I knew from the moment I started to think about my artistic research that it would become a tool for me to explore new paths beyond the traditional performance practice of classical music in which I am trained. Even though I did not know from the beginning where this path would lead me, I knew that my disquiet and uneasiness towards tradition would find me looking for alternatives elsewhere. I knew from the moment I decided to professionally study music, in my high school years, that music was indeed something that deeply interested me. Yet I constantly felt unease, I felt this deep need to search for something that I knew existed but hadn’t quite reached yet or was even fully aware of what it was.
The truth is that despite not fully grasping all that my practice entails, I have been struggling with it for a long time. Throughout my high school and during the first years of my bachelor in classical piano, I actually wanted to be a jazz pianist. This led me to take some piano jazz and jazz theory lessons and made me deal with other kinds of musical language and practice. I later understood, however, that the problem was not classical music itself but the classical and romantic repertoire that I had been forced to study over the years. In the last two years of my bachelor, I started feeling passionate about modern and contemporary music and my connection to my school’s composition department became closer and closer. I even started a bachelor’s in composition that I was unfortunately not able to complete since I was already enrolled in a master’s in piano and did not have time to do both.
In this research, I start by breaking down all the materials related to Avec Picasso, ce matin…. These comprise: two scores, the tape, the light scheme and theatrical script and a cassette tape with possible drafts used on the piece’s composition process. Afterwards I start working with the scores both by understanding them from a historically informed point of view and by exploring different degrees of deviation from the original text in what I call a subversive approach. In this approach I apply the concept of anamorphosis that consists in working the already existing compositional material from a different point of view.
I developed several anamorphoses of Avec Picasso, ce matin...in collaboration with musicologist Mónica Chambel and composer Catarina Ribeiro. Alongside this subversive approach I worked on a historically-informed reconstruction of the piece and studied the potential and possibilities of historically informed practice in relation to my work with Capdeville's piece and to my practice in general. To do so I resort to mixed-methods such as studio work and experimentation, processes of collaborative discovery, auto-ethnography, transcription, and composition. All this work was developed together with literary review that helped not only supporting concepts extracted from my practice, my reflections, and conclusions on these processes but also influenced the actual course of my practical work.
This research is the result of the search for my artistic identity. It is the beginning of a personal path to evolve as performer, embracing different approaches that enforce my creative input. This research integrates different discourses and disciplines. Even though it is a research on performance practice in its core I believe it may be an interesting tool not only for performers but also for composer and musicologists. I hope that people find through it relevant information on how to interpret the piece Avec Picasso, ce matin… and that my work sparkles peoples curiosity to learn more about Constança Capdeville and her work. I also hope that through it, people may find a way to reflect on classical music practice and on collaborative work and this can resonate with people looking for alternatives to the traditional classical music practice.
While seeking for refuge in disciplines other than (classical) piano, I started to explore skills that performers usually don’t. At first, I believed that these were valuable tools for me to be develop myself as a new music practitioner as I realized that contemporary music required that the performer explored an extended set of skills. On her PhD thesis, The Polyphonic Performer, the cellist Tanja Orning coins the term “polyphonic performer” and states new music, due to its ongoing expansion of written notation, the search for new sonic realms and the exploration of the musical instruments requires a parallel expansion, or augmentation, of the performer’s role. This type of performer, who many times debut pieces, has to work out new ways of approaching his/her instruments and scores working in some sort of laboratory, testing out the music in real time.
It is true that the contemporary music scene is indeed manifold and many times the performer is asked to do things out of the realm of conventional playing. These unconventional things can go from delving into extended techniques, to playing other instruments during performances to dealing with other media such as electronics. However, on his essay Hierarchies in New Music: Composers, Performers, and ‘Works’, pianist and musicologist Ian Pace emphasizes the fact that new music practice is still a text-based practice that complies to the Werktreue concept and is ruled by the same hierarchies as in the nineteenth century.
The realization of the degree to which the Werktreue concept influenced the new music practice and my reflections on how this influenced me negatively intensified my will to search for alternatives.
Firstly, I expected to find solutions among interdiscilpinary approaches, as I found myself delving into the world of music for piano and electronics during my first master’s degree back in Portugal. I understood interdisciplinarity as a combination of more than one art form in one performance (even though now I realize that this is an overly simplified perspective). Later, I got in touch with Constança Capdeville’s piece Avec Picasso, ce matin… through my previous piano teacher Madalena Soveral. She was the one who debuted the piece in 1984 and by the time she told me about it there hadn’t been any performances of it for more than 30 years. She shared how the piece embraced an interdisciplinary context, by including an open score, a tape, a light scheme and a small theatrical script.
As I enrolled on my master’s at the Koninklijk Conservatorium, I considered exploring this piece, as a case study for how a work’s interdisciplinarity elements can influence the performer. I hoped to realize through this proposal how the understanding of the interdisciplinary elements of Avec Picasso, ce matin… could lead me to the creation of a larger interdisciplinary performance. I also contemplated resorting to collaborative work as a tool to achieve such an end.
However, research and creative process aren’t straight lines. As I worked on Avec Picasso, ce matin… and learned more about it, I realized that there were two versions of the score and that these scores presented differences between each other. This fact, aligned with the degree of openness of the piece led me to the possibility of expanding my practice through my work with the scores.
At this point on my work theory became crucial in finding my way through practice. I started by learning more about classical music performance tradition particularly through the work of philosopher Lydia Goehr and musicologist Nicholas Cook. Even though it was essential for me to learn more about the work-centeredness music performance that Lydia Goehr speaks about, I cannot deny that Nicholas Cook was particularly inspiring through the course of my work.
His essay Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance became central to the development of my artistic research, and it started a dynamic where my practical work influenced the theory, and the theory influenced my practical work. His essay led me to explore the idea of thinking on scores as scripts rather than texts.
