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Photo: Pedro Amaral · © Marcelo Albuquerque

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Questionnaire/ Interview

Part 1 · Roots and Education

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

Pedro Amaral: Music relates to my family history. When I was a child, my mother bought a piano and, already as an adult, she took private piano lessons. My education started around the age of eight, but my parents had a great passion for music, and I was lucky enough to listen to excellent music from a very early age. While learning the instrument, right from the start I wanted to compose small pieces like the ones I was being taught. Three years later I went to a military college, I studied saxophone and I joined the academic orchestra. At the age of fourteen I understood suddenly, in a glance, that my life would be dedicated to music, to composition. While still in college, I started attending lessons at the Academia de Amadores de Música, which was the only institution that allowed to concentrate the various subjects on Wednesday afternoons, the only period we were allowed to leave school during the week. One year later I changed to public education, to study music more systematically. I got acquainted with Fernando Lopes Graça¹, who accepted me as private student. I enrolled at the Instituto Gregoriano de Lisboa, an excellent school which gave me a quite complete learning, and, after the high school senior year, I went to Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa (ESML) where I got the Bachelor’s degree in Composition, before entering the Paris Conservatoire (CNSM).

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

PA: All of them, I believe! I made the most of my years of apprenticeship, absorbing as much as I could, both in practical and theoretical matters. Three composers have marked my education in different moments: Fernando Lopes Graça, Christopher Bochmann and Emmanuel Nunes. I was still at the very beginning when I met Lopes Graça. I was then fifteen and I knew little about music theory, harmony, and counterpoint. Yet I used to write a lot, despite my limitations, and Lopes Graça was incredibly generous and patient in correcting my writing, in making me understand the form, in guiding my first steps. With Christopher Bochmann I came to know a more systematic and greatly rigorous teaching. It was with him that I acquired the solid technical basis that still accompanies me today. With Emmanuel Nunes, at the Paris Conservatoire, there was practically no technical transmission: his lessons glided over a broader horizon, somewhere between philosophy and psychoanalysis. The fundamental question in his teaching was: “to what in yourself does your writing correspond?” This need for a great self-awareness of the creative act certainly marked me a lot. Yet it only worked because I already had a solid technical background. In terms of orchestral conducting, I owe a lot to the teaching of two great musicians: Peter Eötvös and Emilio Pomàrico, two very different personalities, with two quite different techniques, both determining in my apprenticeship. There is obviously a third figure, a previous one in fact: Pierre Boulez. I never studied directly with him, but I attended a lot of his rehearsals and concerts, with diverse repertoires. His approach, his rehearsal technique, his gesture profoundly marked me.

Part 2 · Influences and Aesthetics

· Which references from the past and the present do you assume in your music practice? ·

PA: The genealogy I identify myself with, as a composer, is that which starts with baroque Italy in the early 17^th century; which then migrates to Germanic lands through the figure of Schütz, still in the first quarter of the century; and which, one century later, will experience its first apotheosis in the work of J. S. Bach; winding paths follow which, in the third quarter of the 18^th century, gradually lead to the establishment of Viennese Classicism, then to Germanic romanticism which, after Beethoven and Schubert, will peak in Wagner’s lyrical work as well as in Bruckner’s and Mahler’s symphonic compositions; what comes next is the agony of tonality, with Schönberg and the reconstruction of a possible language by the Second Viennese School, on the one hand, and, on the other, the inevitable works by Stravinsky and Bartók, Debussy and Ravel; together, they would lead to the great synthesis of Serialism after the Second World War, with the master figures of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Ligeti, but also Bernd Alois Zimmerman. I deeply studied the works by these composers; in my education, I worked directly with two of their most brilliant heirs, Emmanuel Nunes and Peter Eötvös; I’m also a deep admirer of the music by Wolfgang Rihm. My music, I believe, owes to this broad genealogy.

