In focus

António de Sousa Dias

Photo: © Paula Azguime

Questionnaire/Interview

Part 1 . Roots & Education

How did music begin to you and where do you identify your music roots?

António de Sousa Dias: Between the age of four and six I attended music initiation classes at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Later I started playing instruments - first the guitar and then the piano.

Which paths led you to composition?

ASD: More or less at the age of 16 or 17 I started to feel a great need to write down the ideas that were coming to my mind. During some time I kept restraining myself, as I didn’t want to write before learning, how to do it. Yet from a determined moment I wasn’t able to carry on limiting myself, so I began to write down, what I was hearing inside of me.

Which moments from your music education do you find the most important?

ASD: There are various, and all of them important, as they were determining in my life. Perhaps some of them are more prominent than the other ones. The first one concerns my piano master, professor Albertina Saguer. Her enormous sensibility and openness were a great encouragement for me. As soon as she understood that I was writing music and I was aiming towards composition, sometimes to the detriment of the piano, she started to prepare me in the sense to have the broadest music culture possible. In this way, instead of a piano programme with little works but superbly performed, she proposed me to prepare reasonably diverse works by different authors. Albertina Saguer also enjoyed working with her pupils on pieces she wasn’t familiar with, or even by composers that weren’t her preferred ones. She even encouraged me to perform my “works” for her. She used to tell me that it was a good way for me to understand, how my interior listening could superimpose itself onto the effectively performed result.
Not less important was obviously my encounter with Constança Capdeville. Her unique intelligence, allied with her vast culture - not only when it comes to music - as well as her notion of freedom and openness to the world, were determining factors in my music education. With Constança I had composition lessons at various levels - I think that I was probably her only student-finalist at the superior Composition Course at the National Conservatoire. In addition, I also used to work with her extensively, for example within the ColecViva ensemble, and later became her colleague at the Conservatoire.
I would also like to mention some moments that were important points in time, even though not as continuous as the ones mentioned above. The first one is with professor Elisa Lamas: not only was she my music education teacher, already at the Conservatoire, but also she was responsible for my encounter with Constança Capdeville. Having understood that I was composing and that I wanted to follow this career, first she directed me to professor Teresa Macedo - yet another important encounter in my education - and then to Constança. The other moment was working with professor Macario Santiago Kastner. I had the privilege to attend his lessons, which were fundamental for my interest in musicology, in addition to the knowledge on Iberian music, particularly from the 16^th century.
There are also other moments that determined my education, but perhaps “less formal” or “informal”, as one says nowadays - a jazz seminar with Takashi Kako, a jazz course at the Hot Club with José Eduardo and working as organist for the Santo Amaro de Oeiras Choir, during a little more than two years

Part 2 . Influences & Aesthetics

In your opinion, what can a music discourse express or mean?

ASD: It is a difficult question, as in music there is a level of abstraction, which allows for what I would call “expressive polysemy”. Depending on the receptor, place or time, etc., we thus put ourselves into the risk that the same music fragment is perceived differently. When it comes to the meaning, the question is posed in a similar way. I think music represents states or situation that can act as emotional triggers.

Are there any outside music sources that in a significant way influence your work?

ASD: Yes. Even though basic, the education in mathematics and computer science is an important influence in my work, particularly when it comes to its formal and operative aspects.
My work for cinema, for example, also becomes an important source, since I transfer certain aspects of the sound to the universe of image, and vice-versa: for example some research in figure-background relationships or field-space relationships.

In the context of western art music, do you feel close to any school or aesthetics from the past or the present?

ASD: On the one hand, I think that I was influenced by Iberian music from the 16^th and 17^th centuries. I got to know it thanks to professor Kastner. On the other, I feel that many contemporary composers have had strong influence on me, at least in the way that I confront myself with concepts on music and sound. They are for example: Constança Capdeville, Jorge Peixinho, Cândido Lima, Horacio Vaggione and Jean-Claude Risset. I should also mention here composers from generations younger than the former ones - Miguel Azguime, João Pedro Oliveira, Carlos Caires and José Luís Ferreira, among others.

