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Questionnaire/ Interview
Part 1 · Roots & Education
· How did music begin for you and where can you identify your music roots? ·
António Pinho Vargas: For me music began with studying piano, as is the case of many people from my generation. I started at the age of nine, then some years later I stopped and then at the age of 20 I started again. In this second, more serious phase of studying piano I became interested in improvisation and jazz. At the time there were no jazz schools, no improvisation studies, so listening to music on records became the primary method of learning. It was a kind of oral transmission by means of technology – the recordings. It was the common practice of jazz musicians. However, I actually completed the Piano Course at the Porto Conservatoire, which I interrupted and started over a couple of times. At the time I already had various albums recorded. Perhaps it’s possible to say that the root that prevailed was established in the freedom which the improvisation gave me since very early. Improvising certainly implies rules and models, but the most important thing was listening to other musicians and participating in the collective creation. At the time my musician-friends listened to jazz and free-jazz, as well as to totally improvised music, contemporary music and to the modern and classical repertoire. This resulted in a very eclectic and rich atmosphere, in which an apparent affinity joined all the music practices. Obviously, it was a time of intense discussions, both here and in all the other places. Only later, in the 1980s, did the more differentiated and sometimes tight “tribes” begin to appear. In the middle of it all I graduated in History from the Faculty of Letters at the University Porto, what has actually proven to have direct and indirect importance in my music path.
· Which paths led you to composition? ·
APV: Performing the 1970s jazz has quickly led me towards composition, awakening the desire to write music. Still before April 25th, 1974 I made part of the Anar Jazz Trio with Artur Guedes on the bass and Jorge Lima Barreto on the percussion. Since 1976 the contact with Rão Kyao and José Eduardo, apart from the musicians with whom I performed at the time in the group Zanarp in Porto (José Nogueira, Artur Guedes, José Martins), allowed me to dive into various diverse attitudes within the vast interior of what “jazz” then meant. It was a phase of many discoveries. I was also composing for these groups. I was embracing musical practices which some years later have gained various new designations. At the same time, I was studying Piano with D. Hélia Soveral at the Music College of Porto, and Composition at the Conservatoire of Porto with Cândido Lima, by the way a great improviser who often performed at the lessons embracing most diverse styles. His teachings had a strong intuitive component. It was there that I started to have contact with the various aesthetic and technical orientations of contemporary music. It was a process of entering into a particular universe with all the controversies and divergencies of its own. In this phase I also studied with Álvaro Salazar and, already in the 1980s, I started attending Emmanuel Nunes’ seminars at the Gulbenkian Foundation. Since 1983 I began recording discs with my Quartet (with José Nogueira, Mário and Pedro Barreiros), then Sextet (with Quico and Rui Júnior). My “jazz-that-was-not-exactly-jazz” – actually I don’t know precisely how to define it, but I’m able to derive it from the European ECM current –, had a certain public impact and it made me very happy during a decade and a half. It was music composed at the piano and on the paper, in order for me to play it with my musicians. We rehearsed once a week, independently of having concerts or not.
· Which moments from your music education do you find the most important? ·
APV: Without any doubt, playing an instrument, which by itself implies listening, thinking, coordinating movements, feeling emotions, or even a profound commotion associated with the music that one is performing at the moment; all this reveals the great richness of music and the powerful ramifications unleashed with its practice and intense study during various hours. The importance of studying music is nowadays recognised by many neurologists as an enriching factor within the various dimensions of personal and, associated with it, human growth. Music Teaching is important for the children, for the youth, independently of the occupation that they later define or chose for their life.
