On 9 Songs by António Ramos Rosa (1996)

9 Songs by António Ramos Rosa for voice and piano .

a theory and a text   (March 1996)

     In recent years, for every piece I compose, I write a little theory. It's not drawn up before or after, but during the composition itself. More precisely. There is some theory beforehand, but it mainly concerns some ideas about the current state of musical creation and its context. There is some theory afterwards, but in the sense of bringing together and globally formulating the set of principles that informed the piece. This text belongs to the latter category (theory-after)

       I'll start with theory-before. I think that today (1996) there are all kinds of musical objects available to composers. A perfect chord has a historically circumscribed past, so does a dodecaphonic series, so does an irrational rhythm, so does a regular pulse, and so on. I don't think there are any sustainable reasons today to use only some of these objects in the name of any ‘idea of the future’ of music. That's why I use the ones that seem best to me at any given moment. The tonal system as it existed in the 18th and 19th centuries cannot be reconstituted. But its objects, linked to the inexorable existence of the harmonic series, can in my view be used like any other. The idea of exhaustion, like a boomerang, always returns, hitting new languages and quickly making them old. The problem for me is discourse, not vocabulary. I'm not alone in this conviction, but I don't force anyone to agree with it. 

      In this case, the theory-during was determined by the beautiful poems by António Ramos Rosa. Of course, before I started composing, I read the poems. And some of them, and sometimes some words within a poem, triggered a response. Some examples: in the poem ‘tacteio sobre o branco’ the word tacteio allowed me to make associations with specific musical elements such as staccato, hesitando, the passage from sung to spoken etc; in the poem o que escrevo sometimes the line ‘um espaço intacto e puro’ suggested to me in the context created in the meantime a perfect cadence; the line ‘a gesture that seeks its origin’ led me to an isolated musical figure which, as well as being a musical gesture in itself, requires a specific physical gesture from the pianist; the line ‘does the world listen’ forced me to interrupt the musical discourse, introducing a strange element that requires a different kind of listening, etc.

This piece was commissioned by the Encontros Musicais Primavera, organised by the Associação Cultural Convívio de Guimarães under the artistic direction of D. Helena Sá e Costa, and was premiered in 1995 by Rui Taveira and Jaime Mota. 

March 1996