Photo: Rui Penha · © Bruno Nacarato
Questionnaire/ Interview
Part 1 · Roots & Education
· How did music begin to you and where do you identify your music roots? ·
Rui Penha: It was a happy accident. I was the youngest one in the family and I began studying music, following the footsteps of my older cousins. The general school was normally very uninteresting, little challenging and very poor when it comes to stimulating content. It was only saved by some rare professors who had a particular passion for what they were teaching and who were always ready to ignore the manuals and the programmes in name of an opportunity to spread the love for their field. (Unfortunately, nowadays, things are even worse, inasmuch as I fear that there is no passion capable of loosening the corsets which strangle the relation between the teachers and their students.)
Music education was different. A significant part of the professors had an authentic passion for what they were teaching and autonomy – given or stolen, here it doesn’t really matter – to find the best way to awaken this passion in the students, taking to the lessons their every idiosyncrasy and eccentricity. The priority given to individual or small-group lessons obviously helped a lot. It was then at the music schools that I found the best teachers, the most stimulating challenges and the best conditions to aspire to become something more than an obvious consequence of my family context, which would have certainly pushed me towards science or engineering.
I don’t believe that music could have been the only option for my life – my passion for Bach, although older, isn’t greater than my fixation on Heidegger and I have less technical skills as a pianist than as a computer programmer –, but music was the first to reveal itself as an opening towards a promising leap of faith. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I still don’t know. In a life we don’t have the right to many leaps of this kind, so it seems to me that it is within music that I will stay for some more time.
· Indicate the paths that led you to composition. ·
RP: I could say it was a desire to dedicate myself to a profound involvement with the world, which is only possible through the artistic poiesis. But the truth is that I’ve discovered this reason only after being on this side for a long time. This is the reason that today gives sense to the leap of faith which led me to composition, yet it wasn’t the material cause of this path. To explain the latter one, I will need to go back to other accidents, fortunate, as almost all of them are in retrospective.
The first impulse that I determined as mine was, as a matter of fact, to follow the early music path. Then, I understood that what attracted me in early music was its comparative strangeness: as soon as a given practice from the past became more familiar, I started to loose interest in it (though not the fondness, which remains to this day). In the meantime, it already was a little too late to acquire an instrumental virtuosity that would allow for interesting developments in this area, so I diverted my attention towards conducting.
Nevertheless, I quickly understood that what really interested me in conducting was the process of bringing new works to light, hence I thought that studying composition would give me a more solid foundation for that. Therefore, I went to study composition with the purpose to establish a career as a performer. Only in media res did I discover that the composer, particularly in electroacoustic music, also – or perhaps even primarily – needed to be a performer. And here I’ve remained.
· Which moments from your music education do you find, nowadays, the most important? ·
RP: All the ones which I recall, and not only the ones circumscribed to music education: everything that we experience contributes to what we are. A feature of the human memory, just as important as it is neglected, is the capacity to forget. I have a lot of confidence in my ability to forget what is not important and thus to choose what is. If I don’t make the explicit effort of remembering the bad moments, what I recall is a very happy path through music, even when it comes to the moments that would later prove misguided. None the less, I am able to identify that almost all the key moments happened at live concerts: that moment when that piece touched me for reasons that I was often unable to explain. The entire music education is justifiable as a preparation so that these moments can happen.
Part 2 · Influences & Aesthetics
· What are the references from the past and the present that you assume in your music practice? ·
RP: I’m afraid that I don’t really know how to answer this question… I can only say that they change according to what I’m working on at a given moment. All of them are entirely assumed. Any experienced listener will easily identify which are the ones summoned in every case. It’s also not uncommon for me to identify them in the texts that accompany the works. Each work assembles a universe on its own, of musical and other references. It is in this universe that I need to immerse myself completely during the months of incubation of a piece (to my misfortune, from a pragmatic perspective, I’m an extraordinarily slow composer). The presence of Bach on my piano is, perhaps, the only constant which sees the years passing by, proving thereby that some clichés have their own raison d’être. But, for my practice as composer, Bach’s music appears only as a testimony of a transcendent involvement with music. It’s something that can’t serve as referential, since this degree of involvement isn’t accessible to a common mortal man like me.