Are there any non-western influences in your music?

ASD: I don’t believe there are.

How do you understand the term “avant-garde” and what, in your opinion, nowadays can be described with it?

ASD: This is a complex question, above all today, when I ask myself about some types of institutionalization as far as art is concerned. I think that the avant-garde doesn’t necessarily have to do with works that I like, but rather with the ones that question me and make me feel that I’m facing something, which I can’t really respond to easily.
Another important aspect for me, lies in the change within music (classical), when it comes to its traditional way of production, due to the introduction of digital means. They contribute a lot for a change, whose consequences are for us still far from being possible to grasp in their totality. On the one hand, the revolution started with the recording means, as well as treatment and reproduction of sound, allowed for an even broader extension of the auditory spectrum, bringing new and innovative ways of sound creation. On the other hand, it isn’t necessary today to learn to play an instrument in order to use the composition tools. These aspects, despite the arguments claiming that they won’t force back more traditional practices, show that there are movements aiming for change, experimentation, and paving new territories, which create an avant-garde most probably quite different from what we are able to imagine.

Part 3 . Language & Music Practice

Characterize your music language under the perspective of the techniques/aesthetics developed in music creation in the 20^th and 21^st century, on the one hand, and on the other, considering your own personal experience and your path from the beginning until now.

ASD: My approach in music has been gaining shape during the years, taking into account the multiplicity of means, genres and objectives. Fundamentally, I would say that I have a compositional attitude based on the idea of the work as the result of an interface to a music database. Here one must accept the heterogeneity of the music and sound materials, adopting a composition labor, which articulates processes and results within a network, an atypical one, where the music coherence of the circulating semantic heterogeneity is ensured (and assumed) by the composer. This allows for a type of writing that integrates a more traditional work, in the score, extended to the concept of algorithms, sound synthesis, among other operations.
This is how I see in my works the confluence of some aspects that I would call “contaminations” and that are more like “strategies” rather than a composition system: for example, on the one hand, the interest for mathematics and programming in a broad sense; on the other the crossing of techniques originating from the audio, applied into notes and vice-versa, into a generalization of writing. This let me conceive forms of approaching music material, ranging from the palimpsest and the filtering, articulated with development techniques, towards proliferation or additive synthesis and processing.
An important aspect also resides in the necessity (curiosity?) of exploring the territory of the “between”, as I call it. It is a multiple territory, rich in potential, and which, rather than being reduced to the closed use of polarized categories (either sound, note, or for example chord, implying writing niches), expands itself to the exploration of the fruitful distances between the poles.

When it comes to your creative practice, do you develop your music from an embryo-idea, or after having elaborated the global form? In other words, do you move from the micro towards the macro-form, or is it the other way round?

ASD: It depends on the work, and the moment. Sometimes I begin with an idea, for example a sound, which is to be expanded. Other times, I catch a glimpse of a form that is to be concretized in its details.
As a matter of fact, the process integrates a mixture of these two poles, always working within successive approximations. This maneuvering between moments-places-levels allows me to operate with quite a lot of freedom and to elaborate more rigorously a process that is for me complex. I don’t mean complex in the sense of complicated, but a complexity that is based on an articulation of heterogenous structures, within a relation of functional interdependence and not only deducting the elements. I think that the possibility of multiple explanation also plays here an important role. In some of my works there are different ways of obtaining the same materials, and this allows me for the crossing of competing structures. Here I normally give an illustrative example: the notes C3, E3 and G3 can be explained in various ways, such as: 1) as belonging to the C Major chord; 2) as the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th harmonics of the fundamental; 3) as the superimposition of two thirds; 4) as, for example, the G dominant; or 5) as an instantiation of a set of pitch classes (0, 4, 7), starting from C. Although the resulting notes are the same, the form of obtaining them comes from sound/music approaches or even points of view that can be radically different.

