Photo: © João E. Cutileiro
Questionnaire/Interview
Part 1 . Roots & Education
Which paths led you to composition?
Tiago Cutileiro: I began by studying guitar and piano. I was already 13 years old. Before, my contact with music had been exclusively through the few records that my mother had – Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring; Vivaldi’s Six Flute Concertos op. 10; Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7; Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Leonard Cohen; Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’; Joan Baez’s Farewell Angelina; The Beatles’ White Album; and Coltrane’s Live at the Village of Vanguard. I still find these records fascinating and I can’t listen to them without having goose bumps. But the impulse to decide to study music was rather that pubertal desire to become a rock and roll star. I was very anxious to play the guitar or the piano, so before knowing any piece I would improvise and memorize these improvisations, trying to get close to this musical universe that I knew – a mixture of baroque, classical, modern and popular music. With some exceptions, to create and to perform my own music has always attracted me much more than to perform music written by others.
Which moments from your music education do you find the most important?
TC: The composition seminars with Emmanuel Nunes at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. I studied guitar in Lagos, piano in Lisbon, and composition in Évora. I also participated in various guitar, piano and composition workshops. Naturally, every stage of education was important, yet the stance towards work and the aesthetic values transmitted by Emmanuel Nunes ended up being essential. It influenced my way of understanding not only music creation, but also the whole creative act in general. It was also at these seminars that I met Ricardo Guerreiro, Diana Ferreira, Luís Antunes Pena and João Pais – a group of then young composers, almost 10 years younger that me, whose attitude towards musical composition, music and arts, maybe also energized by Emmanuel Nunes’ seminars, brought us together throughout the following years, and had a strong impact on me.
Part 2 . Influences & Aesthetics
In your opinion what can a musical discourse express and mean?
TC: I don’t entirely believe in musical expression, and even less in musical meaning. I simply prefer to think that music creates an impression in the act of listening. A composer might think that, if his own music provokes in himself a certain emotion or a certain spiritual state, then it should be that same spiritual state or that same emotion that is being expressed or becoming meaningful. However, the subsequent emotional absorption though the act of listening is so subjective that it seems to me illegitimate to imagine a direct and universal equivalence between, let’s say, the expression and the impression. Obviously, there are basic elements that can suggest an idea of expressive control, conditioning the listener’s emotional state – velocity and dissonance tend to induce tension; slowness and consonance tend to induce relaxation; all these academic clichés are nowadays more or less acknowledged. That is why, the notion of the musical discourse, or of musical narrative (i.e.: of the idea that a dynamic succession of sounds is analogous to a verbal discourse or a verbal narrative) is conceived. For me these concepts – narrative and discourse – are fundamental to understand the majority of western music. What I don’t find credible, as I’ve already mentioned, is the existence of a clear connection between the narrative or discourse of the one who composes, and the narrative or discourse of the one who listens. Therefore, it’s not possible to speak of expression and meaning, since what comes out from the transmitter isn’t necessarily what the receiver gets. Eventually, perhaps one should consider composing and listening as two, completely solitary and separate acts.
Are there any outside music sources that influence your work in a significant way?
TC: If one recognizes music within its more classical and conservative connotation – ignoring classifications that are very dear to me, as the one by Francisco Lopez, where music is a an aesthetic perception/comprehension/conception of the sound (in the broadest meaning) – then my work is both essentially sonic and extramusical. I feel more attracted by the squeaks of the Lisbon trams passing through the Camões Square than by the complexity of Wagner’s tonal modulations; I am more fascinated by the sonic drones of air conditioning motors and electric generators in big city buildings, than by the richness of baroque counterpoint. I don’t mean that I never listen to Bach’s or Wagner’s music – they’re among my favourite composers. Yet it’s not in their work, but in those other sounds, seemingly coming from outside music, that I find material for my creative work.
At another level, it’s also important to mention that my work is mainly conceptual. In other words, many times there are abstract, social and political concepts that activate my creation and that inclusively define, structure and sustain the works themselves. Again, the formal structure of a discourse of any politician may become more productive for me, than the form of any music work subject to my analysis – and this happens, once more, despite my taste for musical analysis, and for trying to understand how certain works have been composed and structured.
In the context of western art music do you feel close to any school or aesthetics from the past or the present?
