Travels in My Homeland - Portuguese Piano Music (Vasques-Dias; Lopes-Graça)

Travels in My Homeland: Portuguese Piano Music

Amílcar VASQUES-DIAS (b. 1945)

Lume de Chão

Fernando LOPES-GRAÇA (1906–1994)

Viagens na Minha Terra

Joana Gama (Piano)

Recording: 23–26 July 2018. Auditório Sra. Boa Nova, Estoril, Portugal

 

Fernando Lopes-Graça and Amílcar Vasques-Dias were born in 1906 and 1945 respectively. The fact they began their careers in the music world four decades apart goes a long way towards explaining the notable stylistic differences between the two men’s work. In the 1930s, when Lopes-Graça was beginning to make a name for himself in his country’s musical circles, professional Portuguese composers were few and far between. A tiny number of people in Portugal were dedicating themselves to composition. Most young people aspiring to a career as a composer were drawn to Paris at that time, and only a minority were interested in Modernism, a situation that Lopes-Graça attempted to rectify throughout his life. Forty years on, however, by the time Vasques-Dias was completing his training, contemporary music had been given a considerable boost by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Rather than settling in Lisbon, or pursuing his studies in Paris as Lopes-Graça had done, Vasques-Dias instead moved to The Hague. In addition to Luís de Freitas Branco, who had taught him in Lisbon, Lopes-Graça’s models were the leading figures of interwar Modernism—Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartók—as well as Falla. As for Vasques-Dias, his points of reference were his teachers—Cândido Lima in Porto, then Louis Andriessen, Peter Schat and Jan van Vlijmen—and both Xenakis and Stockhausen.

Looking at the historical-political context, it is interesting to note that the 1930s and 1970s marked the beginning and end of Portugal’s Estado Novo (‘New State’), which was brought to an end by the military uprising of 25 April 1974—the Carnation Revolution. Both Lopes- Graça and Vasques-Dias therefore experienced the early days of a new political regime. The Estado Novo, a dictatorship, was of course built on a system diametrically opposed to that which emerged after the Carnation Revolution, which marked the restoration of democratic rule. Despite the undeniably vast differences between these two moments in history, however, it could nonetheless be said that they had one thing in common: they both made it necessary for the image of Portugal and the Portuguese people to be reconfigured and redefined within the context of the values instituted by each regime. As is common in such circumstances, many artists found themselves challenged by these two identity-building processes, and some very varied creative responses emerged, as is clearly illustrated by the cases of Lopes-Graça and Vasques-Dias. Is it pure coincidence that pianist Joana Gama has created this project, with its reflections on Portuguese identity, four decades on from the Carnation Revolution, in the wake of a global capitalist crisis which has had such a profound impact on Portugal?

Lopes-Graça, an active opponent of the authoritarian Estado Novo, devoted much of his life to defining a concept of the Portuguese people that could not be reduced to that regime’s ideology. Not only Viagens na Minha Terra, but a very high proportion of his other compositions and his academic writings were directly related to this concern. It was his aim, through music, to help create a ‘national collective spirit’ that would not be bowed by the dictatorship’s propaganda. In the late 1930s, while living in Paris, he began making vocal/piano arrangements of a number of Portuguese folk songs from traditional songbooks. In the following decade he intensified this aspect of his work and extended it into other instrumental and choral genres. What Lopes-Graça was looking for in traditional Portuguese music was authentic source material in which neither metre nor major and minor modes had been standardised—material that, in his eyes, revealed to those who could understand it, ‘the true musical potential of the Portuguese people’. As far as he was concerned, folk songs mirrored the inner life of his countrymen, and his responsibility as a composer was therefore to make them better known. He aimed to give his traditional sources a ‘classical sheen’, primarily by using variation technique (as he does in Viagens na Minha Terra), but also by applying elements of contemporary compositional techniques.

Some of the most obvious characteristics of Viagens na Minha Terra have to do with the origins of the work, which was intended to provide musical illustrations for a lecture on traditional Portuguese music that the composer first gave during a visit to Brazil. However, these 19 pieces also show how Lopes-Graça took transcriptions of songs and dances from existing collections or used his own field recordings and then created arrangements whose atmosphere was in keeping with the original character of each piece. All of the originals are directly linked with religious, festive or other social customs, or with the physical and, above all, human landscape of which they are part. In some cases Lopes-Graça’s treatment is fairly literal—this is true, for example, of the eighth piece, inspired by the powerful personal experience he had of listening to antiphonal singing in São Miguel de Acha, a granite-built village where a number of centuries-old forms of religious devotion are still practised today.

Lopes-Graça was an influential figure in the Portuguese music world. One of the clearest demonstrations of this is that younger generations followed his example and began exploring the rich resources of their folk traditions and incorporating it one way or another into their own work. One such younger composer was Amílcar Vasques-Dias, who first met Lopes-Graça in December 1989, when the University of Aveiro awarded the latter an Honoris Causa doctorate. Rather than applying the objective lens guaranteed by quotations from traditional songs and dances, Vasques-Dias’s approach to folk culture is based on the subjectivity of feelings and emotions. The starting point of the work featured on this recording is the heat given off from the traditional fireplaces of two distant regions of Portugal: the lume de chão of the Alentejo, in the south, and the lareira of the Minho, in the north (the same word is used in the northern Spanish regions of Galicia and Asturias). Vasques-Dias, who now lives in the Alentejo but was born in a village in the northernmost part of the Minho, combines internalised images of elements of the countryside, the animals, and the smells and tastes of his childhood, as well as memories of his grandmother at work or weaving cloth, with his experience in the present day of the silence and the morphology of the Alentejo landscape. The literary works of Gabriela Llansol and Almeida Faria also played a key role in his creative process, inspiring him to explore his own emotional experiences. The score of Lume de chão (‘Fireplace’) is no stream of consciousness, however, but rather a complex and evocative ‘choreography of gestures’, an expression the composer has used with reference to the piece Azinheira de silêncio (‘Holm oak of silence’) but which could equally be applied to the cycle as a whole.

Teresa Cascudo