What in your music practice determines the relation between the reasoning and the “creative impulses” or “inspiration”?

ASD: I would say that there are some phases in the work that are mutually determined. Normally, I circulate between phases of “inspiration”, letting the materials follow their free and more balanced course, or only “because yes”, and phases where the major part of the time is filled with working, for example, formalizing the processes. All this is counterbalanced with phases, where the whole material is, as Jorge Peixinho would say “restricted”, that is, when one aims at trimming the edges, but also bringing up the appearance of a gestural freedom.
My approach is also based on the need to coexist with the material. I think that when one doesn’t have the complete dominion of the material possibilities - either because the work has a considerable extension or complexity, or because the time to compose is limited - one needs to confide in formal aspects that help in composing and thus, it is even logical that they would be more visible. If we have time to coexist with the materials, until integrating them completely in our practice, the handling of their possibilities becomes intuitive, since they have been “passing the resistance tests” during the time of elaborations and apparently arbitrary decisions, grounded in the same experience and coexistence of the materials.

What is your relation with the new technologies and how do they influence your music?

ASD: My relation with the new technologies comes from my education, culminating in the passage through electronic engineering, and posteriorly in studying computer programming. But above all I would say that this relation and influence is natural, in so far as both of them belong to my universe. For this reason, for me, using new technologies has never been a question; but how you use them, yes. They appear transversally in (practically) my whole work: from the calculation of symbolic structures, to the sound generation.

What is the importance of space and timbre in your music?

ASD: They are two extremely important factors that are manifested in different ways. The space is a concept-notion that appears in different ways in my works, and not only as position in a given place. The space has multiple possibilities and it is applied to all the aspects of a work that I can situate topologically: space/localization, pitch space, formal space and above all the notion of the field that presently seems to me to have more potential, more dynamics - it allows for a qualification of the points in a given space. When it comes to the timbre, even in my electroacoustic works or with components of live electronics, my orchestral education isn’t strange here and vice-versa. If in my instrumental works a certain idea with electroacoustic roots is very important, especially the dynamics and transitions between sounds, in the electroacoustic pieces working with multiple synthesis techniques allows me to create a major timbral richness. Its equivalent is the traditional orchestration operating with different dosages of instrumental families. In these particular aspects as space and timbre, the digital means play a crucial role, as they let me explore places-connexions between sounds and situations that weren’t possible before.

Which of your works do you consider as turning points in your path?

ASD: Some of the works constitute important moments in my path for different reasons, yet they are always related with the enrichment of my universe. To mention some examples, I would say that the first one is ...para dois pianos… (1986). The work’s name indicates two pianos and it marks the first steps in defining my language. With ...há dois ou… (1998) I integrate, let’s say officially, the music theatre in my creative activity. An important moment is constituted of two pilar works, crucial in the affirmation of what has been by creative attitude: Ressonâncias/Memórias (2003), work that explores almost systematically part of my “data base”, either when it comes to the materials or from the perspective of the operations on them; Trois Chansons inachevées (2003) work that actuates in similar context as a search engine for the enrichment of the same data, integrating in my material at least some fragments of Portuguese traditional music. With Va(lé)riation 5 (2006) my formal work algorithms on the sound and notes are expanded to integrate the idiomatic aspect, in so far as some material is generated from the architecture of the guitar and the way the instrument is executed, and not from pre-established pitch organizations, durations and timbres, etc. With the series Tonnetz (2008-) I think I achieved an harmonious integration of various dimensions when it comes to my artistic concerns: it’s a work that explores various articulations at different levels. I will mention these aspects further ahead, but I can describe in advance, for example, the generation of paradoxical sounds, in this case sounds without the fixed octave, as a form of finding a solution to the problem created by the existence of a limited set of previously recorded sounds. It gives origin to the possibility of creating chords that form the perspective of the tonal theory would be in the wrong position. With this I want to say that it is a work, containing a dimension of reflection and integration within a musical heritage, expressing questions related to art and science, but being projected ahead.