TC: I tend to consider my work close to minimal and conceptual art and, with some reservations, to minimal music. The problem seems to be that, as in many other cases, this concept – minimal – isn’t understood in a consensual way. In many situations one gives the same name to classify radically distinct things. Hence, I need to explain that the great part of my work is minimal in the term’s most restricted meaning. Therefore, it shouldn’t be associated with the so-called American minimalism – especially in the works appearing since the 1980s – and even less with the so-called European minimalism that emerged more or less in the same decade. If, on the one hand, it’s possible to find in my work some correlation with such pieces like Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, on the other hand, it seems to me too farfetched to establish any parallel between my work and, for example, the Three Tales also by Reich. I think that in fine arts the term minimal hasn’t degenerated so much and the aesthetic relation established between minimal and conceptual art also pleases me. This is the reason why I prefer to compare my work more with the concepts of minimal and conceptual art, rather than with the idea of minimal music. Recently the designation sound art has emerged to classify a set of works and creators that move away from the tradition of pure music composition, that is, away from dealing with note, interval and rhythm management. Even though it’s not a uniform aesthetics as such, it’s still a designation that in my opinion describes my work quite reasonably.
Part 3 . Language & Music Practice
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-from or is it the other way round? How is this process developed?
TC: As I’ve already referred, I started composing – although completely empirically – at the same time that I began studying guitar and piano. Then, when I was moving my fingers on these instruments, themes, melodic ideas and other things of this kind also started emerging. From there I would try to develop this material, constructing, without even knowing how, pieces with a kind of coherent structure (I still keep tapes with their recordings). Yet I think that my work as composer begun much later, when I started doing precisely the opposite, that is, when I began having a global and structural idea of what I intended to build, before dealing with notes, themes and things like that. And actually I completely stopped controlling all the micro-scale elements. Since then, my music has essentially been a process, conceived as a macro-construction, and it is its development alone that creates the micro-scale elements. Again, my contact with American minimal music from the 1960s as well as, and perhaps more importantly, with the music by John Cage, turned out to be essential.
How in your music practice do you determine the relation between the reasoning and the “creative impulses” or the “inspiration”?
TC: This transformation in my way of working with music – from an intuitive and immediate creativity towards a more conceptual and structural thinking – could precisely be a deviation from an activity defined by “creative impulses” and “inspiration”, towards a work grounded in “reasoning” and reflection. Emmanuel Nunes used to say that one couldn’t compose music as if one was writing a letter to an aunt, making notes while remembering the things that need to be told. And for me it makes the whole sense. There needs to be a reflection (in the term’s meditative sense, whilst thinking about ourselves) on what we do and why we do it. And from this reflection, appears inevitably a general idea on a work that we want to do, long before dealing with all the small elements. Having said this, I need to acknowledge that the same reasoning, or its productivity, is also subject, who knows why, to creative impulses and inspiration. In other words, perhaps there is no “relation between the reasoning and the creative impulses or inspiration” – it seems rather that one thing doesn’t exist, or at least isn’t functional, without the other one.
What is your relation with the new technologies, and how do they influence your music?
TC: I have never had a special ability towards music: I don’t have absolute pitch and my relative pitch is only reasonable; what is more, rhythm doesn’t come out naturally for me; etc… On the other hand, my conceptual way of composing implies creating structures, whose result isn’t easily predictable. Since I don’t wish to leave a specific sonority behind, I need to test the results and be satisfied with them before giving the scores to musicians. These two pragmatic points led me towards the use of the so-called new technologies in the creative act – as a powerful support in the work, on the one hand compensating my limitations, and on the other, helping me to predict the sonic outcome of my sometimes complex aleatoric composition processes.
Later on, I started being interested in the precision and the immediacy of using a computer, when it comes to generating music without musicians. And finally, the miniaturization and the portability of recent technology – especially of sound recorders – allowed me to work more systematically in the area of field recording, something that has interested me since adolescence. Today I combine all these forms of working without great prejudices, and actually without giving it a lot thought. Perhaps new technologies aren’t so new anymore.
Does experimentalism play an important role in your music?
TC: The new technologies came to support all artistic branches, making artistic production much more accessible to everyone. Today, art is much more easily produced in such quantities that have no parallel in human history, and, also thanks to the new technologies, it’s much more easily diffused. Also thanks to the new technologies, but likewise to recent schooling systems – with artistic education spanning from secondary to high schools and universities – this new artistic production has become more competent and professional. I would dare to say that we have much more art, and I mean good art, than we actually need – if it’s possible to make such a statement. And why fill the world with more art, if it wouldn’t be to discover new paths?
