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The Piano in the Portuguese Experimental Music Scene: Approaches, Contexts, and Practices

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07494467.2023.2243101

1477-2256

Alfonso Benetti, Francisco Monteiro,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

ABSTRACTIn Portugal, the avant-garde experimental approaches of the 1960s were fruitful for the emancipation of the sound potential of musical instruments and non-instruments. Since then, prepared techniques—the use of objects as sound producers, or in the context of extended techniques, electronics, and other processes of sound engagement—brought along the potential for rethinking and reformulating the piano and relationships between musical bodies. These prepared (extended) techniques were then acculturated, integrated, and somehow accommodated as a new normalisation, becoming in certain musical spheres the ‘new normal’. Connected to these approaches, new perspectives on experimentation with regard to the piano seem to be taking shape in Portugal, encompassing significant aesthetic, creative, and technical differences from the previous experimental vanguards. This study addresses the piano as a disruptive element in the current Portuguese experimental context, with regard to approaches, contexts, and practices. These disruptions are marked by an association with digital media resources, innovative performative perspectives, and the creation of different aesthetic outputs. However, this is an unconventional disruption—not a disruption related to the past, but an occasional disruption with the past. The objectives of the present study are to identify how the piano is treated by past experimentalists and as a contemporary technological artefact—including influences, techniques, languages, writing/recording materials, and the role of the performer—verifying the impact of its production, new conceptual transmutations, mapping composers and representative works, repertoires and formations, and the different roles assumed by the instrument.KEYWORDS: musical bodiescreative processesdisruptive approachesPortuguese avant-gardeJorge PeixinhoConstança Capdevilleexperimental piano music AcknowledgementsThis work is funded by the national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the Scientific Employment Stimulus—Individual Call—[CEEC Individual 2020–2020.04287.CEECIND].Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Álvaro Cassuto (b. 1938), a composer, pianist, conductor, and a critic, was the first to write about dodecaphonism in Portugal. His 1961 text Considerações a Propósito de Darmstadt (Thoughts on Darmstadt) is historically and aesthetically informative: Cassuto refers to avant-garde music as having roots in the Viennese School or in John Cage’s ideas. Cassuto clearly understood the differences between these two avant-garde positions and accordingly made choices in his career.2 The performers were Ernesto Manuel de Melo e Castro (visual artist, poet), António Aragão (visual artist, poet), Salette Tavares (visual artist, poet), Manuel Baptista (visual artist), and the musicians Clotilde Rosa (harpist, later also composer), Mário Falcão (harpist interested in contemporary music), and Jorge Peixinho.3 Translation by the authors.4 Translation by the authors. It is noteworthy that the practice of electroacoustic composition in the 1950s and thereafter was far removed from the compositional practices (i.e., using a pencil and paper) of composers of serial and post-serial music for instruments, who seemed to handle music and materials (tapes, synthesisers, recorders) in a way that resulted in a less structured alchemical experimental process with unpredictable results.5 As early as 1960, Peixinho met Luigi Nono in Venice, and he took part in a workshop at the Electronic Studio of Bilthoven, the Netherlands. In an interview, Peixinho states that Milan became a brilliant spotlight of musical culture in Italy, mainly due to the creation of an electronic music studio (Teixeira and de Assis Citation2010, 59).6 The piece Canto da Sibila (for clarinet, percussion and piano) includes stage lighting and olfactive effects: at a certain point a lemon scent should be released (Monteiro Citation2018).7 ‘The Head of the Gryphon’. The text is an excerpt from Fernando Pessoa’s Message (1934) (Pessoa Citation1972, 49).8 Original title, mixing Portuguese and French. ‘Study I—memory of an absent presence’.9 Para-serial techniques, as Jorge Peixinho used to define his (non-systematic) approach to serial techniques.10 A piano solo piece made with materials based on a chamber piece.11 This is a set of works with different instrumental versions (Lov—piano, Lov I–­flute and piano, Lov II—flute, cello and piano), based on the stage music for the play Act Without Words (1956) by Samuel Beckett, which took place in Lisbon in 1971. Initially, it was written for piano, tape, and what Peixinho called ‘instrumentinhos’ (small instruments, meaning a group of children’s instruments and objects producing sounds).12 A bicycle wheel running.13 The title derives from ‘Madame Butterfly’, using a mixture of the word butterfly (Borboleta) with letter (letra) (Borbolet(r)a).14 That would be marked by a compositional and structural experimentalism, or something close to Adorno’s ‘informal music’.15 The influence of Walter Benjamin