people?

 

Precisely. But not only that. Every so often, when I do particular solo work, I feel the need of a certain structure for a better definition of the path to choose. This doesn’t mean I need a score in the traditional sense of notes on the stave, as much as a graphic score that will enable me to establish a certain number of rules throughout the path.

What happens very regularly is that, throughout the concert, in this case, a solo concert, I set off without any structure because working live relies precisely on certain reflexes or feedback from where I am, the kind of public watching me, their reaction, etc. That’s important to me. Thus, I often give up the structure and start working with the macro-structure which is space – physical, architectonic, acoustic – the public space in which I am.

 

 

What about the situations in which you provide a score for other musicians, don’t you need one for yourself?

 

I haven’t done it in a long time. Neither have I been regularly using a score for other musicians. I now use scores solely for stage music, when a certain type of instrumentation is necessary which implies that the musicians being used are readers and performers; then it is necessary to create a perfectly traditional score.

When I play abroad I rarely write, because I normally get to play with such extraordinary musicians and such good composer-improvisers, with their own language, that I feel truly privileged to be able to contribute in a personal way that generally greatly transcends what I could conceive or write down. So I feel it’s almost an aberration to write out a score, interesting though it may be. It is a fact that there are many kinds of stage music… I usually make a fairly clear distinction between theatre and dance. Unfortunately, most of the time I had occasion to write for theatre in Portugal, my music ended up just being “systematic”, functional. It’s used as a backdrop, as a basis for changes of scene, the entrances and exits, etc. Thus it becomes something merely illustrative and even redundant, because it works merely as a complement to action that’s already there both in movement and speech. In spite of that, although I obviously agree to do it for economic reasons, I always end up learning something in the process.

In truth, I find it much more interesting to compose for dance than for the kind of theatre usual in Portugal (which is declamatory theatre). The other components assume the role of mere décors, of accompaniment for the main thing: the text itself, the speaking of the text and the action. The presence of sound, of music, of composition in dance, has a totally different dimension, and most times, it’s not at all illustrative.

 

 

Don’t the dance steps of the choreography itself act as a limitation?

 

I must say this seldom happens; I mean, one rarely gets into a situation in which the work with the dancers, the company or the group has already been set or choreographed in a particular way, forcing the music to bend to accompany it with rhythm and movement.

In such a case I would inevitably end up making do, but luckily this situation seldom arises, as it is really disturbing for me. In fact, choreographers who contact me because they know my work, give me a free hand to compose, which is very gratifying, as it enables me to “choreograph musically” what they give me to watch, feel and understand of the whole show from the choreographer’s own conception. And I see this as several “layers” of reading the show (because, in New Dance, movement may also include text, soundtrack, lights, video, etc.). I try not to be redundant or illustrative. I search precisely for my own interpretation and compose from my way of seeing, understanding and feeling such an object.

 

 

But, compositionally, when such a work doesn’t involve a score and is not based in immediate composition, as is the case when improvising, how do you compose, what’s compositional work like? Do you use technology and the like?

 

Undoubtedly, ever since technology developed and became accessible, it’s been fantastic to use it. One of the things that always fascinated me from the time of musique concrète, for instance, is the manipulation of sound material. In those days one would cut up little bits from kilometres of tape, stick them together and edit them, etc. which was rather complicated. Nowadays, with the advantage of technology, of computers, of musical information technology, hard discs and so on, it’s possible to manipulate the material or the sound object almost as though it were plastic. I really like the idea of sculpting sound.

To “get hold of” a note, a sound, work on it until you obtain another material is to me, nowadays, much more effective. It’s a lot easier than fiddling with paper, pen and pencil. I don’t mean I no longer use them to put ideas down, prepare structures, define timings and so forth. In any case, it is musical information technology which has enabled me to try new sounds. I don’t have to look for an instrument, but for a particular timbre or other sounds, having frequently as a starting point the sound of a real instrument. I often use the violin as a first material for a job I’ll do later using this technique.

 

 

And yet this is not what happens when you compose for stage, in which you generally use more technology…

 

More in the case of theatre, there you are… Maybe because I need to have something more “concrete” (if I can use the expression)… sometimes one has to use clichés. For instance, if you have a grand entrance of a king on stage, you may need the sound of trumpets, which is one of those classic things. Obviously, quite often I can only count on one trumpeter or a bugle player, which means I’ll have to be a lot more definite. If I want it to sound like several players, I can always use technology, but will have to keep to that particular sound, to that particular colour, or else to use samples. This will mean using more technology, but I use it as though I were playing piano, only with different sounds.

