Questionnaire/Interview
Part 1 - Roots and Education
How did music begin for you? Where do you identify your music roots? Which paths led you to composition?
Daniel Schvetz: My grandmother was a violinist in Odessa, Ukraine, and David Oistrakh’s (friend) Colleague in the class of professor Stoliarsky. She made part of the 1st violins at the Buenos Aires Philharmonics. Her son - my father - was a pianist, yet he never became a professional. On the part of my mother’s family, both her parents and uncles were actors and singers of a “varietée” theatre. They performed in Yiddish and Russian and all of them immigrated to Argentina in the 1920s.
There were always two pianos at home, accompanied by a reasonable collection of discs, which during my adolescence was my great companion. It consisted of recordings both of great jazz and bossa nova performers, and of some great composers. For example, the recording of Maurice Ravel’s complete piano works by Walter Gieseking was for me one of the first truly intense experiences.
It seems, that at the age of two I started to look for the possibilities of playing the things that I was hearing, and that I felt like imitating – melodies, sounds… I remember playing during a nap of one of my granduncles. At the age of six or seven the attempts to perform what I liked became constant – music from films, television, radio. At most times I was trying to meet the “correct” chords; who knows which they were?
Which moments from your music education do you find the most important?
DSch: I had various piano professors. They all came from different schools, as well as possessed diverse techniques. Yet at the age of 15, or perhaps 16, I began to feel the necessity of registering and documenting my improvisations, sometimes in “exotic” languages. This urge led me to study harmony, analysis and composition, at first independently and then formally at the age of 18 at the National Conservatoire. There, I studied analysis and harmony with professor Fermina Cassanova, who was very important in giving me a unique perspective, similarly as the particular studies of counterpoint and composition with Guillermo Graetzer, one of Paul Hindemith’s pupils.
Part 2 - Influences and Aesthetic
What kind of references do you assume in your compositional practice? Which works from the history of music and the present do you find the most influential?
DSch: The first important experiences were Brahms (symphonies), and the piano works by Maurice Ravel, to which I shall add Prokofiev, Bartók, and… always Johann Sebastian Bach with his Musical Offering and the B minor Mass. Yet, there is one key moment – at the age of 13, soon after seeing a film on the life of George Gershwin, thanks to which I got to know his Rhapsody in Blue. It was a “touchée” that resulted in a real shock; something in me quivered, both intellectually and emotionally.
From the present (and supposing that the “present” are last 50 years), I assume as references some archetypes, and each one of them for different reasons: on the one hand, Ligeti, Takemitsu, Xenakis, Crumb, Feldman, Gubaidulina, Berio, Nono, Boulez… but I also can't ignore Bill Evans or Tom Jobim, my great masters in harmony. Still, the number of influences and references is certainly much greater.
The dichotomy “occupation – vocation” can define the artistic/professional approach of a composer. Where on the scale between the emotional (inspiration and vocation) and the pragmatic/rational (calculation and occupation), can you identify your manner of working and your stance as composer?
DSch: Meeting a balance within what we can distinguish as spontaneous or natural impulses, which will be translated, eventually, in base gestures or ideas of an artistic product, and to see this translation in the real, tangible world, constitutes a confrontation, which suffers, during the years, from different types of oscillations. What is the real measure of the influence that the everyday imperatives have in the creative approach is undoubtedly an interesting problem. The involvement at the moment of creating takes us to a level of abstraction, which, case by case, takes into account diverse degrees of “influenceability”.
Music, due to its nature, is essentially incapable of expressing anything – emotions, mental attitudes, psychological dispositions or any natural phenomenon. What music expresses is only an illusion or metaphor, and not reality. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? In this context how could you define your aesthetic stance?
DSch: In fact I don’t agree with this postulate. As a metaphor, imitation (Aristotle dixit), among other possible features, music has probably the capacity to be the purest expression of a certain reality, both “exterior” as well as of the artist himself. Yet, also this affirmation is without any doubt questionable.
Every new project is always a new challenge. I have “clichés” as well as multiple gestures or means, which, for the better or for the worse, appear cyclically and repeatedly in different works, where I am involved and on which I count. They are my “intertextual” friends – using this term from literature and philosophy seems somewhat comforting for me. I don’t have the ambitions to be modern or contemporary, but I feel a strong and intense desire towards everything that constitutes the “today”, from the so-called new technologies, up to the so-called street art as Hip-Hop or Rap, the silence of the Japanese Noh theatre, the complex political and social context in which we live; in the end we all are inevitably an “all-embracing” product.