and of Theodor Adorno, among other Marxist thinkers, is relevant (Monteiro Citation2015).16 The presence of the piano in Constança Capdeville's works from the 1970s onwards contrasts sharply with previous works for the instrument, written mainly for solo piano, using traditional forms (e.g., suite, variations, and sonata) and tonal centres. This production mainly covers the years between 1950 and 1962. During the 1960s, the piano appears in the context of chamber or ensemble music, when Capdeville began to explore atonality. However, the signs of the experimental pianistic approach that would dominate the works from the 1970s onwards are already discreetly prescribed in the work for solo piano Visions d’enfant (1958–59), in which the pianist has to declaim the title of the fourth piece (‘Maman, j’ai vu dans la lune’) during the performance.17 It is the only time in which the composer assumes this position in relation to a musical instrument. The piano is referred to as a ‘phallic object’ in the score of the first Overture (‘Alma Mater’), in a section involving a dialogue between the lights and the piano.18 A music theatre group founded by the composer in 1985.19 The work was premiered by Filipe Pires and Jorge Peixinho in 1974, and is part of a cycle entitled Figurações for various instruments.20 The work was dedicated to the pianist Adriano Jordão.21 A piece for piano and cello premiered in January 1976 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon) by Célia Vital (cello) and Adriano Jordão (piano).22 The composer was strongly influenced by Iannis Xenakis.23 The cover states that this piece is a part of Oceanos for orchestra (apparently Oceanos Cósmicos, 1975–79).24 The work premiered only in 2000 by pianists Francisco Monteiro and Sofia Lourenço.25 The work was premiered by Jorge Peixinho on 1 June 1979, with Eduardo Sérgio (multimedia) and João de Sá Machado (slide projection).26 Telectu called it ‘instrumental tattoos’—a real ‘tattoo’ (image) to be made in a musical instrument (assuming the role of the ‘body’ with its own ‘skin’).27 The composer studied with Constança Capdeville between 1988 and 1991.28 For instance, In Tempore (2000) and Looking into the Mirror (2004), for piano and electronics; Abyssus ascendens ad aeternum slendorem (2005), for piano, orchestra, and electronics; and Titanium (2014), for piano (four hands), two toy pianos, and electronics.29 For instance, Parfaire le Bleu (1998), for clarinet, piano, and electronics; De part dáutre (2011), for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and electronics; Descriptions de la Matière (2016); and Balada para o Zé (2019), for piano and electronics.30 All of the pianists mentioned here were interviewed by the authors of this article on topic of the role they and the piano played in these creations, resources used, conceptual and aesthetic methods, influences, and recently developed projects.31 Paulo de Assis situates the idea of ‘representation’ as a (not necessarily critical) reproduction of an (artistic) object from the past. In this sense, the idea of ‘problematisation’ is referred to as (1) ‘a highly elaborated form of interpretation of historical data’, and (2) ‘as a critical act of experimentation upon such data’ (de Assis Citation2018, 131). The argument has its roots in Foucault, who identifies the contact zone between different temporalities as a favorable environment for ‘problematisation’. In this context, the idea of post-interpretation emerges (also disruptive), not in the sense that it ceases to exist, but that integrates the structure of ‘problematisation’, based on the critical reconsideration between music and interpretation. According to de Assis, ‘this view also argues for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, and open to critical reconfigurations of past musical objects, which ought to be questioned rather than uncritically reproduced and consumed’ (de Assis Citation2018, 19–20).32 The older misunderstanding between experimentalism and electroacoustic became institutional.33 The term refers to the absence of employment relationships with a specific institution, especially as an option of the pianist themselves.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlfonso BenettiAlfonso Benetti is a pianist and assistant researcher at the University of Aveiro/INET-md. He is a member of the committee of the IMPAR platform, associate editor and founder of ÍMPAR—Online Journal for Artistic Research, co-PI of the Xperimus Project/Ensemble—an artistic research group devoted to experimentation in music, PI of the TransVariations Project—Music Beyond the Limits of Time and Technology (EEA Grants), and Ebony & Ivory Project—History of Piano in Portugal from the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century.Francisco MonteiroFrancisco Monteiro has been maintaining a regular activity as a composer since 2001 with pieces for different chamber formations. Francisco Monteiro is Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal (School of Education). He is a Senior Researcher in INET-md. He coordinated a research project dedicated to the critical edition of Jorge Peixinho's chamber music, a project that was funded until 2013 by the FCT. He is currently dedicated to the artistic research and music creation (performance, improvisation, composition, sound, drama, and visual objects creation).