How this particular idea evolved
— de Lisboa, ‘93 a Nova Iorque, 2012
In the early 90s, while I was living in Lisbon, I was offered an occasion to provide music for the opening of a two story shopping center in central Lx.
Really: Portugal was a rather unusual country at the time, where, just every once in a while (versus never) something as esquisito (wierd, strange, odd…) as, let’s say, “noise music”, might be programmed into a shopping center or a performance for rural shepherds (I’ve been a paid participant in such events). If something wasn’t quite animação (enlivening, usually entertaining activity) it could still be accepted in such a context as cultura. The Portuguese, to their great credit, can sometimes show a surprising openness to (and propensity for enchantment by) the foreign and unfamiliar, much more than many people from other, far more know-it-all-seen-it-all, cultures.
Naturally, my imagination responded with something more than what was ordinarily required by the situation, while still providing some appropriate animação for the occasion.
I got a flash of a sound environment that would surround people, and that people could walk around through. That made me think of using location as a component of the music’s sonic design. Thinking a little further, the most open minded and capable musicians around at the time tended to be guitarists (most self identified Portuguese jazz musicians, back then, felt most comfortable with the neo-conservative, nothing-after-1959, sort of orientation). So, there was the orchestral component: 3 electric guitarists dispersed through an open, 2 story space with balconies and all that.
From there, considering there was little time to rehearse an improvising concept, I opted for a streamlined, almost all-written-out format. From there, I started to think about cross spatial antiphony, call and response, canons and integrating all that with polyrhythmic formulations. I thought about how to get optimum contrast among movements (fast, slow, thick, thin, etc.) while retaining a kind of subtle (but constant) self defined, ever present similarity throughout; hence the application of a common melodic theme (however stretched) though all of the 7 movements.
As it turned out, by the time I’d scored the whole thing, the client pulled out, or the money fell through, who knows what — or all of the above. Not such an uncommon happenstance. Off to the shelf went the music and on to the next gig.
But I’d waxed really fond of the ideas and was just dying to hear it. Back in NYC around ’03, ’05, I don’t remember exactly, I pulled it out for the tried and true grassroots approach. I gathered 3 of my favorite creative guitarists and friends; and we met every week, whenever possible, for a few months. Fun and instructive as it was for all, something just wasn’t gelling. It turned out that the music was, in practice, a lot harder to play than I’d ever suspected. The individual parts were, for the most part, pretty accessible (even basic at times) from a technical standpoint, but the coordination among them was really a challenge. Every session seemed like starting from scratch again, which piqued my inventiveness in trying to resolve that impasse; but eventually, I let it fade again, for the time being.
But, I still loved that music and believed that it could offer a really remarkable listening experience (which is the point). I had to accept that to get this music into sound, I’d have to adopt the professional model, which means raising money and paying people appropriately for their efforts. That’s the way it should be, anyway, whether developed through the bottom up, grassroots approach or the top down, professional strategy. As Bill Mollison, the permaculturalist, more or less put it: “Money is to society what water is to agriculture.” Sometimes, ya just gotta have it, or else … nada.
In preparing the score and wanting to render the music as accessible to play and arresting to listen to as possible, I let my nearly 20 years of musical experience since the initial concept developed revise the materials; sharpening them, sometimes simplifying them — unless the tweaks happen to enrich the palette more densely, in order to imbue the music with that kind of haunting staying power that’ll continue to feed listening after listening (versus more easily exhausted oversimplifications). I’m now even more excited by the music’s possibilities.