In the context of western art music do you feel proximity to any past or present aesthetics or composition school?
DSch: From the past in western music – to the monodic religious chant, embracing the first polyphonic manifestations, particularly the Notre-Dame School (Pérotin and Léonin)... Neither of the tendencies or schools of musical creation is indifferent to me. Hitchhiking through the “western art”, I can mention the aesthetic and stylistic processes in architecture, painting, sculpture from the dawn of the medieval era up to Rothko, Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Pollock, Beckett, Lorca, Bejart, M. Graham… the list of aesthetics and styles that intoxicated or intoxicate my artistic thought is interminable. And for something more precise, I can indicate that the textural universe and the treatment of the harmonic field and support in composers as Takemitsu or Ligeti has always constituted a fundamental nourishment for me, likewise the aesthetic/political compromise in Nono yet… without the Art of Fugue, without the 5ths (both Beethoven’s and Mahler’s), without Berio’s Sinfonia, without Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, without Le Sacre… (To which I could add dozens of incomparably inspiring works and aesthetics)… I wouldn’t be able to imagine myself truly as composer.
Are there any non-western culture influences in your music?
DSch: Repeatedly there are direct or indirect references to oriental cultures, particularly Japanese and Chinese, and for different reasons. I cultivate a profound respect for different traditions such as the ceremony of brewing tea, Ikebana, Zen, Chinese opera, the timbres and sophisticated techniques in such instruments as Pipá, Shamisen, Shakuhashi, Koto, the whole aggregate of elements which, together with the Tai-Chi-Chuan and Chi-Kung practice, accompanies me since my youth, constituting a material, which in different ways either appears or is evoked in some works. Another great source of inspiration from outside Europe has to do with my Argentinian and, fundamentally South American origins, in two quite different aspects. On the one hand I was born and grew up in Buenos Aires, a gigantic and multifaceted city, and the aesthetic connected with the Tango constitutes a base with strong presence in some works, such as the Concerto for Bandoneon and Orchestra, or the Misatango, as well as in a certain number of works, themes, materials of diverse dimensions, in which the urban elements are seen as a source of evocation, as in De un relato.
Another great reference, the one that one can simply designate as folklore, involves the rest of my country, with special weight on the central-north and north-eastern parts (the Andean natural region), with dances and traditions exercising strong impact on various composers, such as Alberto Ginastera, Julián Aguirre, Carlos Guastavino. These references manifest themselves in different works cohabited by the folklore and tango, such as Hexámetro, or Cantata para un Silencio, also the Piano Concertino.
How do you understand “avant-garde”? In your opinion what nowadays can be considered as avant-garde?
DSch: It is known that the word “avant-garde” originates from particular situations during the First World War, when some soldiers used to go ahead in order to recognize the terrain, and possibly give warnings about the situation to the others. In any case they were the ones who used to arrive before, and this meaning ended up being projected in the arts, either visual or performative. What is interesting in this term or idea is that it belongs exclusively to the beginnings of the 20th century. Is it acceptable to think that the concept or idea of avant-garde didn’t exist in various different periods from the last 10 or 15 centuries? To think of what nowadays could be considered as avant-garde, is an invitation to an exercise of complex and difficult definition – at least for the one who writes it. I can’t manage to find a parallel with the significance of the Rite of Spring or Pierrot Lunaire, or the series of Compositions by Kandinsky, or the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki, or the 4’33’’ by Cage, expressions, among many others, of a real avant-garde. Just as it probably was at the premiere of the Notre-Dame Mass by Machaut, or the presentations of Shakespeare’s works by his company… It is probable that we might confuse the idea of avant-garde with the fascinating and constantly renovated technological means, the so-called new technologies, thanks to which it is easy to produce what Xenakis, Varèse and Le Corbusier prepared for the Expo 58 in Brussels, a true multimedia performance, with dozens of screens and loudspeakers. With all the sincerity and regarding art and particularly music, for some time now I have felt the lack of presence of any kind of expression that could be considered as “avant-garde”. There are, certainly, great composers, of the most diverse origins, starting with the indispensable Sofia Gubaidulina.