To what extent composition and performance are for you complimentary activities?

ASD: Both of them can be understood as creation activities. Traditionally, the composition is carried out in a deferred time in relation to the work’s presentation, yet in the performance we are able to include creation in real time, testing the results on the fly.

Part 4 . Portuguese Music

Try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music.

ASD: Portuguese music has always been good, when it comes to the quality of its creators (just think of Jorge Peixinho, Constança Capdeville or Cândido Lima, among many others). But I think that nowadays the situation of music is even better, despite the weak points still experienced in this sector.
Portugal’s development in this domain in the last years has been fantastic and the music quality of the young nowadays, when compared with what was possible to reach a couple of years ago, shows that when there are conditions, there can also be development. I should say that there is still a lot to do. Apart from the work carried out in schools and academic institutions, the work of associations and individuals - such as the Miso Music Portugal, running spaces like O’culto da Ajuda or projects as MIC.PT - is essential not only for the divulgation and exchange of experience, but also for a true development of creation.

Part 5 . Present & Future

What are your present and future projects?

ASD: Presently I am finishing a new phase of Mutabilis with Paula Pinto, a multidisciplinary project between installation and performance - the premier is planned for May 21. I am also working with Cláudia Petrina, a Brazilian researcher and artist, on the project Retraços. In the process of its creation we have already made two residencies - in O Espaço do Tempo in Montemor o Novo and at the Centro Coreográfico in Rio de Janeiro (CCCRJ), where we made a presentation and performance rehearsal. This is a project, where the interlacing of cultures and the confrontation of distance is fundamental. Cláudia is Brazilian with Portuguese roots, I am Portuguese with Brazilian roots. And it is from this curiosity of points of view that this project is born. We have been exploring and experimenting these directions.

Could you highlight one of your more recent projects, present the context of its creation as well as what is particular it its language and compositional techniques?

ASD: Two of my recent projects illustrate some of my main music concerns. The first one, Tonnetz, is an installation rooted in sound, although incurring visual domains and possessing a strong interactive component. It is a work articulating a series of concepts, in which Art and Science cross each other, that is: exploration of paradoxical sounds (Risset), certain twists in a space inhabited by the Tonal Network (Euler), relations between sound and colour (Helmholtz, Scriabin), trajectories from the Lissajous curves, among other concepts. Even though the project has been running since 2008, its successive versions have been exploring and reflecting on the successive technological advances, since the first version realized in Max/MSP and VirChor, until the most recent one, which will be presented in May this year and uses a game engine.
The work Raiana (#2) (2017), for choir and electronics, illustrates yet another concern equally important in my research: how to employ traditional Portuguese music within a material possible to occupy my universe. Hence the title, as “raiana” is the one that lives on the border. The number two means that there is another work of mine from 2003, Trois chansons inachevées for soprano, saxophone and electronics, where the problem was posed and where I started to rehearse the proposal that has now gained form. As a matter of fact is concerns integrating materials that come from popular and traditional music, within an idea that has roots in electroacoustic music. Here I use operations such as selection, cut and editing, as well as the ones that one also finds in relational algebra.
I would also like to mention a project whose finalization has been recent, although it started in 2009 - A Dama e o Unicórnio (The Lady and the Unicorn) with Maria Teresa Horta. In 2009 we premiered a work for two narrators and electronics, lasting more or less nine minutes. Later, already in 2013, a performance and installation were carried out, not to mention the book and CD that were published. Finally in 2017 the French edition of the book and CD was published. This work is particular in my production as it joins various aspects: digital art, installation, performance, composition, audiovisual conception, programming… a series of fields that I have always liked to explore, despite being more associated with music creation.

How do you see the future of art music?

ASD: The changes that are happening, above all through the introduction of the “digital” in our daily life, have had an impact that we aren’t still able to evaluate. Nevertheless, they already indicate that this future, fragile as always, presents itself with an enormous potential. As Constança Capdeville said in an interview realized by Miguel Azguime in 1991: “the future of music will be as we want it”.