Six Portraits of Pain (2005)

Six Portraits of Pain, for cello and small orchestra (2005)

This piece has a relationship with six texts that I chose. It's not a programme piece in the usual sense of the word (how could it be?) but the texts inhabit the work. They are written in the score and the musicians are asked to read them during the performance. In this way, five of the six texts written in the score exist in the work as a conscious presence for the musicians, but do not exist as a song or speech for the listeners. The only exception is a fragment of a poem by Anna Akhmátova. The fragments I've selected come from different types of written testimonies, but not all of them ‘literary’ in the strict sense - letters to friends, speeches, sentences from books, poems - and expose different types of existential suffering: the dangers of free thought, dissent, bewilderment at the state of the world, traumas resulting from the unspeakable experienced and (always) the presence of death. As part of Thomas Bernhard's text says: ‘This pain constituted us. This pain is now our state of mind.’ Pain is both poetic pain and pain that is described, seen, felt or imagined...

My music is restless: I'm interested in gestures, in capturing forces and intensities. Morton Feldman used to say that for him everything was ‘objet trouvé’, even what he thought he had invented. The objects I find are different, but sometimes I also fall into the illusion of having invented them. I've been talking about musical ‘objects’ for several years. And in this case I also found some poems. It would be strange if working for so long with these texts by my side or in my memory hadn't had consequences, presences, in the music and discourse. I have some convictions about this, I could share them, but there's no guarantee that there aren't others that escape me. They escape me, but they don't escape the piece.

The Six Portraits of Pain are:

1. Spinosa/Deleuze

2. Thomas Bernhard

3. Manuel Gusmão I

4. Akhmátova

5. Cadenza sopra Spinoza

6. Manuel Gusmão II - Paul Celan (coda)

The texts are sublime. The first one I chose, by Gilles Deleuze - ‘It is said that Spinoza kept his coat torn by the assassin's knife to remind himself that thought was not always loved by men’ - is, in a way, the most important because (it) launched me into the fundamental question of the freedom of thought, art, politics and the various repressions that mark their histories.

I still hesitate to include all the literary fragments in these notes. The possibility of reading them could orientate the perception of the work towards the search for a ‘literal meaning’ that doesn't exist, which I didn't intend or want to inadvertently provoke.

Mainly because the relationship between texts and music is not linear. At a certain point I realised that the formal structure of the piece had more complex internal relationships than the succession of six portraits/andaments, as if during the compositional work each text/portrait/music had gone beyond its particular location on a page and affected the whole in an irremediable way. I have established a network of relationships between these elements and it is from this that the narrative of the piece derives.

I have a peculiar attitude towards concerts; the usual athletic-virtuosic nature of the soloist's role doesn't appeal to me. I often give in to the exhibitionist temptation. I always try another kind of solution. In this piece there is one soloist, the cello, two secondary soloists, two violins, and also three percussionists as musical dramatis personae. This division (1+2+3=6) is also related to the 6 portraits and a private typology of pains.

This piece lasts between 26 and 28 minutes.

António Pinho Vargas, (2005)

ANTÓNIO PINHO VARGAS, 2005