· In your opinion, what can a music discourse express and/ or mean? ·
RP: I’m not able to answer this question within a limited space, the more because if I could do it using words, I wouldn’t need music in the first place. The idea that everything that is significant can be translated or codified in any other form of transmitting information – either composed of numbers, bits, images or words –, is false and very dangerous. There’s always something lost – and gained, even if inadvertently – in the act of translation or transmutation. The case of art illustrates well the truism that the medium is the message. What I also find dangerous is the idea of art as expression of something, as if the thing that one finds in music would be only the musical translation of something well defined that the author had encountered before, presumably within himself. Furthermore, I am often bothered by the way in which some artists claim for themselves the control over the symbolic power of one or another element in their works. This symbolic power is real, but, as it seems to me, mainly when it doesn’t depend on explicit explanations – and sometimes even on the prior awareness – of the author. In short, it’s a very difficult matter, on which I have expressed some ideas in writing. Since it’s impossible to sum them up here, I can recommend these writings to a possibly interested reader.
· Are there any extra-musical sources which influence your work in a significant way? ·
RP: I don’t know if the extra-musical actually exists; everything can be musical if we take it as such. In my opinion, the problem lies in the vision of art strictly based on its materialisation as an artistic object or in its emergence as a cultural phenomenon. From this perspective, it can be true that there are musical and non-musical objects, or that it is possible to divide the practices between the ones that are musical and the ones that are not. However, art is much more than this. It demands an involvement with the world which goes much beyond the subject-object separation or any other cultural demarcation. Everything can be musical – in the real sense of the word, and not only in the substantive one –, if we let ourselves involve with the world in this way.
· In the context of Western art music, do you feel close to any past or present school and aesthetics? ·
RP: No, but I also don’t feel particularly distant from any of them!
· Are there any influences of non-Western cultures in your music? ·
RP: Each work of mine is a reflection of the references that insist on not letting go in the moment of composing. They are rarely consciously chosen, being frequently discovered whilst being distracted with another goal in mind. That is why I invest so much time in the most serious occupation of distracting me with anything and everything, and that couldn’t be further from dilettantism or superficiality. For some reason, which I don’t always clearly understand before finishing the work, some references “put their feet in the door” and insist on staying and accompanying the work up until the very end. Some of them then stay for diner, others go away right after. I have to take each of them very seriously, under the penalty of losing the opportunity of understanding them by means of their incorporation in my poietic action towards the world.
For obvious reasons, I more frequently stumble over references coming from what is conventionally called “Western culture”, although I have serious doubts whether we can treat it in such cohesive and tight manner. Not only are they closer to my daily routine, but they’re also easier for me to integrate into my worldview. Yet I always enjoy more something that shows me new ways of seeing the world, hence my curiosity ends up taking me everywhere. And it’s not rare that I feel closer to elements of culture from different places than to the vast majority of the products of the Western entertainment industry, however easy the malicious interpretations of this statement can be.
Nonetheless, only the ones transcending the condition of distant objects can rise up to the genuine condition of references, becoming, even if very slowly, an integral part of my worldview. If I’m unquestionably “western”, therefore, up from this moment, these references are also, and to the same extent, “western”. I have serious doubts whether it is possible to truly summon up a reference and keep it at distance at the same time. Sometimes we mistake respect with distance, but, for me, they’re more antithetical than correlated concepts. The distance generally comes from arrogance, fear or indifference. When it comes to me, I want to keep as smallest distance as possible towards the people and ideas I admire and respect.
· What does the term“avant-garde” mean to you and what, in your opinion, can nowadays be taken as avant-garde? ·
RP: I’m not materialistic at all, so the idea of the avant-garde as an advanced group exploring the path which will then be inevitably followed is completely strange to me. And avant-garde is certainly not a “style”: few things would nowadays be more conservative than composing a piece, for example, in the style of Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen from the 1960s, however revolutionary some of their ideas were at the time.
Having said this, I’m generally not in the slightest way interested in the art which is “done” before it is materialised, in other words, in the art affiliated with a determined, a priori selected style, or which emerges from a desire of being acknowledged by this or another particular group. I’m interested in the art offering new manners of seeing the world, what obviously depends on both my capacity of understanding it as well as my knowledge on the context in which it emerged. It’s a difficult balance: if we put ourselves completely outside of a tradition, what we do is meaningless; if we place ourselves completely inside a tradition, what we do becomes redundant.
Perhaps this is what we can understand as avant-garde: an attitude exploring the limits of what is still not musical in a given tradition, always grounded in the firm determination to work the material in order to make it clear for the careful listener that the limit of what’s musical is expanded precisely through that artistic act. If it is so, then I can say that what interests me is, indeed, avant-garde art.