Part 2 · Influences & Aesthetics
· Which references from the past and the present do you assume in your music practice? ·
APV: There are a lot of them. In its essence, composing involves a determined stance towards the history. It implies essential choices regarding the music language in a given decade or phase. Whether one wants it or not, every composer belongs to a genealogy orienting his or her path. Yet I should say that what I consider as my “elective affinities”, has been changing according to the particular time. What has always remained is perhaps the manner of doing things. The references from the “classical” past were common among many other colleague-composers. Having studied and performed a lot of this marvellous music, carved it into my body. Later, Ligeti’s and Kurtág’s music became very important, particularly Ligeti’s last phase, the Etudes and the Concerto for Piano, where he uses triads and scales within complex rhythmic combinations. In another phase, Wolfgang Rihm’s ideas exposed in his 1983 study, De la liberté (in the journal Contrechamps, Avangarde et Tradition), directed me even more towards the recovery of freedom in the compositional act; this idea was much less emphasised in the post-serial music phase. Within this framework of values, the notions of structure, logic and coherence had a major priority during all this period. The implications of Rihm’s study were vast. It helped me to reconsider the attitudes towards the composition, to acknowledge the restlessness which has always been present. Firstly, in relation to the post-serial hegemony – an aspect independent from the quality of many of the works from this period –, which dominated the teaching of composition in Portugal. For this reason, in 1987 I went to the Netherlands, to study. Later, already after 2005, I wanted to study the “absence of Portuguese music in the European context” in my Doctoral Thesis, published in the book Música e Poder (Almedina, 2011; in English: Music and Power). The scarce radiation and circulation of Portuguese music have undoubtedly been very well pronounced for centuries, and it is actually quite common in the case of other peripheral European countries dealing with the great hegemony of the central ones. It’s a cultural and social question, revealing the notorious importance of the hegemonies existing in the music field, yet not without obvious consequences for the “condition” of the composers.
· In your understanding, what can a music discourse express and/ or mean? ·
APV: Music is art in time (and of time). Therefore, a music discourse is what the listener, endowed with his or her own sensitive perception and auditive biography, manages to capture in the moment of listening. In the present phase there are many premieres and few further performances or new interpretations. Therefore, it’s the discourse, which every music composition is able to create, that conducts the listener during the temporal unwinding of each work. On many occasions it seemed to me that the moment of the premiere of a work could very well be the only one in a concert situation. It hasn’t always happened with some of my works which were performed more times, yet it doesn’t end up being more common. One can say that every work tells a different story, designs a sonic atmosphere of its own, constructing a specific “thing” (ein Ding in Heideggerian terminology) which has a title.
· Are there any extra-musical sources, which influence your work in a significant way? ·
APV: Apart from the literary and poetic ones, generally I haven’t used extra-musical sources, except for, sometimes, in the initial ideas. By definition a text is extra-musical, however normally this term takes us to another type of considerations. But it’s a different “thing”. It contains words and a semantics of its own, being destined more to reading and less to audition. A metaphor of any type is equally an idea, a concept, or a “time-image” which can be expressed with words. We all know that during ages Western music was mainly vocal and almost always using religious texts. But I use the term texts just as it exists after the symbolic primacy of instrumental music in the 19th century. In this precise sense, before starting a song cycle, an opera, or a work for choir and orchestra, there is a text or a specific dramatic narrative. The orchestral piece Onze Cartas (2011) uses pre-recorded texts and in Um discurso de Thomas Bernhard (2007) the narrator speaks the texts during the work. In these cases, the compositional work starts with the reading of the text. It is this reading that allows to conceive the work and favour the composition of music in which the text is present, but in a certain way transfigured into music in the voices of the singers or speakers, creating a kind of third level of meaning. In other cases, the fragments of texts by poets and writers served me only to compose, without their actual presence in the works. It’s the case of Six Portraits of Pain (2005) for cello and orchestra (with the exception of a pre-recorded excerpt by Anna Akhmátova) and Memorial (2018) for symphony orchestra, based on metaphors derived from José Saramago’s novels. Ultimately, they are pre-existing texts transformed into metaphors for the composition.
· What does “avant-garde” mean to you and what in your opinion can nowadays be considered as avant-garde? ·
APV: The concept of “avant-garde” applied to music is fundamentally historical. It takes us back to the artistic avant-gardes from the beginning of the 20th century and to the post-world-war-II music avant-gardes. I believe, as far as I know, that this status, this slogan isn’t nowadays frequently claimed. There’s a difference between the use of this term in this precise sense and its current application. Regarding the latter one, “avant-garde” perhaps still arises in the discourses. There’s still a certain cultural prestige associated with it. I don’t know if a given music style can use this denomination in accordance with it already-several-decades-old assumptions. Many books have been published on this subject. However, there are many composers who follow this undoubtedly very important legacy in new manners. The main argument is art that moves forward, in direction towards a “future”. This has always had a strong political connotation. In the beginning of the 20th century this term circulated indiscriminately among the political avant-garde of the working class, the party, and the artistic avant-gardes equally defending the new man, the construction of a new man. Malevich is one of the most paradigmatic cases. It’s not by accident that the artistic atmosphere in Russia, a little before and above all after the Russian Revolution lived intensely around this set of ideas, until the 1930s. An exhibition which I visited in the Netherlands in 1989-90 was generically entitled The Great Utopia. Perhaps this is the implicit desire persisting in the arts and certainly also in music.