· Are there any extra-musical sources which significantly influence your work? ·

PA: I believe that an artist is influenced by all his experience, by what he sees, reads, and listens to, by his interpersonal and professional relationships, by society as a whole. From this environment we certainly distil aspects more directly influencing our work and our worldview. Within the artistic extra-musical plan, I could mention the work of Proust, with whose narrativity and construction I particularly identify myself; Bergman’s filmography, especially from “Smiles of a Summer Night”, but also Fellini’s; the theatre of Beaumarchais and of Anton Chekov, all of it; the painting by Vermeer, Miró, Viera da Silva, and, on another level, the formal lines of Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry. However, the list is endless, and it begins eight hundred years before Christ with the work of Homer, then crossing those of the great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, whose extraordinary dramatic constructions are, still today, unavoidable artistic and civilisational models. Pessoa is perhaps less of an influence and more of a permanent presence throughout my life, as I believe is manifest in my works “Os Jogadores de Xadrez” (2004), “O Sonho” (2010) and “Deux portraits imaginaires” (2012).

· How do you understand the term ‘avant-garde’ and what, in your opinion, can nowadays be considered as avant-garde? ·

PA: The word ‘vanguard’ (synonym of ‘avant-garde’) is associated with the martial vocabulary – ‘vanguard’ designates the troops moving at the head of an army. It’s not surprising that it emerged by association with post-War music, in a time when the war disaster was still very much alive in the collective imagination. Boulez ironizes with the term in the introduction to “Penser la musique aujourd’hui” (‘Quelle débauche de métaphores militaires!’), and I’m not sure that it makes any sense to continue using it today. We live in a very particular and somewhat contradictory period: on the one hand, we have an excessive presence of historical memory, easily binding the public and the audiences to the works, composers, and languages from the past; on the other hand, we have at our disposal unquestionably new technologies and means which are profoundly characteristic of our time. The overwhelming majority of the music we listen to on a daily basis, including in the cinema and the media, is based on a language that classical music surpassed more than a century ago; however, this everyday soundtrack, which the public recognizes as its own, uses contemporary instrumental and technological means extremely advanced in relation to this language. This aesthetic contradiction, which is one of the characteristics of our time, is smaller or even non-existent in most current classical music composers, which means that their works, not sharing this contradiction, have little participation in the surrounding social reality. In Europe, the ‘vanguard’ – if the word still makes any sense – is not, today, of an army representing a people or a country, but of a handful of artists who dialogue with each other, and a tiny part of society that knows them. The North American Minimalism sought to respond to this difficulty with a radical simplification of the language. And one can say that it worked: Steve Reich, Philip Glass and John Adams are among the most successful living composers in the world. I do not believe, however, that this answer is intimately possible for a musician of the European tradition. There is, by the way, a curious, almost anecdotal, and somewhat tragic story about Ernst Křenek's opera “Jonny spielt auf”, a work composed in 1926 opposing jazz rhythms and sonorities to a classical ‘modern’ language. Křenek had a concrete purpose: he wanted to demonstrate the moral and aesthetic superiority of ‘the great European art’ compared to the light and superficial music of the New World. To the composer’s bewilderment, the enormous success of the work was exclusively due to the presence of jazz sounds and entertainment music in some sections. It’s an extraordinary case in which the success of the work dramatically contradicts its author's intentions. In opposite to the North American minimalists, the European composers from the last decades have extended their means, making their musical morphology even more complex: the work by Helmut Lachemann, which once aroused very limited interest, is today a living paradigm for the new European generations who do not hesitate to integrate the sounds of the so-called ‘instrumental musique concrète’ in their language. In the same way, the use of microtonality has become widespread, extending the centuries-old 12-tones-per-octave tuning. Personally, I have not abounded in this expansion of morphology, despite the aesthetic interest it arouses in me. I find that greater complexity on this plane often implies a greater rhetorical simplicity; on the contrary, a more ambitious formal construction, a richer and more elaborate ‘narrativity’ seems to me more practicable within an instrumental vocabulary that I can fully master. My language owes to the great synthesis of Serialism (although I have never used 12-tone series in my work), and, in general, to Structuralism; I don't integrate fragments of past languages into my music, following the post-modern trend; I also don't adhere to the generalization of a conceptual art into music which, to be honest, interests me very little. My language has become more personal over the years, and I search for my own dimensions and sonorities, not existing in other composers. Does this mean I'm part of the vanguard? That I moved away from it? It’s not up to me to evaluate it and, quite honestly, as Boulez told me one day, it’s not worth wasting time with such reflections: one day we won’t be here, and a musicologist will come to interpret the position of our work in history.