Part 3 · Language & Music Practice
· Characterise your music language from 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. ·
RP: I often shock some people by saying that to characterise the language or style of a composer in plain activity is a little like making an autopsy on the body of an alive patient: we will certainly get a lot of relevant information for our objective to cure the patient, but he or she will not survive the operation. I hope that my music language is still a becoming and not a dead body, so I kindly ask to be unburdened of having to answer this question in other way than by composing more music!
· When it comes to your creative practice, do you develop your music from an embryo-idea or after having elaborated a global form? In other words, do you work from the micro towards the macro-form or vice-versa? Please describe this process. ·
RP: For each work the process is different, because each one of them asks for unique things. I’m not able to separate the work from the context in which it emerges: what are my concerns at the moment, what are the books that I read while composing, who commissioned it, what is the space where it will be premiered, etc. If there is something constant, it’s the fact that I won’t be satisfied if I don’t learn something new with every work I write. In other words, it’s very unlikely for me to compose a work which would be only a materialisation of an a priori idea, a work that I’m able to predict entirely before it’s materialised.
In this sense and although I understand its historical sense, I move away from conceptual art when it invokes that the idea is the machine that makes the art. The poiesis has a unique, revealing power which has nothing to do with the artist’s arbitrary whim, being instead founded in his or her capacity of permanently recognising the quality of his or her involvement with the material that he or she is working with. It’s this involvement that leads to the discovery of solutions to problems which frequently we wouldn’t know how to articulate beforehand, yet which, through the manipulation of the material, become transparent. Suddenly, composing becomes so easy that we feel like being guided through the unknown by something transcending us. Until that happens – and it is as rare as it needs to be, in order for it to be as special as it is –, the unique way which I have, is to work, work and work; to choose, revise and, above all, to throw away the unnecessary.
· How in your music practice do you determine the relation between the reasoning and the creative impulses or the inspiration? ·
RP: I’m not able to separate these two things. I’m only one when I’m composing: with the reasoning, the emotion, the intuition. The relations between them are only complicated because we try to artificially separate them through discourse. I give perhaps some priority to the rational control only insofar as it helps me to avoid the whimsy taste, which is, first and foremost, born from an a priori judgement. Tempting as it is to make something tasteful, it always has a very limited reach. I never give up anything that I don’t like at first, however I often give up that which I like at first. It is only possible to immediately like what calls upon something which, consciously or not, we have already been liking: it’s a boring territory and, frankly speaking, quite unfertile in things worth spending time on. Besides that, and appropriating a phrase by one of our giants, I try to put all I am into the least I do.
· What is your affiliation with the new technologies and how do they influence your music? ·
RP: My relationship with the technology is very complicated. On the one hand, and when we dominate it, it’s a fantastic instrument to achieve certain goals which would be impossible without this control of the technique. In this case, it’s in all respects similar to the virtuosity on a music instrument. On the other hand, it’s a domain which easily captures our worldview, putting us at the service of the technology and without great means to resist it. It’s an ambiguity which has already been identified by many and I don’t know how – or even if – we will be able to solve it.
Therefore, for me the most important thing is to feel that I dominate the techniques I use, what is more easily evidenced when I use them for the purposes other than the ones for which they have been created. Thus, I try to escape from the uses suggested to me by the manner in which the technique presents itself – situations in which I end up feeling controlled. In my recent approach, the emphasis put on software programming and on the construction of new instruments isn’t so much a motivation to be on the crest of the technology wave, but rather an attempt – which I know to be futile in its foundation – to retain some capacity to breathe inside the technological vortex in which we all live, and which ends up reducing us all to the condition of mere users.
· Define the relation between music and science, and how does the latter one is manifested in your creation. ·
RP: Another complicated topic, on which I have written some things that I cannot summarise here. I can only say that art and science are quite different and, consequently, complementary ways to deal with the complexity of the world. From this complexity, science attempts to abstract lenses, allowing us to formulate a comprehension that amplifies the power of our actions upon the world. These lenses can help bring to the surface what is universal in a world of particularities. Nowadays, there are a lot of well-meaning people who believe that there’s nothing more to say beyond this.
However, an approach aiming at bringing everything to the surface will always be, and as the name implies, superficial. Art, on the other hand, assumes the complexity of the world as irreducible, looking at every encounter with each particular precisely from the perspective of what makes it particular. Yet, and since the world’s complexity is inexhaustible, an approach dwelling on every detail of this complexity will eventually lead us to the immobility of contemplation. Therefore, I don’t think that nobody gains with the separation of art and science, neither within the academy, nor in society, nor in the life of any individual.