Part 3 · Language & Music Practice
· Characterise your music language taking into perspective 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. ·
APV: I should say that I have never tried to thoroughly explain my works form the technical point of view. There’s a group of composers who analyse and describe the methods and the techniques and there’s also another one preferring to communicate mainly their intentions. I clearly belong to the latter group. I believe that each work is a “thing” that we were able to make, a kind of craft, which in the end can produce a meaning that exceeds us. It becomes something that exists on its own, or it may not exist as in the cases when we withdraw the pieces. It’s contingent, mysterious and sometimes uncontrollable, involving a knowledge accumulated with a lot of work, yet existing according to the internal forces triggered by each piece. It hasn’t always been like this. In the beginning I wrote some pieces using series, for solo instruments and duos. What remained from this group is the piece Três Fragmentos for solo clarinet, premiered in 1985 by António Saiote. Even today it is probably one of my most performed and recorded pieces. Even when using series as a point of departure, I tried to join various serial forms with relations of complementarity and with rules invented for every work. After having studied in the Netherlands I tried to find other types of music language, still chromatic but already with discourse-conducting gestures. Among these works the most important one is perhaps Mirrors for piano from 1989-90. It has equally been recorded and performed by various pianists in various countries. The title takes us to other composers who hover over, models from which I took this or that aspect with the aim to develop the form in an autonomous way.
The works Monodia – quasi un requiem from 1993, Nocturno/ Diurno from 1994 and Nove Canções de António Ramos Rosa from 1995, began a new phase giving primacy to the ideas, independent in each case and already much freer, initiating something that has later become typical: appreciation of some tonal aspects, what I can sometimes designate as “Wagnerian apparitions”, use of strong contrasts and various “type-like” languages in only one single work, ultimately, something that was then designated as post-modernism, a concept which has never completely become stable. In essence, I’ve defended “a small theory for every work” as elaborated in the composition act, within constant self-reflection, without wanting to give too much emphasis on this expression. This attitude, this “method”, prevailed in the various operas, in the Estudos e Interlúdios (2000), in the three works for choir and orchestra (Judas [2002], Requiem [2012], Magnificat [2013]), in Six Portraits of Pain from 2005 and in the series of orchestral works: Onze Cartas (2011), Concerto for Violin (2016), Concerto for Viola (2016), up to the Sinfonia (subjetiva) from 2019, among others.
· Are there any music genres/ styles to which you give preference? ·
APV: Not exactly. What has existed during the years, as I tried to explain, has been an orientation of the work in different directions. A chamber music phase, then the opera phase, followed by a set of works for choir and orchestra and finally mainly works for orchestra. In each of the phases there was in fact a predilection towards genres, but this is an a posteriori conclusion. It has largely resulted from the interaction with the music life and its institutions. Composing is, above all, an occupation. Yet it corresponds with the desire to do. There’s a beautiful poem on writing by Akhmátova, which begins: “In the beginning a certain malaise”. This is what happens very often.
· When it comes to your creative practice, do you develop your music form and embryo-idea or after having elaborated a global form. In other words, do you begin with the micro going towards the macro-form, or vice versa? Please, describe this process. ·
APV: Generally, my dominating tendency has been to start with a base idea or an initial metaphor. Even in the works with text, the composition frequently derives largely from the reading of the text, libretto, or poems, as I’ve already referred. To establish the final text makes already part of the compositional work. Then, the initiated-in-the-meantime music unveils its own determinations, its forces, creating a necessity to continue or to cut, etc.
The form, seen as an open field of possibilities, is being constituted in the course of the composition. Before beginning to define the idea and the materials (gestures, figures, narratives), an idea of a pre-established form has only vaguely existed. However, the form, once glimpsed and auto organised through the development of the music discourse, has strong implications in the global proportions or in the relations between sections and between the materials. The basic idea can be a single line, a sequence of chords, an idea of contrast – this one has been recurrent – between a sonic mass of one kind and another one of a different kind, a predominance of a certain figure in the term’s broad sense, etc.