Part 3 · Language and Music Practice

· Do you have any preferred music style or genre? ·

PA: There are, in fact, two genres that I find particularly appealing: opera and orchestral music. The former comes from a passion accompanying me since childhood: the theatre. The composition of my two operas, “O Sonho” (2010) and “Beaumarchais” (2016), corresponded to a natural and harmonious union between my life as a musician and this everlasting passion towards the dramatic texts, the actors, the staging, the stage itself. Writing an opera is, from the outset, musically staging a given text: to provide it with a tangible dramaturgy through the voice and the instrumental context. An opera composer is, in his own way, a theatre person – and if there was any hesitation in my adolescence between the two possible paths, the musical drama allowed me to join both within a common creative flux. The other genre, orchestral music, probably emanates from my work as a performer. Every musician has his own instrument, and my instrument is the orchestra: it’s through the orchestra that I can best express myself; and in the same way that, as an interpreter, I know how to build a sonority, a phrasing, how to draw a formal arc in the work of another composer, ancient or contemporary, in the same way, when writing for an orchestra, I imprint this interpretive experience into composition, building up my own sonority, my phrasing, my management of form and narrative flow, always bearing in mind the instrumental reality. There are certainly a lot of purely abstract dimensions in composition; yet writing for orchestra – orchestrating – gives me an immediate tangible dimension. As if, while writing, I was mentally performing the instrument – the orchestra.

· When it comes to your creative practice, do you write your music departing from an embryo-idea or after having conceived a global form? In other words, do you work from the micro towards the macro-form or vice-versa? How does this process unveil? ·

PA: I start with a plan, of course: a work of art is not a fantasy or an improvisation. Throughout history, the composers have always started with a plan – call it a fugue, rondo, sonata form, or any other. The period we live in is both a time of privilege and a time of orphanhood: privilege because we create ourselves the original form for each of our works; orphanhood, because we deprive ourselves of all the forms associated with the ancient languages, refined over centuries. This orphanhood is present in many contemporary works which, not having a previous, either original or standardized plan, result in a kind of more-or-less contemplative wander, whose final form turns out to be uninteresting. On the contrary, I believe we should assume the privilege and work in depth the formal dimension, taking it as a departure point for composition. Does it mean that an initial plan is necessarily definitive and irrevocable? Of course not. What’s interesting is precisely moving freely inside the plan: giving it life, reinventing it, contradicting it, if necessary, and resolving its contradictions, get in and out of it – like any composer of the past facing a standard form.

· How in your music practice do you define the relation between the reasoning and the creative impulses, or inspiration? ·

PA: The two dimensions are inseparable: inspiration itself does not translate into anything unless it takes shape – and there’s no other way of creating it than through reason. I’ve always used the metaphor of the architect: to take shape, an inspired instant, an impulsive vision of a building in a given space, requires hard work – from the rigorous calculation of proportions, so that the building is executable in a physical reality, to the vertiginous detail of the project’s tiniest aspects. What happens in the composition of a music work is strictly the same: between the inspired idea and its realisation there’s a path of rigour and rationality. And it concerns not only the global terms but the very inner detail of the realisation: ingenuity and art continuously intersect at each curve of the filigree.

· What’s your relationship with the new technologies and how do they influence your music? ·

PA: Technology applied to music was an important part of my education. My generation was probably the last one that still learned to work with the magnetic tape: I composed exercises on tape, cut, pasted, learned to handle it, first at the Escola Superior de Música in Lisbon and, shortly afterwards, at the Paris Conservatory. Just in time: in the nineties, with the generalization of computer music, the tape was gradually disappearing and IRCAM, for instance, quickly stopped having tape recorders, even for simply copying and saving its audio library!... I’ve studied the various types of synthesis, and, at the Paris Conservatory, I was able to learn and practice all the technology from the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). When I finished the Conservatory, I spent a year at IRCAM absorbing the ‘other side’: the live electronics. These are two worlds that, unfortunately, for historical reasons, communicate poorly: GRM's studio production allows for splendid work on sound matter, but creates fixed sound entities; IRCAM's real-time allows for great flexibility in the interaction between electronics and instrumental performance, but the sound work is not as rich. The ideal is undoubtedly to use both: previously worked sound sequences and, at the same time, live electronics articulating them and opening other dimensions of the instrumental performance. After attending the annual IRCAM course, whose corollary was the composition of my piece “Transmutations” (1999) for piano and live electronics, I returned to IRCAM as ‘compositeur en recherche’ and I composed two new pieces. In recent years, however, I haven’t used technology. The reason is simple: technology and programming languages are constantly evolving. In less than a decade I had to rewrite twice the patch for “Transmutations” – three versions altogether in less than ten years, and today, of course, it no longer works. Either we dedicate ourselves to a permanent rewriting of the computer component, to a constant technological update, in a race against time, or our pieces simply stop being performable. As long as IRCAM exists we shall continue to listen “Répons” in concert; but I wonder what will happen to this contemporary masterpiece, and to all works that use similar technologies, if – or when – a minister decides that IRCAM no longer makes sense in political or budgetary terms. And thus, realism shifted my utopia towards other domains and I have left technology alone...

