In focus

Photo: Pedro Rebelo · pedrorebelo.org · © Geraldine Timlin

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Questionnaire/ Interview

· Describe your family, sound/ music, and cultural roots, highlighting one or various essential aspects, defining and constituting who you are today. ·

Pedro Rebelo: I have always manifested a particular interest towards music, and I remember listening to my older brother’s band rehearsing at our house. I started to play around with some instruments, and at the age of 10 or 11 I asked my parents if I could have piano lessons. I’ve been lucky to have parents who have always and unequivocally supported me. My brother was a great influence in the development of my passion for music, through both, access to instruments and listening. In parallel to the classical piano repertoire, I started performing in bands (playing on my brother’s instruments…). The then (more or less progressive) rock eventually gave place to jazz, free jazz, and free improvisation, before eventually deciding to study music at university.

· Which paths led you to composition? ·

PR: During adolescence, composition was simply a pragmatic way of organising musical materials, in order to perform with friends. It was when I was studying for my undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh that composition became a more focused activity. It has always been sufficiently open to include my improvisation interests and practice.

· Do you follow your path according to a plan (for example, knowing that within ‘x’ years you will meet the ‘y’ goals)? Or perhaps the reality is too chaotic to create such determinations… ·

PR: I follow a plan, but only very vaguely. It’s rather a set of decisions made over time that reveal themselves as a path. Sometimes they’re pragmatic decisions that tend to be influenced by the desire to produce an open space for artistic creation.

· In your opinion what can a musical discourse express or mean? ·

PR: Several different things, but always dependent on the context. In my opinion, the musical, cultural or social context has a central role in music discourse, and in its possible meanings. I am referring to the contexts in which the music is made, performed, listened to, remembered, or imagined… these contexts are in constant development and alteration. I should also add that music has an incredible capacity of putting things in different contexts, unfolding even more in its capacity for interaction between people.

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

PR: Fine arts of the second half of the 20^th century are an important reference for me. Architecture and forms of thinking about space are probably even more significant sources of influence.

· When it comes to your creative practice, do you compose your music from an embryo-idea, or after having developed a global form? In other words, do you move from the micro towards the macro form, or is it the other way round? How does this process unfold? ·

PR: It depends, but often both the context and concept are predefined (perhaps in response to external motivation or opportunity). I like working with the concept, bearing in mind the ideas behind any work. When the moment of making music, of working the materials, etc., arrives, then my improvising spirit dominates the process…!

· How in your music practice do you determine the relation between the reason, and creative impulses and inspiration? ·

PR: I don’t make any distinction between these fields, although there are obviously moments when ideas are created, as well as moments of execution. I want the relation between the two to be as fluid as possible.

· To what extent do the new electronic and digital instruments open for you different paths, and when can they become constraining? ·

PR: New and old instruments and tools are important from the point of view of the access to the music creativity, not equating, necessarily, new instruments with new paths, since the notion of the ‘new’ is today, in itself, rather problematic. In some circles there’s still an attraction towards technological determinism, which I try to avoid. Promises of new expressivity paradigms and sonic universes that are frequently associated with new instruments, don’t attract me. I give more importance to the relation between the artist and the tool or the instrument, and to the cultural baggage which any instrument carries. I tend to use tools and instruments in manners for which they weren’t necessarily designed for.

· Do research, experimentation and invention constitute to you indissociable elements of the music creation and, generally, of the Art? ·

PR: Not all artistic creation undergoes the processes of research and experimentation. In the case of my practice, they are decisive, particularly the research. A lot of my work takes place in so-called ‘practice-based research’ or ‘artistic research’, where the artistic practices constitute research methodologies in themselves. Within these processes, the creation of knowledge (one of the definitions of a research process), is constructed and exists in the practice itself, as musical creation, for example.

· What’s the importance of space and timbre in your music? ·

PR: Immense! Space (understood as a way of qualifying a place, distances, acoustics, resonances, locations, communities, or identities) is the main element in my music. Through resonance space is always connected with the timbre.

· What are the works that you consider turning points in your path as a composer? ·

PR: An installation developed during my Ph.D. and entitled “Partial Space” (1998) has given origin to a process that still resonates today. I remember showing a recording to composer Gérard Grisey who motivated me to explore the same concepts in the instrumental domain. It’s an exploration of the resonances of architectonic spaces, and it has led to manners of listening and creation interconnecting sound and space.
The “Shadow Quartet” (2007) for string quartet and four suspended violins with transducers was another piece important for me in the context of scale exploration in the domain of the resonance.
More recently, in the context of the work “Listen to Me (Crónica 2020)” resulting from a residency at the International Nanotechnology Lab, I have opened new ways of working with field recordings, which I now continue to develop.