· How in your music practice do you determine the relation between the reasoning, the creative impulses and inspiration? ·
APV: From my perspective this separation doesn’t entirely correspond to the reality of the creative act. Even the most intuitive of composers (or artists) aren’t able to prevent themselves from reasoning. And even the most rational or systematic of composers can’t reject impulses. Any of the paths is valid to try to achieve something singular: a work. In this way the reason and the creative impulses coexist, creating a whole. Feeling and thinking coexist and interconnect in humans in a complex form, as António Damásio has broadly shown us. Thus, in my practice I can’t establish this relation between the oppositions positioned in this manner. I rather note their simultaneous and inexorable existence. Having said this, the power of the traditional and common ideas on reason or inspiration is excessive and it tends to produce a lot of extreme prejudices, in both directions. The imagined romantic composer would be an example of someone who lets him or herself being conducted by the inspiration. There’s a lot of literature about it: “Chopin and the rain outside”. It wasn’t really like that. When I say “Chopin” there’s a complete man behind this name. The ideas and the imagery from his time strongly valorised the role of intuition and/ or the artistic inspiration. Then, on the opposite side the rationalist composer elaborates a programme, in the most radical cases, the algorithm and the work, being the music piece its almost automatic consequence. This has never properly been my predilection. Every time when I start a new piece, the time leading me to the constitution of the base idea is generally very long. From there I begin another kind of work, which this idea or metaphor already conducts in music terms, with specific materials, predominance of intervals, etc. It is an insane, contingent, insecure effort, made of trials and errors. To define the materials, to transform them, organise a form, respect the created tensions and releases, etc. And, nonetheless, all this effort requires reasoning. There’s no other way. The composer is a doer. It’s in this doing that one experiments, tries out, elaborates, organises, tests, corrects, etc. This is what I think. There’s no system which would on its own secure the quality of a work, nor any inspiration that on its own would produce a music work or an artwork. It’s a complex process, which can’t be reduced only to this opposition. I suspect that most of the composers know it very well. A persistent going and coming. From this point of view my stance hasn’t changed much during the years.
· What is the importance of space and timbre in your music? ·
APV: The timbre is the colour of the sound, its specificity. For example, an orchestra is a determined sound. A gigantic instrument. A contemporary music ensemble is another sound. The space is the place where music happens and the concert halls are, on their own, endued with an acoustics. The differences can be great. In some of the works I used movements of the musicians in the concert hall space. I can give two examples: in Judas (2002) for choir and orchestra there is a part in which the choir opens, dividing itself to the right and to the left side between the feminine and masculine voices. In this moment of the work the sound of the choir changes, travelling through the hall in a different way than in the initial traditional disposition. The writing of this part takes this into consideration: the minor-major chords move from one side to the other. In Monodia – quasi un requiem (1993) the space that I imagined would be a church with a wide resonance of its own. It was in fact firstly recorded in a church on the CD Monodia (1995; EMI Classics/ Valentim de Carvalho). Nonetheless, the premiere by MusikFabrik took place in a concert hall in 1993. The music writing is articulated within this prior notion of the acoustic space: long notes, extreme registers and silences. For this reason, in concert halls I ask for two microphones, one between the violins and the other one between the viola and the cello, without direct sound but only reverberation in order to artificially recreate the intended wide resonance. The piece has been performed many times and it works well. In any case, I haven’t used this kind of spatial resources on many occasions.
· Which of your works do you consider turning points in your path? ·
APV: Here I need to make a memory and self-analysis effort. Perhaps the group of works from 1993-95, which I have already referred – the string quartet, Monodia – quasi un requiem, Nocturno/ Diurno (originally for string sextet, yet the string orchestra version has been more frequently performed) and Nove Canções de António Ramos Rosa –, marks the first turning point; then, certainly, Judas (secundum Lucam, Joannem, Matthaeum et Marcum) (2002) – without it there would be no Requiem (2012), Magnificat (2013) and even De Profundis (2014); and finally Six Portraits of Pain (2005), up to the orchestral works from the recent years.