· Does experimentalism play an important role in your music? ·

PA: From my point of view, every new work unavoidably contains an experimental dimension: without it, the work is nothing but a repetition. This is valid today as it was 250 years ago: every Mozart’s opera was an experiment on a type of theatre, a musical language and a dramaturgical relationship between them; each Haydn’s Symphony is animated by the search for a new sound, rhetorical or instrumental effect; each Beethoven’s Sonata is a reinterpretation and extension of the formal model and construction. Experimentalism is not a circumstantial and contemporary attitude: it emanates from any work of art, considered as such, and it’s determining for me. What varies from one period to another, and from composer to composer, are the dimensions more or less open to experimentation. We can’t experiment everything at the same time, and the experimentation itself is not always immediately perceptible to the listener: if it concerns morphology or sound, it’s manifest; if it acts on the formal level, for instance, it will be less accessible.

· Which works from your catalogue do you consider turning points in your path? ·

PA: My catalogue is reduced. My professional life, shared between composition and conducting, between the little time for writing and the various functions I perform, makes each new piece somewhat distant from the previous one in time and in maturation. Looking at my pieces, nonetheless, I see a coherent whole that expands step by step. I don’t find decisive ruptures but a rather permanent evolution of forms and language.

· In your case, to what extent are composition and performance complementary activities? ·

PA: They are complementary activities, absolutely. They emanate from the same person, from the same vision on music; however, psychologically they act differently: when I write, I am entirely focused on myself, turned inwards, prospecting; when I conduct a concert, on the other hand, I’m turned outwards, focused on someone else’s work, trying to transmit it to the musicians, to the audience. Both are important, both complete me on complementary planes, and the experience from the former illuminates the latter: I conduct as I do because I’m a composer and I have a particular comprehension of the writing, of the reasons that have made the author follow this or other path and write in this or another way. I’m truly an interpreter, not just an executer: I put all my experience at the service of the understanding of the musical text and of its transmission according to a particular dramaturgy – in the same manner as a theatre director establishes his dramaturgy of a literary text. I try to transmit an original vision of a Bruckner or a Mahler Symphony, as well as of a work by Luciano Berio or António Pinho Vargas, and my view as a composer guides me through a particular prism along this path. But the reverse is also true: my experience as a performer gives me a knowledge of the instrumental environment which I would hardly have without the continued experience of conducting. Handling the orchestra through writing is evidently nourished by my role as an interpreter; and while composing the two points of view are superimposed in the score – the one who writes and the one immediately contemplating the performance.

Part 4 · Portuguese Music

· Try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music. ·

PA: Over the last decades, Portuguese music has been experiencing an unequivocal flourishing. Several reasons have contributed to it. The first one is education: the professional high schools and the artistically specialised teaching, in articulation with the Polytechnic Institutes and the universities, have radically changed the educational landscape, creating new generations of world-class musicians. The number of young people obtaining their degrees in Portugal, enrolling in second cycles or post-graduate studies at the best European schools and obtaining positions in national and foreign orchestras, has no precedent. When it comes to composition there’s a determining factor preceding all this transformation: the arrival in Portugal of Professor Christopher Bochmann who, over almost four decades, systematically trained with a world-class teaching consecutive generations of composers. The teaching of Composition in Portugal has risen to a level which one had probably never experienced before, in our country, during such a long period. Many Christopher Bochmann’s students then went to the best international schools, which they accessed with levels of excellence, and, returning to Portugal, continued his pedagogical work themselves. I am proud to be one of them. On the other hand, concerning the aesthetics, the endemic delay from which we suffered so often throughout history, linked to our peripheral contingency and poor investment in culture, has today become quite relativised: Portugal is open to the world making part of the European Union. The mass-media allow for a permanent access to information, and music works circulate as never before in human history. It is therefore not surprising that in a few decades (those decades that distance us from the so-called Estado Novo and which began with Portugal’s accession to the European Economic Community in the mid-eighties) we have moved from an aesthetically closed country – animated with only sporadic visits of artists from the great European centres –, to an open horizon where everyone knows what’s being done throughout the world, and where, indoors or out, many participate in this international creative flow. What’s still due is the renovation of the institutions: during decades the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has played an essential and solitary role in supporting the arts. Nowadays there are various institutions sharing this role, contributing to the increasing presence of art in the Portuguese society. However, we are still very, very far from what would be desirable (and it’s the half-empty glass), but probably closer than ever.