So as composer, on the account of this whole creative proliferation, I can’t encounter any other useful working area that wouldn’t be precisely the experimentalism – the search for new paths. Only in this field do I see hope to find/discover something new that is worth showing to a world already packed with art and too many other things. Outside experimentalism, I feel that humanity is drowned in so many perfect artworks, of all the genres, and with very little more to add.
Which of your works are turning points in your path?
TC: In my case the turning points emerge from the interest in or the discovery either of a system, or a new technique. The list mentioned here doesn’t necessarily include the major or most important pieces, but primarily the ones that led my work towards another direction: the piece Lego (1996) for guitar was the first one that I composed grounded in a concept and distanced from the traditional writing for this instrument – only with a small concern that it would be performable; in the pieces M.M.C. (1996-97) I introduced mathematic models of melodic and harmonic phase shifting, a kind of phase counterpoint that I use until today; in the theatre music Jacques or the Submission (2000) I used mashup and sampling techniques, typical of electronic dance music, that I continued using in different ways in several following pieces; in the work Useless (2007) I worked with the confrontation between the sung and necessarily narrative (or discursive) text and my non-narrative music – a subject that I explored more exhaustively in my opera Tudo Nunca Sempre o Mesmo Diferente Nada (2014) and in my doctoral thesis that accompanied it; in this opera I also worked the use of pure (unprocessed) field recordings in combination with music instruments with definite pitch. It’s something that I’ve extended in my more recent work.
To what extent composition and performance are for you complementary activities?
TC: If one understands performance as realization/concretization, then obviously one thing (composition) doesn’t exist without the other one (performance). If we refer to performance as a possible part of the composer’s work, then the works where I have an active role as performer are rare – Portugal Político (1996) where I discourse texts by Portuguese politicians; Noise (2013), in which I manipulate in real time the sound and video projection on a wall where I also find myself; or A Verdade e a Realidade (2017), which is a staged conference; these are some of the rare cases.
Finally, if we consider the attention put on the stage and spatial perspective of each piece - i.e., on how the sonic piece is involved in a specific context (visual, interpretative, etc.) — as a performance work, then yes, one can say that almost all of my work has a subjacent performative character.
Part 4 . Portuguese Music
Try to evaluate the present situation in Portuguese music.
TC: I don’t find the present situation of Portuguese art music very different from the one in the rest of Europe, or generally in the western world. There’s obviously a decrease in audience, parallel to an increase of composers, musicians and performers. In the whole Western Europe there has also been a significative increase of music high-schools and universities, and even orchestras and other ensembles, specialized in contemporary music. It’s probably the lack of audience that has led to the decrease of big events dedicated to contemporary music – in Portugal the end of the Contemporary Music Encounters at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has been the more visible side of this phenomenon. Still, the afore-mentioned increase of musicians and composers has led to the appearance of small cooperative and private spaces, creating and diffusing on the fringes of state and other influential institutions, something that in my opinion is very healthy. The negative side would be the difficulty to create a truly professional class, but, besides some honourable exceptions, contemporary art music in Portugal has never managed to have a constant structural model that would allow for composers and musicians to live exclusively out of their artistic work.
In your opinion, is it possible to identify any transversal aspect in Portuguese contemporary music?
TC: In the so-called western, and more and more globalized world it seems to me difficult to find a specific national dimension – regardless of the country. Even when in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century some composers were recovering the traditional repertoire from their countries to then compose their own works, this aesthetic focus was already something in common. Although the works would unavoidably have a sonority that can be considered specific of each nationality, all of them belong to a western, consistent and transnational cultural movement. In the 21st century this exchange of aesthetics, artistic tendencies and creative concerns has become even bigger, eliminating, in my opinion, any national particularity in the western contemporary creation. Another aspect is, however, that there are, yes, aesthetic currents that can be attributed to certain schools or professors – I would say that nowadays, while listening to new music, it’s easier to identify the university or school where a certain composer studied, than to guess his or her country of origin.
How do you see the composer’s role nowadays?
