Tradicional-experimental:
Ressonâncias da música vernacular
Quais são as melodias que estão no limiar da escuta, ao longe e debaixo de outros sons por identificar? A alvorada transmontana abre os ouvidos à espera de algum eco. Desde esse momento calculam-se meios, distâncias e ângulos na esperança de se conseguir ouvir alguma coisa que volta.Combinam-se as semelhanças melódicas e diferenças estilísticas dos revivalismos, harmonizações ou adaptações contemporâneo-clássicas. Neste ponto de fuga acústico talvez se consigam ouvir vestígios sonoros acoplados de outras realidades, urgências, e desejos.
Podcast para a Fonoteca Municipal do Porto, gravado a 26 de Março, 2024.
Traditional-experimental:
Resonances of vernacular music
What are the melodies at earshot, at a distance and beneath other sounds yet to identify? The dawn in Trás-os-Montes opens our ears awaiting some sort of echo. At that moment, means, distances, and angles are calculated in the hope of hearing something returning.Melodic similarities and stylistic differences are combined through musical revivalisms, harmonisations, or contemporary-classical adaptations. At this acoustic vanishing point, you may be able to hear sonic traces of other realities, urgencies and desires.
Podcast for Fonoteca Municipal do Porto, recorded March 26, 2024.
(English transcript below)
This is the only non-portuguese piece I chose for this episode. We’ve just heard “Enigma Variations (Variations on an Original Theme), Opus 36: IX, Nimrod (Adagio)” from the british composer Edward Elgar — interpreted by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, under Thomas Beecham. This is perhaps the most well known section of the piece.e
Written at the end of the 19th century, “Enigma Variations” is, essentially, 14 variations over an original theme. The piece carries an cryptic idea that is taken on further by Alan Clarke’s “Penda’s Fen”.
Elgar thought of each variation has a portrait of a close friend of his; addressing a specific characteristic or personal trait. This idea may be considered musically as, for example, adapting a melodic line or the same musical information to another style.
Aside from this somewhat opaque interpretation, at the time of Elgar had suggested the presence of a hidden melody within the piece, a negative space yet to be occupied by counterpoint. He never gets around to explain the solution for this puzzle. Since then, other composers and critics have contested whether the hidden melody exists.
In recent years, however, one particular solution has stood out. Ed-Newton-Rex proposes that the Elgar’s Enigma is resolved by Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” For the two compositions to work together, Pergolesi’s melody has to be transposed up a tone.
“Penda’s Fen” (1974), written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, opens with another musical piece by Elgar. The camera scrolls the rural landscape of the village Pinvin; the hills on the horizon, the pasture lands, the church, and at last, the rectory. We hear the music get louder as the frame nears in on one of the first floor windows of the house. Inside the room, an adolescent boy, the protagonist, sits at his desk in front of the window, overlooking the meadow. Eyes closed and hands clasped together. The vinyl record of “Dream of Gerontius”, about the journey of a common person until their death and trial by God, plays in the background.
The music continues to build, louder and louder. As soon as it reaches the crescendo, the sound is cut off. The boy’s mother had come in the room and turned off the record player for it being so loud. His father, a vicar, has a sermon to prepare.
The film unfolds over the familial upbringing and apparently conservative social context of the protagonist. Despite the father’s religious title, he isn’t necessarily dogmatic toward his son and one may come to find the son to be more close-minded than him. The boy attempts to assert his truth (founded on Christian, aryan, and nationalist morals) upon the world and reality around him. This compass becomes disoriented as he confronts ambiguous questions, both subjective and social, and the apparitions of demons, angels, and figures of the pagan past of his village. The landscape is simultaneously transformed through this.
Edward Elgar is one of these apparitions that the boy encounters. The composer whispers to his ear the solution to the cryptic “Enigma Variations.” The sound is never given away to the viewer. Don't sing it aloud, don't offer the secret to the world, sing it in your head: "The tune that fits is under all their noses. But they won't spot it. Because, you see, they have no demon for counterpoint."
