Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre
Linking Portuguese Music to the World
In 2015 the Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre and its website, www.MIC.PT, enters the 15th year of its activity.
In 2000 Miso Music Portugal, a non-profit cultural association of public utility, submitted the project to constitute the Centre within the European programme then designated as Operational Programme for Information Society (PoSi). In consequence the Centre was constituted at the end of 2001 in order to fulfil various objectives of public service – cataloguing, archiving, studying, preserving, publishing and promoting the Portuguese Music Patrimony, within and beyond borders, and putting emphasis on the probably most mistreated and surprisingly least known period in the history of Portuguese music: the 20th Century!
Some additional support for the project’s realization was received from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Ministry of Culture and the Camões Institute. The official release of the MIC.PT database and website took place on January 6, 2006, at the Camões Institute in Lisbon.
The MIC.PT scientific board constituted by Isabel Soveral, António de Sousa Dias, Paulo Ferreira-Lopes, Pedro Rebelo, Rui Vieira Nery and Tomás Henriques, together with the direction constituted by Paula Azguime and Miguel Azguime, defined then the driving forces of MIC.PT’s strategy and activities, as well as its main objectives. Among these one should highlight the recovery and digitisation of the Portuguese Music Patrimony, contributing for its valorisation and its national and international divulgation, encouraging its research, preservation and digital storage; including the digital edition and online distribution of scores, registering the circulation of Portuguese music, as well as, creating new opportunities for Portuguese composers and performers.
Gradually all these objectives have been being fulfilled. In this sense, in 2015 the Centre launches a new initiative, announced here at first hand, and which during January will be materialized in the edition of Dossiers of Portuguese Composers from the 20th and 21st Centuries, whose two first issues will be dedicated to Sara Carvalho and Paulo Ferreira-Lopes.
Database
Having been conceived and created within the perspective of digital evolution in constant acceleration, which nowadays (re)defines our everyday life, the MIC.PT central nucleus is constituted by a database, built from scratch, partially available online, and whose structure is based on the four following elements: works, composers, performers and materials. In this sense the MIC.PT website is regularly updated with relevant information on Portuguese composers, or residing in Portugal, with focus on the music creation from the 20th and 21st centuries, including the performers of Portuguese contemporary music. The database is also constantly updated with new materials such as scores, audio and video files, images, musicological texts, articles, bibliographies and discographies, or music reviews, among others. For every work included in the MIC.PT database one provides complete information on instrumentation, duration, programme notes, commissions or public presentations. In consequence the works are linked directly to the composers’ and performers’ pages, as well as to any other corresponding material, either score, audio or video file, etc.
Presently the MIC.PT database has 9405 catalogued works, 179 active composers’ pages, as well as 8095 associated materials (texts, scores, images, audios or videos), covering several centuries of Portuguese Music.
Editions
Apart from providing pertinent information directly from the database, there are various other MIC.PT sections and activities, which have as objective the national and international recognition of Portuguese music, as well as providing specific services to composers. Here one should emphasise such projects as: the radio programme produced for the Antena 2, Música Hoje, dedicated to Portuguese music from the 20th and 21st centuries; the monthly MIC.PT newsletter with relevant information on activities of various contemporary composers, and consequently on music life in Portugal; as well as the In Focus section, every month dedicated to one Portuguese composer with anniversary or relevant works, either in form of a musicological or biographical article, or as a Questionnaire / Interview.
In this context the MIC.PT team is presently preparing a series of new digital editions. Their aim is not only to divulgate the extensive material contained in the In Focus’ since 2011 – a kind of portrait of composition in Portugal nowadays – but also to promote even more effectively and directly the work of Portuguese contemporary composers. In this sense the series of Dossiers of Portuguese Composers from the 20th and 21st Centuries will constitute an “introspection” in the work of every composer, being simultaneously an encouragement to explore and (re)discover their music, as well as their aesthetic and philosophic reflection. Every Dossier, created and edited in close collaboration with the composers, will be built of the following elements: short biography, questionnaire / interview or musicological article, and catalogue of works with two ordinations – by instrumentation or following the chronological order. As we referred above, the first Dossiers of Portuguese Composers from the 20th and 21st Centuries, whose release is planned at the beginning of the 2015, will be dedicated to Paulo Ferreira-Lopes and Sara Carvalho, composers In Focus on the MIC.PT in September and December last year, respectively.
At a time when the MIC.PT website has reached an average of more than 500.000 annual visits, it has become evident that this portal constitutes a privileged place for the edition of scores in digital format. This activity aims at distributing scores of works by Portuguese composers, making them available online for preview or free download, and thus promoting them to be known, chosen and researched among performers, ensembles, programmers and the academic environment, both in Portugal and abroad. The edition and distribution of scores by the Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre is a free of charge service provided to composers, which guarantees that the complete ownership of the works remains theirs, including the totality of the author’s rights. The online Catalogue of Scores published by the MIC.PT is every month updated with new works, and presently it includes 872 scores by 51 Portuguese composers from the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Among the more recent MIC.PT editions one also needs to highlight the new CD, Cadavre Exquis, Portuguese Composers of the 21st Century. This first CD released under the auspices of the Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre, in collaboration with the Miso Records and the MINSTREL European project, is composed of 45 acoustic and electroacoustic music miniatures by 45 contemporary Portuguese composers, constituting a unique overview of Portuguese contemporary composition.
International Projection
By means of its various projects the MIC.PT actively promotes the international visibility and presence of Portuguese music. Presently the Centre belongs to various international networks, which share similar objectives with regards to preservation and divulgation of art music, that is: International Association of Music Information Centres (IAMIC); International Music Council & European Music Council (IMC / EMC); International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM); International Network for Contemporay Performing Arts (IETM); as well as the projects, MINSTREL and On the Move, among others. In this sense, we should highlight two recent examples within this activity for the sake of Internationalization of Portuguese Music: the concert with the work Momentos-Memórias II by Cândido Lima, for Portuguese and classic guitars and orchestra, in October last year, during the Annual Conference and Meeting of the International Association of Music Information Centres, Tradition and New Music, in Wroclaw in Poland; and the concert dedicated to Portuguese electroacoustic music with works by Filipe Lopes, Rui Penha, Duarte Dinis Silva, Carlos Marecos, André Castro, Carlos Alberto Augusto, Pedro Patrício, Simão Costa and Carlos Guedes at the CIME / ICEM 2014 Conference and Festival, which took place at the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia in Texas, equally in October last year.
At a time when the MIC.PT completes 15 years since its conception, the new digital editions materialized in a series of Dossiers by Portuguese Composers from the 20th and 21st Centuries constitute another step forward in the prosecution of its objectives when it comes to divulgation of Portuguese Music Patrimony. Putting emphasis on the digital is a natural response to the present time, not only within the technological context, but also with regards to economical, ecological and civilizational sustainability. Unquestionably, all the materials available on the MIC.PT are digital – articles, composers’ dossiers, scores, images, audios or videos, … – and it is obvious that this inevitable format offers numerous benefits, namely: the easy and immediate access to all kinds of data related with musical creation or the possibilities of cooperating in network between music information centres around the world, … Nevertheless the digital transformation also brings new challenges, which one could designate as the “paradox of continuity of digital objects”. Seeking to respond to this crucial question the MIC.PT cooperates actively in a project led by the Portuguese General Directorate of Books, Archives and Libraries (DGLAB), and the Network for Common Preservation of Digital Patrimony (RPCPD).
January 2015
© MIC.PT