Part 3 - Language and Compositional Practice
How do you characterize your music language when taking into account the techniques developed in Composition in the 20th and 21st Centuries? Do you have any musical genre/style of preference?
DSch: In order to be able to characterize aspects of my creative language I should resort to experiences and resources from periods previous to the 20th century, and which will justify any kind of exposition on what the 20th and the 21st century bring to the diverse fields and registers of composition in music. The rhythmical and articulatory freedom of the Gregorian chant; the fascinating world of polyphony when we reach Renaissance, where the irregularity of motives, phrases, sections, coexists with a notable technical rigour; the passage of baroque dances to the form of sonata/quartet/symphony; the opera as a universal genre and field of experimentation, particularly from the second half of the 19th century; the development of the Lied since the magnificent Schubertian legacy; the highly refined counterpoint technique, above all in the passage from modality to tonality, reaching the maximum expression with the father of modernity, Johann Sebastian Bach. In any way can I ignore what all and each one of these compositional experiences, during many centuries, have contributed in diverse ways to these incredible and luminous 20th and 21st centuries – in their active and optimistic register. The bridge between the abandonment of tonality, and the appearance of dodecaphony, the so-called “atonality”, within its certain instability, gave us the marvellous 5 Pieces for string quartet, op. 5, by Webern, or the 4 Pieces for clarinet and piano, op. 5, by Berg, or the already mentioned Pierrot Lunaire, op. 12, by Schönberg, where we feel the emanation of a sincere and vigorous search for a substitute of the tonal world, which is still not institutionalized and will only be, at least formally, with the emergence of dodecaphony, and serialism. The direction that at first involved me is the one of the ochre sonorities and dense textures of Bartók – his six string quartets or the first movement (fugue) of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. It was an essential moment in my education – the open acceptance of the genre of fugue with intervals at the limit of micro-intervals, the creation of timbral textures in constant evolution, the open apparition of materials coming from Central-European folklore, the refinement of a composition both transparent and loaded, the speculation in managing the motivic material.
Particular attention goes to the Rite… another piece that I consider as one of the “key” works – a compendium of means for the multifaceted development of thematic materials where the element that stands out is rhythm, reaching all of its possibilities. Stravinsky proposes evolutionary directions for the base materials, where the perceptive capacity of the listener is constantly challenged, even more so, when considering it as a work thought for dance. The repetition, the ostinato/pedal, the juxtaposition of numerous motivic cells in an ostensible form results in a succession of textures, in which the attention is nourished at full time. We can’t forget the timbral treatment of the one who was the student of Rimsky-Korsakov. The instrumentation is the essential part of the evolutionary and discursive direction of this true monument of the 20th century.
Le Marteau sans Maître and Histoire du soldat, in spite of the temporal distance, fall within a specific chamber music format, where Stravinsky is faithful to the principles of his Sacre… and Boulez cultivates a meticulously planned work, serial development and evolution of notable dimensions, thus continuing the line proposed by Schönberg with his dodecaphonic technique.
The area of the “harmonic field”, of the texture in evolution, of the “cluster” elevated to its maximum expression –Lontano, Atmosphéres, Lux Aeterna, Le grand Macabre, the Second String Quartet, among other works by Ligeti, constitute a corpus for creative thought that has accompanied me for a long time. Here such parameters as “timbre”, “dynamics”, “colour”, “brightness”, “opacity”, present themselves as dimensions coming from the world of fine arts.
Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia was and continues to seem to me as a fundamental mark, above all at the level of the treatment of recycled materials (quotations), simultaneously (3rd movement) with the collocation of a background material on one of the movements of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. It is probably the true prototype of a post-modern spirit, a true and assumed motet, which nourishes me from different points of view.
Could you describe the process behind your compositional practice? Do you compose from an embryo-idea or after having elaborated a global form of music?
DSch: The approach towards a new work can have as an embryo a series of hypothesis, each one with different characteristics, depending on the genre, dimension and typology of the instrumental group, for which the work is destined. Normally, there is a general plan, above all, as far as form/structure is concerned: parts/sections/architecture/estimated duration/character… The concept is a process that can vary in its duration, as well as in the degree of detail in relation to every element, making part of a determined work: the textures and their evolution/direction, the special means of writing that these textures request, the variations of tonicity/expression/density. Still, fundamentally and containing a special weight, the moment of pouring out what one intends to the “empty” score, is both psychological/emotional and intellectual. Unavoidably at each instant it interacts with what could have been the general and preconceived plan.