TC: In this admittedly capitalist world, where the great utopias have been overcome by simple (or simplistic) pragmatism, the composer’s role is the one that she or he is able to establish in managing her or his own career. Hence, there’s the composer responding to commissions by large institutions; the composer of theatre and dance projects, financed by public money; the composer of scattered works for ensembles and events, also annually subsidized by the state; there’s the province composer that creates small works, commissioned by his local administration for internal events; etc…
The status that lets the composer receive these commissions also originates from a thought and worked out conquest. It’s in the previously established contacts, managed according to specific criteria, either with the people involved with the afore-mentioned institutions or the mass media, where the composer seeks to gain visibility, convincing whoever is responsible for these selective processes, that her or his (the composer's) work is relevant and fundamental. The value that a society gives to a certain composer isn’t the society’s discovery. It’s either defined by the supporting institutions and by the media that chose her or him, or conquered through the composer’s backstage work. Nothing depends on the music itself anymore. Even Mozart is a genius by previous definition, nowadays nobody discovers him listening to his work, he is given to us as something established – be it in hundreds of annual editions of his repertoire, or in the chocolates/sweets with his image on the package.
All this happens in a society, where one listens to music from dusk till dawn – from the radio programme at breakfast time, up to the background sound in the daily TV news. Yet less and less people go to concerts. And still, in this context of music congestion, the art music composer rarely manages to have regular commissions that would let her or him live exclusively from this work. So teaching either composition, perpetuating this whole model, or music theory, possibly or idealistically building new audiences, ends up being the usual career path for the majority of western composers. Alternatively or complementarily, the self-production of events, promoting one’s own music, can be another possibility. Ultimately, if nowadays there’s a role for the composer to play, it seems to be dissociated from music composition.
Part 5 . Present & Future
Could you highlight one of your more recent projects, present the context of its creation, and also the particularities of the language and techniques used?
TC: Recently I’ve been asked to make a conference on my work as a composer. Within my pessimistic stance, regarding the composer’s function in the society, my first thought was to reject the invitation. But then I came up with the idea that it could be a kind of last conference, where I would expose my scepticism. Slowly the conference was transformed into a kind of performance, with excerpts of my work serving to exemplify the issues that I brought up. Eventually, I was working on the whole structure of the spoken text and music in a cohesive manner. My previous work for the opera also stimulated me to use stage elements and video projection, so the conference became a combination of text, music and staging. I didn’t compose a single new note for this work, but I ended up creating a kind of piece. If I manage to continue working in music, I think that it’ll be this self-reflective path that I’ll follow.
How do you see the future of art music?
TC: There’s art, and then there’s its valorization. They’re two very different processes. I believe that while there’s human species there’ll always be art. It’s something about us (humans) that stimulates us to make what is still not there/here, simply because we want to. Nowadays, a lot of people make art using scientific discoveries or the possibilities offered by technological progress. One invents things to be useful, but immediately somebody remembers that they can simply be beautiful (in the term’s broadest meaning). And so a new art or a new aesthetic model is born.
Music uses a very old technology – musical instruments invented hundreds of years ago – but also very new technologies. And it has shaped itself accordingly. With every new discovery somebody remembers that the produced sound can also be music or used as music – or as sound art.
Will all of this be valued? And will all that has been made until now keep its value? That I do not know. Nobody knows. Even today, music isn’t really appreciated. Only few people go to concerts or choose to listen to music for strictly musical reasons. Perhaps we’re all too focused on other things. This has happened before in human history. Pop stars have already understood it, but the classical music market as well. Today there’s a whole process of giving an a priori value, way before anything becomes music. And this happens because of the market. One hopes that an artistic creation will give money to somebody – to the one who makes it and to the one who buys it. Furthermore, for historical reasons classical music has also this wicked side: the creation tends to be unfinished, that is, it needs a concretization by performers at concerts and/or on CD editions, and all of this bypasses the composer. All of this makes art music problematic: music creation needs money to be able to be materialized. In other words, music and/or art in general might one day cease to be financially viable.
However, having said this, I don’t believe that this would stop art making. As long as we keep thinking about things that we want to do, we will continue to create, with or without money. Still it’s true that one can doubt if we are really making art, if everyone makes it only for her or himself, without the possibility of being seen or heard by others. Would Beethoven’s 9th Symphony have been a work of art, if only he, and just he, had heard it?
Tiago Cutileiro, September 2017
© mic.pt