· In what way composition and performance are, for you, complementary activities? ·
APV: I think that performing in front of an audience allows to understand a series of important, but perhaps not immediately obvious aspects on everything that influences the act of performance. For example, the quality of the instrument. I have already played on both excellent and very bad pianos. Besides that, the presence of the audience transforms the act of playing at home into a performance with another dimension. There’s also the acoustics of the concert halls, the temperature, the hour of the day, individual disposition, etc. There’s a great quantity of external factors, which always have a great weight. If on many occasions I say that composing is a contingent act, then it is even more possible to say the same about performance. Music is a performative art. It always involves an hour, a day, a place, etc. However, when I performed publicly, I played my own music written for “jazz” groups, quartet, sextet, etc; that is, within a particular music practice. To compose within the 1000-year-old tradition of European written music is fundamentally different. In 1989, at the request of a dear friend of mine, Dr Carlos de Pontes Leça, I wrote an article on the relations between jazz and contemporary music for the already non-existing Colóquio-Artes journal (no. 85-1990) of the Gulbenkian Foundation. I can recall two passages from the beginning: “Let’s begin with the most evident perception: jazz and contemporary music are two separate universes. Each music has its own history, heroes, myths, ethics, literature, specialised critique and audience…; The organisation of music life takes into account this classification […]”. As this is my profound conviction, I’ve always tried to keep these two spheres separated. I believe that since early I’ve had an acute perception of these differences and their reasons of being. What is common for all the music practices, both within a performative experience and within a compositional one, is the fact that the act of performance is always as contingent as the act of composing. Having said this, the performative side is always identical. All the musicians and performers know it. External determinations, the concert hall the place, the acoustics, temperature, the hour of the day and other aspects, including the most secret ones (“today I’m not well”, “today was better than yesterday”, etc., are some of the phrases, which we all have already said and heard on many occasions). An orchestra, an ensemble or a choir, however good, exact and precise it is, every time it executes, plays, performs and records a CD, it doesn’t do it twice the same way. All this presupposes the consciousness of the contingency. The works are the same (in the scores), but it’s their nature to become sonic reality only when they are performed (and it’s always verifiable, perhaps with the exception of electronic music, but even in this case there’s the figure of the person projecting the sound…). Listening to the same work of mine performed even if on the next day, always turns out differently. Among other reasons, it is precisely because of the fact of non-existence of definite interpretations, that the music from the past has become a living art of performance of works from the past. The character of every music work as being “possible-again-and-again”, equally derives from this fact. It doesn’t always happen (new interpretations of new music), but this normally results from multiple external factors. The “destiny” of the works is filled with most varied contingencies. We all know that. However, when it comes to the works removed from the catalogue, in those cases we ourselves assume the final point. The work didn’t go well, so it is removed.
Part 4 · Portuguese Music
· Try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music. ·
APV: In one of the following answers, I refer the enormous improvement concerning the quality of musicians in Portugal. The same can be said about the quantity and quality of composers. Obviously, there are groups with diverse affinities – the ones composing with electronics, the ones who never use electronics, the ones who compose instrumental and/ or vocal music without electronics, the ones who reject operas, etc. It’s evident that there are a lot of interactions, but there are equally diverse and marked options. The most important fact is that this panorama has been improved gradually. There’s no comparison with a couple of decades before. Today there’s a whole well prepared and genuinely creative generation.
· What, in your opinion, distinguishes Portuguese music on the international panorama? ·
APV: The question of identity is perhaps easier to enunciate or unveil if seen from the outside. We can have a vague idea of French, German, English or Polish music, because our view is more distant. But I have to admit that each of these identities is much more diverse and plural than our possible image about it. Apart from this there are a lot of emigrant composers who become important in the country of their residence. In general, these exterior points of view are partial. Moreover, living in another country often changes the previously conceived ideas. For this reason, I think that it’s very difficult to define a specifically national musical identity. I’m not saying that it can’t exist, but perhaps it can’t be described by a composer. In this plural phase of many diverse and coexisting currents it is probably easier to identify the attachment to currents embracing groups of composers from various countries with identical affinities, than to find an identity in what we share: a nationality and a mother-tongue.
· How do you define the composer’s role nowadays? ·
APV: In the strict sense the composer’s role is to write music. Yet it’s obvious for all that his or her place nowadays in the musical world is very different from the one occupied by the great names from the past, constituting the Western music canon. The global set of many music practices which nowadays exist, has notoriously transformed the social view on the composers from this “classical” tradition. They live on the illustrious margins of the cultural life, perhaps still illustrious, but undoubtedly margins. Their emanation is much more limited. In this point, among others, without considering the great primacy of pop/ rock music in our Western societies and likewise in global terms, what has grown is the primacy of classical music as a living art of performance of a lot of great music from the past. In the whole institutional world, the concert and opera theatre seasons are based on it. However, composing music is what unites the composers from the illustrious past and the ones from today. Similarly, in the past the strict sense of their role was to compose music. For whom, on whose request… we know that it changed from century to century. It has always been changing according to the transformations of the societies. Nevertheless, independently of the historical frame, the composer’s role has stayed the same. I don’t think that one can give him or her a role as a redeemer or, as I sometimes read, of resistance. Without any doubt, such label reveals a certain programme.