I’m interested in both, and that is certainly reflected in what I do. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the social equilibrium is at the moment clearly out of balance, in the sense of almost exclusively privileging the science. One of the most obvious dangers of this unbalance is that some people begin to feel the lack of what science can’t give them – the more because it wouldn’t be doing its work well if it could – and to identify that lack as science’s intrinsic problem, leading them to reject it altogether, even in areas in which it’s unwise to do so. If I feel that science doesn’t respond to my anxieties while, at the same time, it presents itself as the only human activity capable of giving response to all questions, then it’s obvious that I need to reject it…
The worrying phenomenon of the rejection of science which we observe today is, it seems to me, a consequence of an emptying promoted by science itself, and which, as such, can be more easily solved with a recovery of the role of the humanities (among which I include the arts), than with the inquisitorial persecution of the unbelievers in science’s enlightening exclusivity. There are probably more historical lessons that could be summoned up here, but it seems to me that, above all, we are paying the price of an excessive specialisation in the education. Appropriating the celebrated aphorism by Abel Salazar, I would say that the artist who knows only art, doesn’t even know art. And that the scientist who only knows science, doesn’t even know science.
· What is the importance of space and timbre in your music? ·
RP: We can see music as being materialised through the articulation (rhythm, metrics) of a spectral morphology (timbre, tuning, harmony) in an acoustic space, which in western music tends to be a closed space. (Even at outdoor concerts, the prevailing acoustic paradigm is the one of a closed space and not of an open field.) Being aware of this, how could these elements not be important? All the more, in a historical moment in which we have all collectively become aware of the importance of this fact and when diverse perspectives on these matters proliferate.
I could opt for relating me to this fact by ostensibly ignoring it, in what would be a perfectly legitimate artistic choice, as long as consciously made. It hasn’t been my case though, particularly regarding the relation between music and space, which ended up being the subject of my doctoral thesis. Yet it’s important to me that spatial consciousness changes the musical discourse, and not the contrary. In other words, I don’t want to make the same music as I would make it without the space, only with this extra ornament: a little like someone orchestrating a piece that was clearly composed for piano. I want the work with space to fully contaminate the music discourse, so that the work becomes impossible without this element, so that the music gesture doesn’t’ exist only in the space, but through it. As in almost anything, it’s certainly much easier to talk about it than to actually do it.
· Does experimentalism play an important role in your music? ·
RP: Yes, as it can be understood from the previous answers. If I don’t experiment and, with this, I learn something new, then I feel that I don’t have anything new to say and that my work is redundant.
· Which works from your catalogue do you consider turning points? ·
RP: I wish I could say that all of them are, in the sense that all of them are unique. But, as a matter of fact, pragmatic contingencies oblige me to sometimes compose pieces in which I experiment less and which therefore are heirs of previous experiences, becoming thus less important. I would say that the pieces I composed during my doctorate (particularly the two last ones, “auditorium” and “pendulum”, both from 2012), were very important due to the conditions in which they were created, favouring slowness and reflection. It doesn’t mean that they are the “best ones”; far from it. I think that it is quite rare when we can identify as great works the ones that have an experimental character. Yet, these works showed me the importance of allowing the involvement with the material to lead the way. They also showed me that the arrival point can be surprising, even – and, perhaps, above all – to myself. It was with these works that I felt, for the first time, the arrival towards something close to the famous statement by Morton Feldman: “I don’t push the sounds around.”
· To what extent do composition and performance constitute for you complementary activities? ·
RP: As I said above, I think that they are more than complementary: they coexist. I always compose thinking about the performance and there are few things in the world that give me more pleasure than the rare opportunities to perform my own music, even if I don’t possess particular qualities that recommend me as a performer of music by others. Yet, I don’t believe that it’s an accident that so many composers are also excellent performers, even if in different moments of their lives. The increasing complexity of what is demanded form the composers and the performers limits the capacity of serious dedication to both careers. However, the invention of the composer who doesn’t begin with being proficient in the performance is very recent, circumscribed to a very small music environment – in which I include myself – and perhaps it still lacks a validation that only time can bring.
Part 4 · Portuguese Music
· Try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music. ·
RP: I don’t know if a “Portuguese music” actually exists, in the sense of not depending on the arbitrary circumstances that make some works appear in a place we call Portugal. To make music in Portugal is unnecessarily difficult, since it is rare for us to have conditions to do our work seriously. Why? Because we are required to do anything and everything – and, above all, stupid things, such as bureaucracy, marketing, collection of indicators, adequation to pointless criteria, etc., etc. –, but almost never are we required to do our work seriously.