In the context of your compositional practice could you define the connection (or opposition) between calculating/reasoning/scientific processes (for example linked to acoustic phenomena) and the more emotional side (the so-called “creative impulses”)?
DSch: The rational component coexists peaceably with the intuitive gesture, which always makes part of any genuine creative act, from the methodical Johann Sebastian Bach, up to the intuitive Charlie Parker. This affirmation is extensible to the universe of fine arts, literature or performative arts. Such intuitive gesture is the reflection of the true mystery of creation, whose description and definition shall remain… infinitely mysterious.
What is your relation with new technologies (for example with computer means), and how do they influence your way of composing and your music language?
DSch: There is an inevitable relation with the so-called “new technologies”. There are diverse ways of their participation in the conception and production of music works. We take for granted the use of software for traditional music writing within the five lines, and so this element constitutes a gigantic ranging tool. We treat pdfs completely naturally, as if this mean wasn’t an extraordinary technological vehicle, just as the use of software for sound, image or video edition. When in the end of the 1990s I accepted with some reluctance the use of software for writing music, I had lots of doubts on the possible influence, which these means could have in the way I think and conceive music. Still there are so many varied advantages, that in the end it didn’t matter to me that much to abandon the sound of pencil on paper, and of scores cut with scissors in order to add measures.
What is the importance of timbre and spatiality in your music?
DSch: When the Renaissance composers use the imitative textures, the listener receives the motives not only from the place where the choir is located, but he perceives that what one group of musicians does, for example on the left, it reappears in the centre or on the right. Here, the spatial procedure concerns not only the sound component, but also the visual side, that is the demand of dividing both orientation and attention. It doesn’t have to do with the origin of sound, but with its displacement, serving as one of the expressive parameters and means, and which I only used in orchestral works, in two operas, and in various chamber pieces, of diverse approaches. I have never recurred to spatialisation by using computer means.
The timbre has come to occupy, at least in the last 15 years, a more and more central paper as an essential element when it comes to the interaction of the totality of the parameters, involved in any work where I am composer. The detailed study of the multiple instrumental combinations, of the homogeneity of timbres (the same instrument but multiplied) up to the interaction of various heterogeneous sources, constitutes an almost infinite universe. In some cases I used materials pre-recorded on computer, or with the reproduction or treatment in real time.
What is the importance of experimentation in your music?
DSch: Experimentation is inherent to any creative act, either in the field of the arts, science or philosophy. And thus, from my perspective, personal and debatable, I don’t find possible the nonexistence of any kind of more or less intense research “in the shadow”. I don’t feel “safe” if the creative act keeps wandering around a “secure and known” terrain. It is my intention that the audience manages to have the same doubts, uncertainties, sufferings (in the end) and observations as the composer himself. I don’t seek originality, and I don’t intend to be the first in achieving any kind of results. It would be a sterile direction. More than experimentalism, I would support being in the “state of experimentation”, where everything in every detail can be questioned, including the composers himself.
Which works from your catalogue do you consider turning points in your career as composer?
DSch: I consider the work Formantes from 1994, for saxophone quartet, a true inflection point, both when it comes to the aesthetic and stylistic aspects, as well as in the form of conceiving the compositional act. The symphonic-theatrical poem Parabola del tigre y el espejo from 2002, a hoax cantata based on Jorge Luis Borges’ poems, is a project, in which my capacity and curiosity were being challenged. I also consider the Concerto for Bandoneon and Orchestra – already mentioned here – as the consolidation of the way of confronting composition, in which I can simultaneously achieve abstraction and, paradoxically, take the listener into account.
Part 4 - Portuguese Music
In your opinion, is there any transversal aspect in Portuguese contemporary music?
DSch: It seems to me that there is a composer who occupies an essential place in Portuguese music, in what concerns creation, who managed to conciliate a telluric element with experimentation, who never abdicated the fundamental principles constituting the base for sustaining his creative philosophy. This artist is Fernando Lopes-Graça, composer engaged in his time and art. In the last 20 years a number of important composers and lines of creative thought have come to appear in Portugal. This is the result of the growth of the education offer at the superior level, and which, undoubtedly, will have and has impact on the various aspects of music in Portugal, both at the interpretative and creative level.
Daniel Schvetz, March 2015
© MIC.PT
