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Entrevista a Ernesto Rodrigues / Interview with Ernesto Rodrigues
2003/Aug/26
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I’m increasingly aware of the importance of the existence of a greater awareness of composition in real time, as regards composition as such. By this I mean that there are some musicians, technically weak, in virtuosic and technical terms, but who manage to work very well in real time. This is the case with some musicians of the English school, some weaker than others, but some are extremely good with real time. This attribute seems to be becoming more and more important in the New Improvisation.
For me, they are two complementary things. They are two ways of arriving at the same end. You can use one or the other, it doesn’t matter to me. I know wonderful musicians in both areas. I, for example, tend to do both things. I like to do both, and so I can’t say that one is better than the other.
Some of my pieces were written entirely by hand, and were then put through a sequencer. I also improvise, which is another way of composing. There are n methods. For example, one can improvise with notes, or do some gestures on a keyboard.
In spite of coming from this tradition, I structure improvisation less and less. Formerly, improvisation was structured, but today it is less and less so. Today, it’s more usual to receive a Japanese, a German or an American, without ever having seen him before, and to begin playing immediately. You don’t even talk, because each of these people has his own vocabulary. Only afterwards does one discuss “musical” ideas for the first time. Curiously, it’s this kind of improvisation that I find most interesting.
I’m not interested in doing things that have already been done and digested. It’s as though I’d been asked to paint a picture in the style of Van Gogh. It makes no sense at all. I think Van Gogh is one of the greatest painters, but let’s leave him in peace. He did what he had to do and was at the vanguard of his time. Aesthetic evolution in painting is the same as in music; in other words, it makes no sense to paint a picture in the style of Picasso today, because it’s already been done. Nowadays, something else is necessary. We’ve been through many things. We’ve seen the suprematists, the monochromaticists. All this is related to music too, because things are interconnected.
My first piece was completely written-out, but what you hear is an electronic piece. I have others that were played in their entirety and still others that were played first and then I eliminated and made use of some elements. Until now, none of my discs have been published. The first three contain complete studio sessions, but not the most recent, because these days it’s a bit too much to do discs of 70 minutes. We’re usually in the studio for an hour, 70 or 80 minutes, and we select the best, if something doesn’t go well. But usually everything would go well and we’d use everything.
My last disc, for example, is only 37 minutes and 40 seconds long. And I don’t think there’s anything missing. I don’t find it too short or too long. I feel that it’s balanced.
At first sight, contemporary music and improvisation may not be related at all. But I think that it’s possible for there to be contamination between these two worlds. There’s no problem, quite the opposite, it only enriches the lexicon and its world.
Sometimes I’d prefer my discs to have less of this expressivity. I try to do this, but then I am unable. For example, I Treni Inerti, which was a group I put out a while ago… it has a coldness, a rationalistic and conceptual coldness that I can’t reproduce. Though I’d like to be more arid, with less consonanza and harmony in a certain sense. I don’t consider this a negative thing, but sometimes I’d like to do something more rational.
The disc (which I still don’t know if I’m going to publish or not, because I haven’t heard it), which I’ve recorded with Costa Monteiro, is perhaps the most arid disc I’ve done up till now. When we were in the studio, I didn’t give a single note, and I usually always give notes. I also like this ambiguity of, from time to time, giving a note, a certain expressivity. But on this disc I didn’t do that, or at least I think I didn’t do that. For the first time I did it consciously. But I haven’t the slightest idea what’s there.
As far as contemporary music is concerned, at present I’m working on some things that I find interesting. The problem with contemporary music is different. It has to do with the question of performers. Because if you do a work for chamber orchestra, or some other group, where and when is it played? This is the problem. However, I can be my own performer. If I feel like writing a piece for electronic tuba and violin, I could play the violin part. But it’s also not that which interests me most. I’d have a great deal more pleasure in hearing it performed by somebody else.
I’ve been meaning to use live electronics for many years. But I never liked working with sequencers. That never fascinated me. Putting something there and then playing over it, no. I had the opportunity to do it many times, and never did, and it wasn’t just chance… It was never a passion of mine.