· According to your experience, what are the differences between the music environment in Portugal and in other parts of the world? ·
APV: Some decades ago, there were great differences, above all between the music environments of various European countries; there was a notorious difference between the music life in the central countries and peripheral countries, such as ours. Today the global improvement of the Portuguese scene in the quality of teaching, in the quality of musicians, orchestras and even the concert halls, has become evident. What has been important, is the emergence, mainly in the 1990s, of various new cultural institutions of the state. This allowed to gradually equalise the old differences. It’s obvious that they still exist, but before the gap was undisputable. In the 1970s and 1980s the active composers could be counted on the fingers of both hands and the orchestras were in crisis. Step by step this state of things has been changing and presently there are many more composers. Furthermore, the existence of the figure of “emerging composer” constitutes an obvious sign of the great improvement. However, there are still various aspects which can be changed for the better, particularly the persistence of the works beyond their premieres.
Part 5 · Present & Future
· What are your present and future projects? ·
APV: Since 2019 I’ve had some health problems which interfere with my work. For this reason, I need to be modest when it comes to new projects. I expect to compose some small pieces – solos, duos or perhaps for strings. Actually, I’m not able to know. It depends on various factors, as it always happens. I’m equally revising the scores of some works in order to establish editions or new editions. Presently my music is in the hands of musicians, conductors and other institutions. We’ll see…
· Could you highlight one of your more recent projects, present the context of its creation and also the particularities of the language and techniques? ·
APV: In the recent years I’ve composed an important group of works for orchestra. Thus, I can perhaps describe some aspects of my last orchestral work, Sinfonia (subjetiva) [Symphony (subjective)], commission by the CCB (Belém Arts Centre in Lisbon), where it was premiered in April 2019 in the first part of the concert whose second part included Six Portraits of Pain, with Pavel Gomziakov on the cello and the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra conducted by Pedro Amaral. The latter work was accompanied by Teresa Villaverde’s film with the same title. The premiere of the Sinfonia hasn’t been recorded, what I really regret. It was indeed an admirable execution with an excellent reception. I’ve always made an effort to have the premieres recorded, but in the case of the last three pieces it wasn’t possible, by accident, force majeure or for other reasons. Here I would primarily emphasise the form: following the symphonic tradition, it’s a work in four movements. Only a certain foreseen title has immediate consequences. However, the piece includes a motto – its nuclear element – which is a part of the first movement, emerging already close to its final. It re-emerges in the second one, a little expanded in the orchestration and constitutes the whole final, fourth movement, with a wide expansion in the register. I emphasise this aspect (the mottos) insofar as, being the traditional four-movement form clear, it is, however, challenged from within by a particular element, a theme which transversally cuts the form giving it a specific tension, at the same time conducting the audition of the work as a whole.
It has already become evident in the previous works, but particularly in the Sinfonia, in the register’s entire extension I used manners of distributing wide harmonic fields, starting with a varied overlaying of three diminished chords and tetrachords, built from the three octatonic scales. In this way one obtains endowed sonic objects of great ambiguity, both modal/ tonal as well as obviously chromatic. Essentially, the whole piece derives from this type of harmony, both in the extension of the registers, as well as in the positions closed within a reduced range of intervals. Symmetric chords with the predominating tritone interval. I’m well aware that this approach has been known for a long time, but I believe that various composers who have passed through serial, spectral or other phases, have more recently manifested an interest in the modes of expression that, in a certain way, recover some aspects of neoclassical music, for a long time considered as having neither interest nor potential. It’s the music by Stravinsky, certainly, but also an entire resulting filiation – also, perhaps, from Debussy and Mahler. It continued during the whole 20th century being sustained now in the 21st century. Everyone makes his or her own reading of the past, defining his or her own choices. The fact of having composed in this phase mainly for orchestra has had decisive importance and consequences of its own. The percussion, very wide and manifest in this set of works, often introduces a timbral specificity of its own, transforming the orchestral sound or, as in the Sinfonia’s third movement, conducting a pulsed line, on which the whole music of the third movement is settled. Thanks to its undefined-pitch nature, in general, it creates a global specific sound beyond the existing harmonic frame, adding to it another meaning.