I can also have a recording of instrumentalists on which I can work to produce the final composition. In the case of dance, at least in the kind of work I have done so far, I have used quite a wide range of options. I choose the kind of colours I want to use and from that I get other combinations, other sounds and timbres.

 

 

What do you think has more weight in this compositional work, especially in what you do for the stage in terms of sound? Do you use the same experimental sounds or do you prefer to go beyond that and get a different array of sounds from different provenances?

 

It depends on the context. Especially as regards dance, as I have more freedom (in the majority of cases, total freedom), I look for what I’m interested in, what I want to delve into or experiment within the context.

 

 

So, you don’t necessarily use an instrumental approach to attain definite instrumental sounds?

 

Exactly. I mean, the approach is in the end instrumental, with the instruments I create. Generally, people prefer (especially stage designers) a more classical situation, in which you can see which instruments are used. It’s those instruments, and nobody is under any illusion, because they are there fulfilling their function. I always try to pervert this. But there are times when it’s necessary because they call up wider, older references, more comprehensible to the public in general.

 

 

(Returning once more to the beginning)

 

The idea of composing, in terms of a work, a finished object, has never interested me much. I may be completely wrong, perhaps because from early on I began performing my own things or because my academic training in music began very early and the approach taken to classical music at the time may have traumatized me: what one should listen to, what to play and how to do it was all defined. This may perhaps have distanced me from that route, and determined what I’ve been doing now for several years. So therefore the idea of a finished work, or just of a work, was always foreign to me. I find it difficult to accept a disc, because for me music is, within these characteristics, a living object, in real time. For me the score is, in this particular case, like a disc. It’s a sound recording.

 

 

So it’s an end result and not a starting point?

 

Absolutely. For me, it’s the situation of the present moment, which is important. And perhaps the most important is the work in progress, the process of work, rather than the final work or final object as such.

 

 

Your use of technology and computers and so forth also differs according to the kind of work you’re doing. For example, is the use you make of electronics, of electronic technology, when you use the violin to set off the sounds (more in cases of immediate composition) different from the way you use electronics on stage? How does this come about?

 

Composing for me is improvising with the possibility of correcting. When I’m in a studio writing music for stage, whatever it is, I establish a score, whether real of virtual, and then I erase things, reuse things, and throw away what’s not interesting.

 

 

There’s the case of Cage of Sand, the disc that’s about to come out, a studio disc, but in which there is that difference. Why is that? Because there too you would have been able to erase and correct…

 

But very little… I don’t consider it to be a studio disc. It’s a disc that was recorded live, with two other musicians.

Cage of Sand is much more composition than improvisation. It’s that situation of dichotomy. Because when you get on stage, with the audience in front of you and you’re playing a solo, even if it’s structured, there’s always the freedom to change the structure, because there are circumstances that determine this. The acoustics of the space, for example. In most cases, I don’t know the spaces before I get there. So, there are a number of conditions which determine that what I might have premeditated does not happen. Then, there’s the immediate side of things, a certain spontaneity, which gives rise to another kind of performance, an other kind of intensity and, inevitably, another kind of music.

 

 

So what we hear on the disc could not have happened in the same way if it had been recorded on stage?

 

It would be very difficult, even if the material used were identical or very close. But in terms of the work of manipulation that I did for this disc, and in spite of having left most of the material in a raw state, I can’t reproduce it live in the same way.

 

 

But you could in a recording made live…

 

And then work on it. That’s really what I did here. The difference is that instead of playing a concert from beginning to end for fifty minutes or an hour, and then making use of what happened, here I don’t. I play for three minutes, go downstairs and make some coffee, answer the telephone, and then I work for ten hours in a row. So, there’s a completely different kind of interrelation with the material. Even the way of listening to them. Listening and listening again. Using the metaphor of sculpture, you polish here, add a bit more clay there. Live, there’s no safety net.

 

 

So this disc is more “composed” than composition done immediately on the stage?