Influences
Since I was 15 or 16, I’ve liked composers of written contemporary music such as, for example, Xenakis, Peixinho, Boulez, Nono, Berio… I’m hugely fascinated by these composers. But without any doubt, the one who has most influenced me is Ligeti.
I came to Ligeti through Stanley Kubrick. I was still quite young at the time, but when I saw A Clockwork Orange I realized that the music was fascinating. So I began to investigate, to look for things in an encyclopaedia. A few months later, I already knew most of what had been published, and I became completely fascinated.
And I also learned a lot in Emmanuel Nunes’s seminars. In these seminars, we didn’t only analyse his compositions, but those of everyone who was there. And Emmanuel Nunes is a fascinating person, with an extraordinary capacity for discernment. He’s one of the greats, an extraordinary and fascinating composer.
Situation within the New Improvisation
Recently, I’ve been in e-mail correspondence with Dan Warburton, who’s a critic, violinist and pianist. I already knew his discs, and thought some of them fantastic, but I didn’t know he was a violinist. And in this respect, he has become one of the people who interest me most within the New Improvisation. And the piano too, I find interesting his exploration of the inside piano and those things that are more fashionable today in more avant-garde improvisation. Dan Warburton proved exactly what I had in mind some time ago. It’s that, if I feel like it, from one day to the next, why not do a disc of free jazz? Why not do it? It’s something I like and that’s inside me. It interests me because it has no barriers, “do this”, “don’t do that”, “I can do this”, “I can’t do that”.
I know in which aesthetic I should be moving. I know that I can’t do things like Costa Monteiro, for example, or play like Cecil Taylor, or some other musician of that kind. They come already from that tradition, and I have to adapt myself to another way. But, indeed, I like both things, and what interests me is that it be good music.
Though just now I said that I could do a disc of free jazz, because I like it, it’s not very likely. It’s much more likely that, of my next ten discs, nine will be New Improvisation and one of free jazz.
But there’s an aspect of New Improvisation which I’d like to underline: the category that John Cage proclaimed, in the 1950s, still in the first half of the 20th century, that of silence, was, I think taken up much more by the New Improvisation than by new written music.
I had an argument about this with Emmnanuel Nunes, because I thought that silence was being increasingly looked-for in new music, the “living music” that’s done today. And he asked me: “Well, show me where…” and, indeed, in the composers of the written tradition you don’t notice it much yet. It was more obvious in Cage, fifty years ago, than today with Gérard Grisey and all those composers of this new generation.
In this kind of music, silence is not something so sought-after as in the New Improvisation, in which it’s almost obligatory nowadays. But already in the 20th century, John Cage had indicated a path for this. One point is that silence is noise, but in the end noise and silence are such in a natural way. It’s natural that it be so. One thing implies the other.
All improvisers since Parker and Bailey included these elements, during the course of time, in their music. Bailey in 1995 was more noisy than Bailey in 1960. All this is progressive and natural.
The aesthetic paradigms and concepts of the avant-garde of the New Improvisation
Though we know that the Tokyo Off Site is more of a determination than an orientation or an aesthetic, it has much more to do with a circumstantial need than with a conceptual need.
The entire history of man’s aesthetics, not just music, was always determined by power. If we think about it, in the 11th century, the rhythms used were the Greek feet. They were all tertiary because of their connection with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Musical evolution was connected with the harmonic series because the Church found that the harmonic series was perfect. There was the octave, the fifth, and fourth and then the third… And all this with people being burnt at the stake. So, in relation to Off Site, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s circumstantial or not, but the fact is that it was born, and continues as such. Throughout the world there are many people following this line.
I think that the New Improvisation comes from that. It comes from spaces, from being unafraid to confront silence. Many years ago, people used to say “Two seconds of silence is too much! Three seconds is too much! Be careful when you put it together”, and then there were Syberberg, Tarkovsky and Jean-Marie Straub. Even Orson Welles, in Touch of Evil, did something extraordinary… He did an enormous sequential shot which was the record holder for years.