· How do you listen to music? Is it a more rational (analytical) or emotional process? ·

PR: It depends on the context. For me it’s important to practice diverse ways of listening.

· In the interview given to the MIC.PT in 2016, the composer João Madureira said that ‘music is philosophy and politics, which is a way of inhabiting the world’ ¹. Do you feel close to this affirmation? ·

PR: Yes. It is a way to relate with the world and to create a universe with a rationale of its own, with values that are in constant dialogue with everything and everyone surrounding us. The transforming power of music has been known, although it’s not always easy to identify a causal relation between a musical practice and a concrete behavioural or societal change. One of the areas where this seems to me more evident, is the one concerning social relations and culture representations. Like in gastronomy, the exchange of music cultures amongst peoples is one of the powerful mechanisms to ensure acceptance, comprehension, and respect.

· What does ‘transdisciplinary’ mean to you, and how is it important in your work? ·

PR: I understand the concept of discipline as a process conserving conventions, terminologies, and methodologies. I associate this disciplinary protectivism with an almost self-validation. Today, more than ever, our great challenges necessarily comprise transversality. In my work it is important through the relations between the music and other arts, architecture, design, anthropology, environmental sciences, …, etc.

· Do you prefer to work isolated in the ‘tranquillity of the countryside’ or in the middle of the ‘urban confusion’? ·

PR: More and more in the countryside, however not only because of its tranquillity, but also because of its richness and ability of making us belong to the natural world. The natural environments have become a kind of laboratory for listening and recording. These environments and soundscapes are important elements of my practice today – directly with field recording, but also conceptually through experiences such as walks and hikes in forests or at the seaside. Nevertheless, I also need regular doses of the urban rhythm, and I’m lucky enough to have access to both.

· Please try to evaluate the present situation of Portuguese music. ·

PR: Extremely healthy, diverse, collective, innovative, and gaining international visibility.

· If you hadn’t followed the path of a composer, what alternative paths would you have taken? ·

PR: I have always been fascinated with architecture and design, so they could have been the alternatives.

· Could you reveal the projects on which you are working now, and your artistic plans for 2022, 2023, 2024, …? ·

PR: At the moment I am working on an opera commissioned by Miso Music Portugal, and it has been an interesting challenge. I’m also finalising an installation within the research project “Sounding Conflict”, and another one for the project “Sounding Tourism”. Next year I’ll be working on the results of an installation in Newfoundland (Canada), with the artist Geraldine Timlin. I want to compose sonic pieces based on two installations which I created last year: “Mondego: The River is Everywhere” at the São Francisco Convent in Coimbra, based on field recordings realised along the river Mondego in Portugal; and “A Fazer” at the Jardins Efémeros, with recordings and interviews with five craftsmen in the region of Viseu.
I have also been developing various technological listening systems for the Sonic Laboratory at the SARC – Sonic Arts Research Centre (Queen’s University Belfast), and I’m planning an audio-visual installation for 2024. Additionally, I hope to dedicate myself to writing some pieces for solo instruments and electronics, for which I have received requests during the years, but which have always been postponed.

· What are your main present artistic concerns? ·

PR: We live in a time when the arts need to inspire more generous forms of thinking about the challenges we face as a civilisation – particularly and with special urgency, social injustice, degradation of political systems, and the environmental crisis. The role of sound and sound studies has been greatly developed in the recent years and we are living in a moment when there’s engagement in treating sound as a vehicle for knowledge and an agent for change. This interest comes from different areas of knowledge and one of the challenges is to articulate the artistic process in face of questions and practices which are formulated within other areas. Presently, I’m collaborating with two environmental scientists, who have also raised these questions.

· In one of the 2020 interviews the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas said that ‘the new art creators act as yeast in the society’ ². What is, in your opinion, the role that art music plays in the society and how is it possible to increase the importance of this role? ·

PR: I understand music as an essentially social and relational practice. Art has the capacity to change behaviour and relationships not necessarily through great symbolical gestures, but rather through a continuous and localised activity.

· In terms of aesthetics and techniques the history of Western art music is full of births, ruptures, deaths, rebirths, continuations, discontinuations, other ruptures and so on… Taking on the role of a ‘futurologist’, could you predict the future of Western art music? ·

PR: I understand the process of decolonisation as a factor of change with major aesthetic, technical, and artistic implications. In this context, the concept of Western music is already problematic. It brings the whole way of organising resources, establishing hierarchies and self-promotion, which go against a better distributed, and, to my mind, richer and more interesting music ecology.

Pedro Rebelo, April, 2022
© MIC.PT

¹ Interview with João Madureira realised by the MIC.PT in 2016: LINK
² Interview with Georg Friedrich Haas, conducted by Filip Lech in June 2020 and available online on the Culture.pl website at: LINK.

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