I feel that what we lack in Portugal is a knowledgeable and demanding critical mass; a group from which serious and dedicated music critics could emerge and, if it’s not asking too much, politicians and cultural managers more motivated and dedicated to the cause of the artistic worldview than to their will for belonging – or for rejecting, which is also a way of giving relevance – to this or another social group. All the rest – more or less money, more or less institutions, more or less equipment, more or less promotion, more or less consequent thought about the art, more or less time for creation – would be easily resolved if there was a demanding critical mass.
· What in your opinion distinguishes Portuguese music on the international panorama? ·
RP: It’s difficult for me to answer this question. What always interests me more is to get to know the composer x – or even to fully enjoy the work x by the composer y –, than to affiliate my evaluation of his or her work in any classification, elaborated on the basis of arbitrary historical, stylistic or geopolitical criteria. I think that it’s not such a strange position, since what always interests me more is to get to know the person x – or even fully enjoy the encounter x with person y – than to affiliate my evaluation of this person in any classification elaborated on the basis of arbitrary historical, stylistic or geopolitical criteria.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that the context of the creator is determining for his or her worldview, and it will always emerge in his or her artistic production. It seems to me, however, that in the context of Portuguese art music – using the expression proposed in this questionnaire –, this worldview is mainly determined by the musical activity of the European countries from where the works programmed by our cultural managers come, the same countries to where our composers go to study. Therefore, it seems to me impossible to establish borders – though as artificial as they all are –, which would define Portuguese music.
Still too often, the works created in Portugal die in the very same day they were born, at premieres not rarely marked by the absence of respectable conditions for rehearsals and performance. I’m not sure if it’s desirable to create a “Portuguese way” of making music, but I am certain that we will never truly get to know the composers working in Portugal – and the reach of their worldview –, if this situation is not significantly altered.
· In your opinion, is it possible to identify any transversal aspect in Portuguese contemporary music? ·
RP: Musically speaking, I think not, for the reasons which I’ve exposed above.
· How do you define the composer’s role nowadays? ·
RP: I think that it’s not different from what it has always been, nor does it seem to me substantially different from the role of any other type of artist. I don’t even think that it’s substantially different from the role of being a human being, who, using existentialist terminology, lives his or her life authentically. It has to do with developing a profound involvement with the world, revealed under the peculiar practice which we conventionally call music. It’s an enormous privilege to be able to have the necessary time and peace to let this involvement with the world grow with the necessary slowness. Being able to show this involvement by means of some type of artistic creation constitutes an additional privilege. Yet it all depends on the involvement with the world. Not only are we not fighting for more and more people to be liberated from the vile battle against the scarcity, having thus – and only so – real access to these privileges, as we are each day inventing more and more artificial scarcity and more micro-divisions within the work so that nobody is able to escape the tethers of the dichotomy “labour/ entertainment” which obscures the human potential existing in all of us.
Part 5 · Present & Future
· What are your present and future projects? ·
RP: At this moment I’m anxiously waiting for the premieres of works which have been postponed due to the pandemic. I’m also preparing a piece for the Sond’Ar-te Electric Ensemble, about which I can’t say anything yet. I have also lots of lessons to prepare, books and articles to read and write; all the activities that give me as much pleasure as composition. And then, I don’t know – I don’t like to make long-term plans. I’m afraid that they will prevent me from taking advantage of the changing opportunities which appear now and then.
· How do you see the future of art music? ·
RP: I don’t have the gift to foresee the future. But I do have some clues on the direction where I would like to go, slowly and always giving primacy to the post-experience reflection over any kind of a priori ideology. I believe that some of these paths will have become clear in my answers to this questionnaire. It’s where I will try to go, if in the meantime I’m not distracted by anything more important.
Rui Penha, December 2020
© MIC.PT
Rui Penha · no man is an island João Silva (trumpet) recording at the O'culto da Ajuda in Lisbon (2019.12.14) |
Rui Penha · Pendulum Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble · Guillaume Bourgogne (direction) recording at the Goethe-Institut in Lisbon (2012.10) |
Rui Penha · In the 1st Person Interview with Rui Penha (in Portuguese) conducted by Pedro Boléo recording at the O’culto da Ajuda in Lisbon (2020.01.23). |
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· "obra com título longo" (2009) · Performa Ensemble · Momentum [Phonedition] · · "Pendulum" (2012) · Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble, Guillaume Bourgogne (direction) · Portuguese Music of the XXI · [Miso Records] · · "rainy afternoon delay study" (2010) · Cadavres Exquis [Miso Reocrds] · · "Três quadros sobre o fado · Métrica, Melodia, Harmonia" (2013) · Performa Ensemble · Fados [Numérica] · |
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