· Do you think that it’s possible to identify any transversal aspect in Portuguese contemporary music? ·

PA: If there is any transversal aspect in the new generations of composers in Portugal, it’s not as much a common aesthetic current, but rather the quality of the writing itself. With more than thirty years of high-quality teaching, we certainly have composers of different schools, of multiple or even contradictory aesthetic trends. What prevails here is the individual competence, knowledge, and technical reliability: this is the richness and strength of the present time. As for the rest, as everywhere in Europe, we live in a kind of international period which, as in the Renaissance, favours a prevailing style or set of styles, to the detriment of local schools specifically linked to national cultures. We shall see whether the growth of the extremes within the political spectrum in several countries, in a not-too-distant future, will result in new closures and less transversal aesthetic panoramas, as in the past.

· According to your experience what are the differences between the music environment in Portugal and in other parts of the world? ·

PA: The differences have essentially to do with the State’s investment in culture and with the presence of culture within society. In Portugal we have one orchestra for every 1.275.000 inhabitants; Germany has twice the number of orchestras for the same number of inhabitants; Finland has four times more. Portugal has only one opera house; Germany has more than eighty, that is, ten times more in relation to the population. These differences clearly reflect the greater or lesser presence of musical culture in society and, consequently, the ‘market’ in which musicians move: an instrumentalist, a conductor, a composer have in Portugal a very limited market when compared to other countries in the European reality. Quality does exist, however: the Orquestra Metropolita de Lisboa or the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, to name just two examples, compare with advantage, in quality, with orchestras of their size internationally. Therefore, we have quality nowadays; we still lack scale – but this is an endemic issue, in culture as well as in the economy. Casa da Música is, moreover, a clear example of how investment in culture (public and private, in that particular case) generates a dynamic that attracts audiences and multiplies them over the years: the presence of musical culture in the city of Porto, over the past two decades, is unprecedented in the recent past.

Part 5 · Present and Future

· What are your present and future projects? ·

PA: As I give this interview (November 2021) I am finishing the rewriting of an orchestral piece from the beginning of my catalogue: “Anamorphoses”. It was my final piece at the Paris Conservatory, in 1998, and, at the same time, my first commission, coming from the Macau International Music Festival. More than 20 years away, I wanted to rewrite the piece, to develop many aspects that were still embryonic there, to improve the orchestral writing, to amplify ideas, to extend the form. The revision has been commissioned by the Casa da Música along with the City of Matosinhos and in its present state the piece has around thirty minutes. It will be premiered by the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música in February 2022 – if the pandemic crisis permits… In 2022 I will write a Violin Concerto dedicated to one of the greatest performers of our time. In a not-very-far future I would like to continue my “Beaumarchais” project: to the scenes I wrote in 2016 for the D. Maria II National Theatre, with the Orquestra Gulbenkian, I would like to add a series of new scenes and form a complete opera of greater extension, ensuring a coherent dramatic journey between the youthful loves of Count Almaviva for Rosina and the great dramatic outcome of “La mère coupable”.

· How do you see the future of art music? ·

PA: With optimism: there will always be art as long as there is humanity. Forms will change, the position of the composer in society will change, but I have no reason to believe that future generations will be less creative, less innovative, or less sensitive to the arts than present and past generations.

Pedro Amaral, November 2021
© MIC.PT

1 On the request of the composer, Pedro Amaral normally choses to write ‘Lopes Graça’ without hyphen.

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