Questionnaire/Interview
Part 1 . Roots & Education
How did music begin to you and where do you identify your music roots?
Vítor Rua: For me music began in the same way as it started for all human beings: while listening to the nature! The first music that has ever existed wasn’t composed, improvised or even performed. It was listened to. My music roots emerge from listening to the sounds, to the whole aural sphere that has surrounded me: from neon light bulbs to turntables.
Which paths led you to composition?
VR: I am from a generation that learnt to perform, to hear and to listen to music. However, what really led me to wanting to be a composer was a book about Karlheinz Stockhausen, where he described his normal day of work. When I read this I said to myself: “I want to be like him”.
Which moments from your music education do you find the most important?
VR: The ones, when I was learning things for myself, listening to other musicians, either when they were performing live or on recordings, or still from the experience of playing with other artists. I rarely learnt important things in music schools or with teachers.
Part 2 . Influences & Aesthetics
What kind of references from the past and the present do you assume in your music practice?
VR: My reference, either from the past or the present, has always been the same – every possible sonic state. I have always learnt a lot from listening to sounds. Every kind of sounds – organized and unorganized, tonic and not tonic, acoustic, electric and electronic.
In your opinion, what can music discourse express and/or mean?
VR: Music isn’t a language and it is even less universal. Just as humour, it doesn’t mean anything. What one feels, while listening to music, is a singular and unique experience. The same music that makes a person cry can make another one laugh. The emotions that music provides are the receiver’s idiosyncrasies.
Are there any sources outside music that influence your work in a significant way?
VR: From a sunrise to a sunset, a waterfall and clouds in the sky, the stars, the sea, the wind, the desert or the jungle – all of them are inexhaustible external sources of inspiration. They have always influenced my way of being as a musician and individual.
In the context of western art music, do you feel close to any school or aesthetics from the past or the present?
VR: In an initial phase I was close to rock; than to minimalism; later I experimented with acousmatic and concrete music, electronics, spectralism and serialism. Presently, I try not to give any importance to music styles. I feel much more influenced by a “meta-typology”, in which all the musical and stylistic experiences from my life reunite and merge into a one and only genre, which I intend to have discovered by myself, and which I call “compositions on meta-idiomatic improvisations”.
Are there any non-western culture influences in your music?
VR: If there presently is any influence in my music, it is precisely of non-western origin – from the whispered chanting of the Burundi to the Tuva chant, from the music of the Eskimos to the Japanese gagaku.
What do you understand as “avant-garde” and what, in your opinion can nowadays be considered as avant-garde?
VR: For me the term “avant-garde” hasn’t changed at all since I got to know it – it encompasses all the music that intends to give us something new through the sensorial experiences, lifting our spirit and consciousness.
Part 3 . Language & Music Practice
Characterize 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 since the beginning until now.
VR: I have never been good in imitating or copying. I simply can’t do it. I have dyslexia, affecting the listening and the attempts to reproduce what I hear. In the beginning my music language was full of references to what I was listening to or hearing while others were performing. Until it simply no longer interested me, and I started doing what I wanted and what was my real impulse, independently from styles, currents or fashions.
Do you have any preferred music style or genre?
VR: No! I am a meta-stylist!
When it comes to your creative practice, do you develop your music from an embryo-idea or after having conceived the global form? In other words, do you start from the micro to the macro-form or is it the other way round?
VR: While composing, I am very “conceptual”: I discover something really small (a cell) and then I try to develop it as much as possible.
How in your music practice do you determine the relation between the reasoning and the “creative impulses” or “inspiration”?
VR: For me “inspiration” means being seated in a chair, with a pencil, a rubber and a sharpener, and writing music on a stave or millimetre paper. I don’t believe in “muses”! I believe in sweat and work!
What is your relation with new technologies and how do they influence your music?
VR: I use the computer to create functional music (theatre, dance, cinema, video, poetry, performance, etc.), but I don’t use it to compose. I use technology as music instrument (effects and sound processors). I have always been fan of technology as a creative tool, inspiring the creation of new sounds.
Define the relation between music and science, and how the latter manifests itself in your music.
VR: Music doesn’t exist without science. My music is full of examples, where I study science in order to compose. For instance, in my piece Whistle & Piano I whistle and reproduce the resonance frequencies of two contiguous notes of the piano (half-tone intervals).
What is the importance of space and timbre in your music?
VR: Whenever I can, I turn to live sound spatialization through the use of quadraphonic or octophonic sound systems. The timbre is what makes me a musician. And I know what it is, only until I am asked about it.
Does experimentalism play an important role in your music?
VR: If “experimentalism” is understood as trying out new things in order to create original music, then yes, it is important.
Which works do you consider turning points in your career?
VR: The already mentioned piece Whistle & Piano and my other work for piano What Time Is It? as well as the work that has been awarded the most in my career: Saxopera.
To what extent composition and performance are for you complementary activities?
VR: I am both improviser and composer, so there is a constant ping-pong between these two activities, obviously, complementing each other.
Part 4 . Portuguese Music
Try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music.
VR: It is better not to evaluate it, in order not to be accused of being antipatriotic. Nevertheless, to say something positive, I believe that the new generation of composers will be far more interesting, than all the other generations from the past (with the exception of the luxury generation – Peixinho, Pires and Lima).
What in your opinion distinguishes Portuguese music on the international panorama?
VR: Nothing! Here one composes in the same way as artists in other countries, who, in their turn, do things equally to what has already been done.
In your opinion is it possible to identify any transversal aspect in Portuguese contemporary music?
VR: No!
How do you define the composer’s role nowadays?
VR: What distinguishes a composer from a non-composer is that the former one writes music.
According to your experience, what are the differences between the music environments in Portugal and in other parts of the world?
VR: We are more provincial and we have a tendency towards saying that, what comes from the outside is good and all that we have here, inside Portugal, is bad.
Part 5 . Present & Future
What are your present and future projects?
VR: As improviser, I am presently working on a new music style that I created and that I call “meta-idiomatic improvisations”. It consists of improvisations, where I use all kinds of languages vertically and not horizontally as Frank Zappa used to do or John Zorn still does. As composer, I use these meta-idiomatic improvisations to create structures for ensemble and orchestral compositions. My favoured medium is the opera or music theatre, if you prefer.
How do you see the future of art music?
VR: I hope it to be full of nothing! A music, where the silence would cover the noise existing around us. A noisy silence and a silent noise. And this isn’t cheap poetry! It is science! For instance, the dither noise is a silent one!
Vítor Rua, December 2016
© MIC.PT