Tarkovsky, for example, has an eight-minute section and subverted all the rules. All this was prohibited because silence is very disturbing, and may be terrifying people. Now, the acceptance of silence, voluntarily and in a perfectly conceptualized form, is something of which much may be made, and we are only at the beginning of all this…
The case of Eddie Prévost is a good example of what I’ve just been saying. He’s one of the few improvisers of his generation who openly shares a weekly space in London with the younger generations (between 15 and 40 years of age). These young people have new ideas. And there’s a day in the Freedom of the City festival in which he promotes these young groups. I never saw him improvising in the “old” way. I think AMM are some distance ahead. It seems to me that the kind of improvisation of Schlippenbach or of Kowald is more rudimentary than that of AMM. They’re already pointing towards a new generation, or at least they share various musical experiences.
I have the greatest respect for the more classical improvisers, such as, for example, Evan Parker, and all those people, but I have increasing difficulty in listening to that kind of music. I don’t know if this kind of improvisation will ever come back again. I don’t think so. In its golden age it was extremely important, and had an important role in the development of improvisation, even influencing some composers of written music, but I think that this kind of music is not going to be sought out. It’s not going to go back to exhibitionism and technicality.
In technical terms, one thing is obvious – the way of exploring instruments in this New Improvisation covers new conceptions and new experimentalisms on the instrument in question. Until now, instruments had not been used in this way, as it happens in written music.
For example, in Gran Torso, a string quartet by Lachenmann which I consider extraordinary, the instruments are played in an unconventional way. He asks the musicians to play on parts of the violin, or of the cello, that are not usually used. Nowadays one can give an excellent concert just with two notes, within a semitone. Because today there’s such a wealth of things that one can do as much with two notes as the excess of information of the romantic composers whom I also love, such as Schumann and Wagner. But all this is part of a period. I think that anything that comes about has to do with the world as it was at the time. Many notes were demanded at the time. 100 years before, we see, for example, in Miles Forman’s film Amadeus, the emperor criticizing Mozart and saying: “Too many notes, too many notes…” So these are things that come and go. I think that now we’re in one phase, but in 200 years’ time we could be in a phase when more notes are wanted.
Arts and perfection
For example, in films, what I like is precisely what isn’t considered film by most people. The directors I most admire and like are Jean-Marie Straub, Syberberg, Tarkovsky, Sokurov (especially Mother and Son) and I also like Bergman very much. As Straub says, I’m fed up with stories, I think the cinema should be something else. And it was for that reason that my music stopped being narrative. Though we had lived through a time of crisis, which coincides with post-modernism, which at the time generated a certain confusion, in which all narrative art conquered some terrain over what has being developed at the time, I basically like “heavy” things. I like to feel weight in art.
I have many discs based on silence, and they have a density… I like Thomas Mann, Dostoievsky… Basically, I like what Milan Kundera set off at the end of the 20th century with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, even if it seems the other way round. Because, for me, the most difficult thing is to attain simplicity. I like a certain ambiguity in things, but I also can’t see this in a Manichaean way. Whether it’s good or bad… Just what it is, and I think that about any number of musicians.
What fascinates me in Zíngaro, in Brötzmann, in Xenakis or in Ligeti, is precisely the personality of the individual in the service of his expressivity in that field. Nobody can think that if Ligeti wanted to he could compose in the style of Berio, because it would be false. It would be false because each one has his own personality.
And then there may be more rigid ideas, for example, Jean-Marie Straub, whom I mentioned a while ago, when he films a magazine of 20 minutes, does so without any interruptions at all. Then he does another, with the same scene, and doesn’t edit at all. He chooses the best and makes no cuts. He chooses the best with all its errors and virtues. He doesn’t say: “This part is good”, ”I liked that bit and will use it”. He watches them both and chooses one. That’s the way I like to work, because there is more truth in it.
There are people who tell me exactly the opposite, but I find this stupid, because they’re damaging something for rational or conceptual reasons.
I realize that if we have, for example, two things in which the first ten minutes are good in one part, and in the other part it’s the last ten minutes that are good, why not cut and edit? But often things are not so perfect. Perfection doesn’t exist in art.
Everyone says that Velázquez was perfect, but it’s not true. He had his own perfection. But what is a perfect thing? What are we? Do we have divine awareness in order to say what is perfect? That would be very good… but perhaps if Velázquez rose again now he’d change something in his art. I don’t like perfect things!