“Penda’s Fen” traces a critique of ecclesiastical power and the violent imposition of nationalist and Christian ideologies, through a spiritual, moral, psychological and sexual transformation. The apparitions in the film are glimpses of a forgotten, latent past, dormant in material artifacts and in the etymological root of the village’s name "Pinvin" — a reference to an ancient king. What is there to inherit, and how can we engage in this process organically?
Barely over 10 years later, in 1986, portuguese film directors Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis were filming “Rosa de Areia”, their last film together. They explore ideas close to “Penda’s Fen”, temporal and symbolic densities. It was by thinking of them that I chose the next record. They filmed plenty in the region of Trás-os-Montes.
Anne Caufriez and Michel Plumley published in 1980 a compilation of recordings they’d done in the same region, in July 1978. We’ll hear two versions of “Alvorada” (Dawn).
The first one is played with bagpipes. The liner notes mention “the use of oscillating, fluctuating and micro-chromatic scales” as a playing feature. However, it is unsure whether these may originate from “particular archaic scales or simply irregular and imperfect diatonic scales”, due to similarities found in sung melodies, “survivals of a medieval solmization.”
The second “Alvorada” that awakes the village is played with percussion and flute.
Alvorada (A1) -> Alvorada (B3)
At the time of these recordings, Trás-os-Montes was the region where one could still find traces of Celtic culture, shared with the north of Spain. The bagpipe being one of such artefacts.
The same record’s liner notes later describe the cultural phenomenon of that time, the survival of an artistic idiom over centuries and historical events:
"Today, by interrogating the secret memory of the old through the selection of a cultural history of a land, it may be possible to bring back to life these ancient poetic-musical traditions, dormant in the depths of the unconscious."
Firstly, what is implied here in terms of memory; mentions an either genetic memory or transcendental one, and a cultural, material memory. If the argument put forward is that memory is something retrievable, what is its repository and modes of access? Or, if it is something inherently fragmented, what tools do cultures develop in order to retain some form of cohesion between these fragments? If such cohesion proves impossible, what’s left to do?
Secondly, the deal of ressuscitation. The ontological transition of death to life, that which returns to life does not return the same. Several attempts at revival (or resistance to) can be drawn up from the rise of memorial culture in the recent decades.
Returning back to life, in whichever form, the next two songs are from Cantaril, a portuguese group from the 80’s. We’ll play first their own version of Alvorada, “Alvorada Transmontana”, from the album “Por Conta Própria” (1985) — most of the music in it is based on the ethnomusicological recordings of Michel Giacometti and Fernando Lopes-Graça.
Alvorada Transmontana
The following song from the same group is called “Ehu-Dominé”, from their second and last record “Música d’hoje, d’hoje e quinhentos” (1990). Based on a recording from Giacometti & Lopes-Graça’s “Alentejo” (1974), this track blends popular percussion elements with a processional melody. In a sacred-profane dimension, this arrangement goes from liturgy to revelry.
Liner notes:
On top of the processional melody, we ventured to mix the popular percussions, which, initially respectful, become more autonomous and increasingly bold and festive. The dual sacred and profane character of popular festivals is thus recreated. There is a piece on the disc "Alentejo - Música vocal e instrumental" (Alentejo - Vocal and Instrumental Music), with collections by M. Giacometti and F. L. Graça, which may have served as the basis for this creation. There, too, female voices sang a religious chant while in the background a philharmonic played "...Chopin's Funeral March." (...) We don't consider this song to have a “text." The few words that are articulated are improvised, and only serve to give "colour" to the atmosphere and have no logic outside of the context.
Ehu-Dominé
Brigada Victor Jara is up next; another portuguese popular music group that reworked and recontextualised the repertoire of traditional music, and one of the most sucessful at it. Their album “Eito Fora” (1977) has a version of one of the most popular pilgrimage songs, “Senhora do Almurtão”, traditional from Idanha-a-Nova (Beira-Baixa), sung accompanied with an adufe 15 days after Easter.
Under the same breath, we’ll hear a version of the same song by the portuguese contemporary music group Opus Ensemble. This track is from the album “Temas do Cancioneiro Português” (1987).
Senhora do Almurtão — in the style of Brigada Victor Jara and Opus Ensemble
Still in Beira-Baixa and with Opus Ensemble, the group arranges a particularly popular traditional theme “Milho da Nossa Terra”, a harvesting song also versioned by Lopes-Graça, who recorded the traditional version, and later by José Afonso in his song “Milho Verde.”