 

It’s also more conceptual. I could have chosen to make a recording as though it were live. I can sit here and work out a 50 minutes solo with several pieces. I play from beginning to end and what was recorded stays and you don’t touch it any more. But this is a falsification, because actually I’m playing live, in real time, but I’m not playing live in the sense that there’s another space and other people. There are other elements in the kind of approach I use, which are inevitably important because they affect me positively or negatively. Somebody coughing in the third row may not be deeply traumatic, but it’s a sound element that interferes. Here that doesn’t happen. The telephone might ring. But when I’m recording, I disconnect the telephone. Live there’s a different tension, another way of feeling the space. Studio work is laboratory work, in which I don’t have the luxury of time to experiment and make big mistakes, which is not the case live. The mistakes go in the rubbish, or the following day I can listen to what I thought was a mistake the day before and find it marvellous, and use it. So, it’s this kind of work with the materials that’s different.

 

 

In this studio work you do, which is the same as saying your compositional work, do you create a distance from yourself as a violinist, or is that difficult?

 

It’s very difficult.

 

 

Do you not want it to happen, do you really try to distance yourself and find that difficult? What happens? Because there’s this question: there’s something you do directly with technology, the studio, and there’s something else, which has to do directly with you being a violinist.

 

I usually say that when I’m composing for myself, for violin, I’m using an artificial substitute with which I have a love-hate relationship, even after all these years. It’s part of me. This may sound like late romanticism, but it’s something I know well, that I want to know even better; in fact, I was almost born with it – I was playing at four years of age. But when you use other materials, it’s almost as though you were using other musicians, even though it’s obviously not the same thing.

 

Specifically as regards technology… Every day new things appear, there are regular upgrades and you have always to be re-adapting and re-evaluating what is a given but, in fact, is not. Thence the parallel that I make regarding the use of other musicians; because today you could have a trombonist with certain characteristics (in performance, I mean) and tomorrow, for the same piece, you could have another. The sound is different and the way of performing too. It’s this re-adaptation of materials that I use in technology. With the violin it’s different.

 

I remember that in the 1970s I had to do a set of theatre pieces, in which I had to compose for horn, trumpet, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, piano, guitar, double bass, and in which I also played two or three pieces (in fact, it was a piece for the stage and also for film, with more or less the same instrumentation). In this compositional process I didn’t always have access to a piano, and had no keyboard at home. There were times (especially for the film) when it was urgent to have the material ready; I’d sit up in bed until 4 in the morning composing with the violin in several parts, for wind quartet, piano, and so on. It was difficult and very disturbing.                                                                                                       Then I realized that, in some pieces, the line, the melodic construction, the parallelism of the harmony and to an extent the form, came from the violin.

 

 

“Violinocentric…”

 

It’s true, it referred to the instrument. If you’ve got a piano, the range of possibilities is greater, which is why composers favour it. With the violin, on the other hand, you can calculate mathematically harmonies, mixtures, voices, rhythms, but it’s not the same thing. This explains why, in spite of everything, even in this situation, my instrument was the violin.

 

But nowadays you have precisely a kind of double personality as a musician. On the one hand, you’re a violinist, usually acoustic, especially in improvisation, in concert; and then, on the other hand, you also us electronics. And, necessarily or otherwise – you tell me – what you do in one is different from what you do in the other, in some way it’s not the same. What do you think about this? Live and otherwise…

 

This has a great deal to do with technology and the choices which technologically possible. I’ve never given up the violin and its acoustic sound, however much was present in the way of electronics. Many years ago, I played electric violin, which didn’t have any acoustic sound (I’ve still got it, but never used it again). The wood, the acoustics of the instrument, has always had a very important role for me.

I think that I can perhaps divide using violin and electronics vaguely into four phases. The first phase was very basic; at the time, I would set out bases, textures, spaces, over which I would play with the electronics (live and pre-recorded or pre-programmed). It was much more of a compositional thing than later, because I also had to pre-programme, or pre-structure, certain pieces over which I was going to play. They would end up being pieces for violin and electronics, or tape. They were rigid, determined, even when I used sequences that could interrupt live. But in any case, the sequence was pre-planned.

