Composers

Foto
Works
Interview
Bibliography
Scores
Discography
Audio
Images
Videos
Multimedia
Radio programmes
Television programmes
Others
Details as performer
 MIGUEL AZGUIME, CREATOR-IN-THE-WORLD by Pedro Boléo.

Miguel Azguime has been a singular case from the outset. Or should we say “outsets,” in the plural? The Miso Ensemble was an unidentified flying object in the musical landscape of its time when it was founded, by Miguel and Paula Azguime, in 1985. It was simply a highly original duo of flute and percussion bearing the name of a Japanese soup – a gift from the gods. Miso gradually discovered many friends, tirelessly sought out unheard sounds and a new way of creating. The Azguimes improvised, loved, composed, and found accomplices with whom to dismantle the barriers of sound and performance. It was an attitude that subverted dominant ideas about what new music was and what a concert could be – ideas that never again left them. Since the mid-1990s, Miguel Azguime has devoted himself full-time to composition and less to performance, though without relinquishing his passion for appearing on stage as performer, actor and narrator in some of his works.

A full-time composer, therefore. Yet he still seems to find time, together with Paula Azguime, for persistent work in promoting Portuguese and international contemporary music (one need only recall the Musica Viva festival, very much alive), or for serving as artistic director of one of the most exciting contemporary music ensembles of our time, the Sond’Ar-te Electric Ensemble. Miguel Azguime is among those who followed in the wake of Constança Capdeville in rejecting traditionalism and stagnation, embracing irreverence, research and invention. Alongside the most restless composers of his generation – and, fortunately for us, of the generations that followed. He is one of the most active and inventive creators today. Azguime is a creator-in-the-world, alert to the global dangers of non-thinking, of stupefaction, of the levelling and devaluation of the arts, of their mercantile submission, or of the forgetting and silencing of what, for him, is among the most decisive things for human beings – a free art.

In his compositions, beyond the opening of new horizons from the seeds sown by serialism, spectral music, musique concrète and the evolution of electronics, one hears a joy in inventing and discovering something unheard in each work. For that reason, one might invoke both the freedoms Beethoven claimed two hundred years ago and the spirit of rupture, dream and liberty of the Surrealist poets. “Tout un royaume à l’envers à découvrir” (“an entire kingdom turned upside down to be discovered”), as a verse by Mário Dionísio written in French puts it – incidentally one of Miguel Azguime’s most cherished and frequently used languages.

Each of his pieces is a trace and a sediment, the fruit of a profound inner necessity, an act of passion and metamorphosis. It is also the result of poetic work on concrete available materials – an expression, in its own way, of the human capacity to create worlds and defeat emptiness. Ultimately, it is the concrete presence – here and now – of the inextinguishable flame of creation. A fire that burns and allows itself to be heard. But also the delicate, rigorous and fierce craftsmanship of musical matter, in poetic conflict with the difficult times of the present. A musical creation for others and for today, yet without concessions to fashions or canons. In most cases, Miguel Azguime’s music does not resort to words except in its titles. Yet in some of his creations the word occupies a central place, as is evident, for example, in O Centro do Excêntrico do Centro do Mundo (2002) for choir and electronics; in the electroacoustic tale Mestre Gato ou o Gato de Botas (2009); in the beautiful and poetic (ThS)inking Survival Kit (2010); in the children’s opera A Menina Gotinha de Água (2011); or in the opera A Laugh to Cry (2013), an explicitly political and ecological artistic creation with his own text, denouncing barbarism, environmental destruction, the destruction of cultures and of the very possibility of human life on the planet. More recently, in the poetic action/electroacoustic theatre piece A vida é sempre preferível ou o monólogo do sal para lhe completar a medida (2023), he offers a reflection on humankind and the world and a work in progress that represents a new incursion into sound poetry – or, if we prefer, into the word as music and music as word.

Despite several important earlier experiments, the great milestone in this field is Itinerário do Sal (2006), a New Op-Era with history, the fruit of a journey and of profound reflection on what it means to be a creator-in-the-world, without precedent in Portuguese creation of the last decades. A theatre in which the means (staged by Paula Azguime and with video programming by Andre Bartetzki) come together not to dazzle, but to think (with the help of the ears) about what remains to be done. A work about knowledge of oneself and of the world in the very act of forging paths through music, sounds, images and word. Word must be underlined, because Miguel Azguime is also the almost unknown poet whom his New Op-Eras (always alongside Paula Azguime and signed by the Miso Ensemble) and other “poetic actions” gradually reveal to us.

“Opera,” which four hundred years ago designated the emergence of a new theatre through music, is now reopened by a hyphen in a gesture suggesting that we may open our eyes and ears to what a “music-theatre” for our time might be – made of gesture, word, video, music, movement and electronic means. An uncommon opera, which is also a singular reflection on the power of creation and on what it means – today! – to be a creator and an author.

Dossier n.º 8 . Compositores Portugueses dos séculos XX e XXI . Miguel Azguime

EXTERNAL LINKS
Miguel Azguime's Official Website · www.azguime.net
Sond'Ar-te Electric_Ensemble · www.sondarte.com
Miguel Azguime on Musicalis – Compositeurs Classiques
Miguel Azguime on ElectroCD
Miguel Azguime on Wikipedia
DAAD · Berliner Künstlerprogramm
Miguel Azguime on Música Electroacústica Blog
Miguel Azguime on Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research
Miguel Azguime on iTunes