Questionnaire/Interview
Part 1 . Roots & Education
How did music begin for you and where do you identify your music roots?
Pedro Rebelo: I have always had a particular interest in music and I remember listening to my older brother’s band rehearsing at our house. I started to play around with some instruments and at the age of 10 or 11 I asked my parents if I could have piano lessons. In parallel to the classical piano repertoire I started performing in bands (playing my brother’s instruments!). The progressive rock eventually gave place to jazz, free jazz and free improvisation, before having decided to study music at university.
Which paths led you to composition?
PR: During adolescence composition was simply a pragmatic way of organizing musical materials in order to play with friends. It was when I was studying for my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh that composition became a more focused activity. For me composition has always been sufficiently open to include my interest and practice in improvisation.
Which moments from your music education do you find the most important?
PR: My first vivid memory is when my brother taught me Jobim’s As águas de Março on an Elka electric piano – he was playing the harmony and I was performing the melody. And then…
The first harmony lesson at the first year of university in Edinburgh with professor Nigel Osborne. He asked us to take off our shoes and to choose a place in the enormous gamelan, spread over the room. Some years later at a private lesson with Gérard Grisey I presented an installation based on the spectrum of a room and sinusoidal waves. I remember him saying that they sounded sad. This led me to work on the same concept but with a string orchestra. Unfortunately he never managed to listen to the result… In terms of rethinking music… my doctoral thesis was completed in an architecture school. This was perhaps the most significant moment when it comes to my music education!
Part 2 . Influences & Aesthetics
Which references from the past and the present do you undertake in your music practice?
PR: In general terms music based on free improvisation rooted in free jazz, but occurring in Europe since the 1960s – for me this is probably the main reference. John Cage is another reference that I revisit quite regularly.
In your opinion what can a musical discourse express or mean?
PR: A number of different things, but always dependent on the context. The musical, cultural or social context has in my opinion a central role in the musical discourse and in its possible meanings. I am referring to the contexts, in which the music is made, performed, listened to, remembered or imagined… these are contexts in constant development and alteration. I should also add that music has an incredible capacity to put things in another context, which unfolds even more its capacity of interaction with people.
Are there any sources outside music that in a significant way influence your work?
PR: Fine arts from the second half of the 20th century are an important reference for me. Architecture and ways of thinking about space are also important sources of influence.
In the context of western art music do feel close to any school or aesthetics from the past or the present?
PR: Not particularly, although I tend to feel most comfortable in free improvisation practices.
Are there any influences of non-western cultures in your music?
PR: Yes, occasionally.
What is your understanding of “avant-garde” and what, in your opinion, can nowadays be considered as avant-garde?
PR: In the context where I work (as a university professor in the United Kingdom) it is a word that I haven’t heard for some time!!! The modernist concept of the avant-garde doesn’t seem useful to me at this particular moment. My concern is centred more in music making as an act of research and creation of knowledge.
Part 3 . Language & Music Practice
Please describe your music language under the perspective of the techniques/aesthetics developed in music creation in the 20th and 21st centuries, on the one hand, and on the other, taking into account your personal experience and your path, from the beginning until now.
PR: The main elements are concentrated in the following points: 1) a spectral approach in situations that require the choice of pitches and harmonies; 2) a formal opening (open form); 3) an approach towards notation (graphic or hybrid) that means sharing decisions with the performers; 4) improvisation as a method to ensure critical listening and a social approach to music making. Although I associate myself less and less with electroacoustic music as a format, I can’t neglect its influence when it comes to the treatment of sound materials. Documental elements that in some way can communicate the context, space and identity, have become increasingly more important. Frequently, this is translated in the use of field recordings and interviews in an almost radiophonic context.
When it comes to your creative practice, do you develop your music from an embryo-idea, or after having developed a global form? In other words, do you start from the micro to the macro form or is it the other way round? How does this process develop?
PR: It depends, but often the context and concept is predefined (perhaps in response to an exterior motivation). I like working with the concept while taking into account the ideas behind any work. When the moment of making music arrives, of working on the materials etc., my improvising spirit takes over the process…!
How in your music practice do you determine the relation between reason and “creative impulses” and “inspiration”?
PR: I don’t make any distinction between these two ideas, although there are obviously moments when ideas are created, as well as moments of execution. I want the relation between the two to be as fluid as possible.
What is your relation with the new technologies and how do they influence your music?
PR: All technologies influence music making, as they bring determined workflows, resistances, opportunities and cultures. This can be applied both to digital technologies, as well as to various traditional instruments. One of my preferred examples is the Mbira practice. It is a lamellophone used in many parts of Africa. In certain communities the song or melody is defined by the pattern of fingering, and not by the sequence of pitches (in other words, the same fingering patterns can be used with different tunings). It is an example of re-programmable music technology.
What is the importance of space and timbre in your music?
PR: Immense! Space (understood as a way of qualifying place, distances, acoustics, resonances, locations, communities or identities) is the main element in my music. Through resonance space is always connected with the timbre.
Does experimentalism play an important role in your music?
PR: Yes. The alternative is “derivativism”, which doesn’t interest me at all.
To what extent composition and performance are for you complementary activities?
PR: For me they are always interlinked and sometimes inseparable. Performance, composition (and improvisation) are names given to activities that many times aren’t distinguished in everyday musical practices, particularly in collaborative and shared environments.
Part 4 . Portuguese Music
Please try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music.
PR: Extremely healthy, diverse, collective, innovative and gaining international visibility.
According to your experience what are the differences between the music environment in Portugal and in other parts of the world?
PR: In Portugal, the politics of financing, patronage and education weigh in a manner that isn’t always visible in other countries. In the last few years (for someone observing from the outside) one can note a much greater agility and positioning in terms of creation, promotion and associativism… This agility creates some independence from the governmental agencies. It is crucial to have a creative sector that isn’t liable to the political routine of changing governments. It is also important that this sector is able to concentrate on mid and long-term objectives.
Part 5 . Present & Future
What are your present and future projects?
PR: I will begin preparing a participative project concerning sound art in Viseu (my hometown). It will last for three years in the context of Jardins Efémeros (Ephemeral Gardens). This project follows another work, Som da Maré from Rio de Janeiro. I also have an autumn commission by the Quasar Saxophone Quartet from Montreal. For the next three years I will also focus on a study of sound music and conflict in various parts of the world as part of a large-scale research project based at Queen’s University Belfast.
Could you highlight one of your more recent projects, presenting the context of its creation, but also the particularities of the language and techniques?
PR: One of the projects that had a huge impact on my way of understanding the function of music and sound is entitled Listening to Voices. It is a 30-minute, binaural, and semi-documental piece, exploring the experience of hearing voices. It is a participative project with people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The composition process included listening exercises (for example sound walks), field recordings, interviews or re-enactments. The aim of the piece is to let the audience know, experientially, what it means to hear voices. The qualities of the target audience in this piece are different than in other projects. This means that the compositional act needed to be more reflective in terms of the work’s impact. The piece has an almost radiophonic, but not necessarily narrative character.
How do you see the future of art music?
PR: Not being called art music, but only music (or art!). Above all, I see contemporary music practices as part of the broader framework within the sonic arts. The aim is to overturn prejudices associated with supposed levels of erudition in determined manners of presenting music (the score, the concert hall…). In practice, there is a generation of creators feeling comfortable in a concert hall, a warehouse developing an installation, programming an application for smartphone, a DJ set in an alternative club, or working with a community in a participative project at a modern art gallery, or still, simply making public interventions. The art of sound encompasses all of this.
Pedro Rebelo, September 2016
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