I can go back to an even more basic phase: the use of pedals, effects and sound manipulation, from which I was desperately trying to run away at the time. Then there was a phase which has to do with what I mentioned before concerning technological evolution, which allowed me, with the Pitch-to-Midi system, to interact much more closely and directly with the violin. This technology allows one, when playing the violin, to set up pre-programmed sequences or not; to trigger samples, synthesis; and, later, when you begin to use the computer you can manipulate whatever you’ve done on the violin. The term Pitch-to-Midi means transcription of the parameters of velocity and pitch to Midi code. And this went into sequencers, computers, samplers, synthesizers, and helped to create a number of situations, which did not depend on effect, but interacted, they were interactive. Nevertheless, these things had to be pre-programmed in Midi terms, not all of them, but some. Nowadays, I can do the same thing with audio, with the sound of the violin. This is precisely what I did in Cage of Sand. The manipulation of what I do in real time is on account of technology, thanks to the computer and the programmes I use, in which I’ve almost given up any sound that does not originate from an instrument, in this case the violin. And all the sounds on the disc have the violin as their basis, sounds which I played and manipulated in real time, or which I sampled.

 

 

But there’s a question you didn’t answer: do you think that the music that you do, with and without electronics are different? In that you are even working in different spaces?

 

They’re quite different. But I’m still myself. And a piece for solo violin is just that, just violin.

But even with other musicians, for example, what you did with Voicecrack and which is coming out now in disc, or what you did with Mats Gustafson or with Joëlle Léandre…

 

But in those cases I’m not an autonomous composer, it’s different… there I’m a composer with other composers.

 

 

With Voicecrack too?

 

Exactly. There’s a completely different relationship because, in fact, when I’m playing solo, when I prepare a solo concert, I only depend on myself.

 

 

But what I mean is that the use of electronics…

 

The use of electronics gives me other parameters which I have to take into account. I have to spread them out, and there composition has a different kind of risk, or another kind of approach, that of a concert. With technology there are failures, and I continue to learn how to work with them and use them.

 

 

So you feel that you’re really working into different areas, one of acoustic improvisation in a more conventional way, if you like, and the other, which is characterized by the use, or by a particular kind of use, of electronics in real time.

 

It’s inevitable that there be some difference, but I wouldn’t separate it quite that much. With any use I make of electronics, it’s inevitable that I have to do some programming work beforehand, preparing the electronic material, creating a new patch, or something of the kind, that will condition what I do with the mistakes, with the more or less increased parameters, etc. But the work that I do beforehand for an acoustic violin is different. I can work out structures, paths, sequences of pieces, but at the time I can change it completely, or even completely ignore the structure that I’ve made – because it’s just me and the violin. The most that can happen is that the bow falls, a string can break, the violin can fall apart in my hands, but that’s it. I know what’s there. It’s those four strings, depending on tuning or de-tuning. With electronics, the things I prepare previously are different.

 

 

But when you are playing the violin, there are also a number of things that are already prepared, even if incomplete. In other words, your education, training, experience…

 

Even though, as I usually say, through academic de-training, I fight against some situations that may be determined by one kind of education or another. When I’m playing live, on acoustic violin, I feel that I’m in a situation that has parameters – subconsciously or otherwise, defined, idiomatic, as some people like to say. I have to fight that. There are things I’d like to do at that moment and can’t, because I have to go back home and re-programme so that it will allow me to do it. And there’s something else: working with electronics allows me to play less, and this gives me room to move and, inevitably, reflect, gives me distance from the instrument, or the instruments, which would not be the case in a concert.

 

So when I work with a computer, there’s a different distance, another posture, because there are a number of other instruments that are also there and which I can manipulate. I can put the violin down and work just with the computer, based on that I’ve just played. But this distance took me some time to come to terms with; in a way it was strange, because I was used to holding on to the violin all the time.

 

 

You make use of pedals…

 

I’ve used pedals more in the past than I do today. I prefer to play violin standing up, and I quickly realized that when I had many pedals, it seemed as though I was doing some ridiculous kind of step dancing, with a foot on one side and a foot on the other, almost losing my balance. So I had to play sitting down. And I don’t like it that much … I tried to get rid of the pedals, though of course I still use them.

 

 

Even with the computer?

 

Even with the computer, and sometimes just as input and output of sound material. When I’m playing and there are things I don’t want in the computer because I’m not going to work with them later in real time. There I make a shortcut to the violin through the computer. There’s material that’s being prepared in the computer which I don’t need immediately, and I have another pedal. Basically, they’re not pedals for the manipulation of parameters, but more pedals for controlling volume, entries and exits; essentially, it’s a mixing, a composition in real time.