Milho da nossa terra/Milho Verde(?)
During my time listening to the records available in Fonoteca, I stumbled into a version I wasn’t familiar with of one of my personal favourite harvest songs “Oh que calma vai caindo”, originally recorded by the english ethnographer Rodney Gallop in Casegas, Covilhã in 1953. The interpretation by Lopes-Graça’s Coro de Amadores de Música is a particular highlight, as well as José Afonso’s, who only sings some of the original verses, adding new ones.
The version we’re about to hear is from “Seis canções sobre quadras populares portuguesas” (1974) a joint record by Lopes-Graça, piano, and the mezzo-soprano singer Dulce Cabrita.
Oh, que calma vai caindo
Another record from Lopes-Graça; in 1950 he composed an elegy for Manuela Porto, an actress, writer, journalist, translator, feminist activist and opposer to the Estado Novo regime. They worked together as artistic directors of Grupo Cénico e Coral do Grupo Dramático Lisbonense, founded in 1945 from the M.U.D. (Movement of Democratic Unity) youth choir that Lopes-Graça directed as well. This elegy is found in a compilation of piano works “Música do século XX” by four portuguese composers, all interpreted by the italian-portuguese pianist Nella Maissa.
Pranto à memória de Manuela Porto
Next up, a couple pieces from the compilatation “Music of Portugal” by the american label Educo, coordinated by the pianist Fernando Laires; an ambitious project with the intention of not only publishing music from living portuguese composers who hadn’t been published yet, but also to disseminate the music beyond national borders — so much so that some interpreters renounced their fee in order to support the project itself. The compilation totals 20 LP’s, 5 of which were produced by the portuguese embassy in Washington DC and the remainder by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Out of the many relevant names recorded here, we’ll listen to two of the bravest experimentalists and educators in portuguese music history.
Firstly, Jorge Peixinho, key figure of contemporary and experimental music, studied with Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, among many others... in 1970 he founded the Grupo de Música Contemporânea de Lisboa (GMCL - Contemporary Music Group of Lisbon) — group is active to this day — to create and disseminate contemporary avant-garde music. What I find most interest in Peixinho is the way he simultaneously and (seemingly) coherently articulated, within his body of work, several artistic, pedagogical and political intentions. A musical practice not subjugated to politics and neither alienated from it.
Sucessões Simétricas I (1961, improvisation and melodic study for piano - played by Fernando Laires)
Peixinho wrote, in 1971, the second version of this piece, Sucessões Simétricas II (for orchestra), developing further an idea of improvisatation for composition and timbre studies.
Lopes-Graça operates like a shadow in Peixinho’s work, who was a great admirer of Graça having written critical analysis and tributes to the composer. In 1970, during an interview for the brazilian newspaper O Globo, Peixinho is asked the following:
Interviewer: To what extent can the music you compose be considered portuguese music?
Peixinho: (...) portuguese music began and eded with Lopes-Graça, the only one exploring a folcloric network in a rational, even scientific, way. Even Lopes-Graça had to resort to international processes of composition, aside from the use of the orchestra (that comes from Beethoven). We, young composers, are not concerned with making a said “national” music. However, it is clear that the fact that we are from this or that nationality bears significance, due to the basic conditioning we are submitted to under it. Our education may be cosmopolitan, but that only offers us a tool, and not the recipe. What does national mean?
Excerpt from “Escritos e Entrevistas”, published by CESEM and Casa da Música.
The second musician I want to point out from Educo’s compilation is Constança Capdeville, a member of GMCL and who Peixinho was one of the biggest supporters of.
Sonata (1963, for piano and trombone)
This piece may be an example of the composer’s reaction to academic compositional methods, in search of another type of musical and extra-musical exploration (e.g. theatre-music, performance,...). Capdeville developed a sensibility not only to music, but to sound and pursuing disciplinary crossover. She would do exactly thtat through her group of theatre-music ColecViva — theatre-music is a sort of “staged concert”, a genre born in Europe at the end of WWII, where the actions of the performers contribute as much to the show as to the music itself; musician-performers.
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