One of the focuses of the four-recent works for orchestra (the Concertos for Violin and for Viola, Memorial and Sinfonia (subjetiva)), was to unveil and follow the “leading tone”, either in the lines or in the chords. Within the patent tensions, in non-tonal music languages one can chase and search which particular note, which instrumental sound or which determined sonic mass can acquire this property of being a “leading tone”; one can establish the way among the various possible hypothesis – which one in a given context and in a certain moment of the music discourse, within the registral voice distribution or in a dense sonic mass, within the created melodic, harmonic and timbral context, which hypothesis, I would say, seems to be the best to become chained with the one that follows.
The Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma said, using a peculiar expression, that for musicians every note needed to be “pregnant with the following one”. This metaphor is applicable to composition. When the sonic mass is complex and rich, it’s up to us to unravel its internal forces, requiring an answer, a resolution or possibilities of attachment. It forcibly has nothing to do with the tonal system, nor with its historical heyday from the past. Given the existence of a series of harmonics, only one note immediately establishes a resonance containing a potential harmony. More than potential: real. This sensitive force can emerge in moments of maximum ambiguity and I believe that it is valid for any current. Music has always been like this: it works with tensions and distensions or resolutions, independently of the way it is manifested or how it is described or classified. I have expatiated upon this aspect, because I find it essential.
Ultimately, I’m trying to describe with words what has actually been a series of musical answers, the ones that I’ve been able to give, invent, relate and to make, although music always refers to itself. Perhaps verbal discourse is not the most adequate to do it, except for teaching, certainly. It’s a truly ontological question: the very being of music, the sound in movement which produces, or doesn’t produce, its aesthetic, emotive and sensitive finish.
· How do you see the future of art music? ·
APV: It’s not possible to predict what is going to happen. To speculate on the future has given origin to a lot of misconceptions and posterior démentis on the reality of predictions, such as the end of art, or the end of classical music, etc. The books exist and one can compare those predictions with what has really happened in the meantime. Reality is determined with the action of humans, true agents of potential transformation by means of a set of institutional decisions, political options and paradigmatic social changes. The declarations of announced death or radiant future are tremendously risky. It’s not possible to go more beyond anything than some personal convictions. Frequently, what lies behind these declarations on the future of music, is actually a certain idea of the present. It’s evident. The alarm raised by some theoreticians on “the death of classical music” or “the crisis of contemporary music”, should be seen in the light of the concept of art’s death formulated by Hegel. Hegel’s “death of the art” only emphasises, in my opinion, the death of a “certain mode of art’s being” and the end of a certain mode of articulation with the social whole, historically delimited and destined to be substituted with another one. That is why I think that the future will have surprises and realities that we can’t predict. A great number of variables and vast implications is at play. Having said this with regard to the long-time future, we shall see how far the already-devastating-for-culture consequences of this terrible pandemic will go. As it has already been said – “the worst is yet to come”. Unfortunately, in this case it is a strong short and mid-term possibility.
António Pinho Vargas, February 2021
© MIC.PT
CIIMP Archives · António Pinho Vargas Interview with António Pinho Vargas conducted by Teresa Cascudo from the Archives of the Portuguese Music Research & Information Centre – MIC.PT, recorded on April 12th, 2003. |
António Pinho Vargas Monodia – quasi un requiem (1993) Matosinhos String Quartet · recorded at the O'culto da Ajuda in Lisbon (2019.06.29) |
António Pinho Vargas Estudos e Interlúdios · Estudo III (2000) Drumming – Percussion Group Miquel Bernat (musical direction) |
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António Pinho Vargas Judas · Dies festus (2002) Gulbenkian Choir, Fernando Eldoro (direction), Gulbenkian Orchestra, Joana Carneiro (direction) · CD: Naxos 2014 (8.573277) |
António Pinho Vargas Six Portraits of Pain · Cadenza e Final (2005) Anssi Karttunen (cello), Remix Ensemble Casa da Música Franck Ollu (direction) · CD: Numérica/ Casa da Música (NUM 1166) |
António Pinho Vargas Concerto para Violino · III e IV (2016) Tamila Kharambura (violin), Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra, Gary Walker (direction) · recording at the CCB in Lisbon (2016.02.07) |
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