Cher Ami,
Dear Friend,
Je pense à vous lors de votre 70e anniversaire et je vous souhaite de continuer longtemps encore votre activité aussi fertile qu’elle l’est aujourd‘hui.
I’m thinking of you on your 70th birthday, and may your activities long remain as fertile as they are today. Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez
the flow of the music with a typically discursive-verbal quality, through the subliminal presence of vowels, consonants, syllables and words.
into music, the Chessed pieces are related to holy Jewish text – and after all, the composer was working at the same time on his monumental Tif’ereth. Along with ‘Chesed’, ‘Tif’ereth’ (beauty, splendour) is one of the second-order spheres of the sefirot Tree of Life – following the order of Creation. Tif’ereth for six soloists, six orchestral groups and two conductors (1978-1985) is one of the most important works in Nunes’ oeuvre. Here the orchestral groups and soloists are ranged around the audience, allowing the unfolding of spatialised antiphonies, regulated by the principle of a ‘rhythmic pair’. For all the differences in content and sonority, Tif’ereth stands as part of the tradition of spatially conceived works such as Stockhausen’s Gruppen (195557) and Carré (1959-60).
In 1991 Nunes was nominated by the Portuguese president Mário Soares as ‘Comendador da Ordem Militar de Sant’Iago da Espada’. In addition, this year saw the premiere of Quodlibet for six percussionists, 28 instruments, orchestra and two conductors (1990-91), which attracted a great deal of international interest. Though fragments of other works had already been extensively worked into Ruf, in Quodlibet this tendency is pushed to extremes. It is a subjective immersion in one’s own creativity, a confrontation with one’s very self. One can’t talk here about collage in the strict sense, since it appears that all the material taken from other works has been reworked in terms of compositional detail and instrumentation. In a sort of ‘sonic space theatre’, the musicians are located around the audience and in the upper balconies. To date, the composer has declined to comment on any programmatic background to the countless musical associations which are brought into play here. All one knows is that beforehand he made a critical analysis of certain passages from the pieces quoted, so as to reveal their previously unexplored potential. But by no means does Quodlibet manifest an aesthetic of fragmentation. Rather, it is a gigantic mosaic, a kaleidoscopic view of different times, spaces and musical contents: a constant playing with creation and alteration.
Then come Wandlungen (1986) and Duktus (1987), two large, extremely dynamic ensemble pieces. The first of these explores a ‘cantus firmus’ in the form of five passacaglias, the third of which can be performed separately as Sonata a tre. Duktus is composed for seven groups with three musicians apiece, and deals with the possibilities of constant variation of a continuous melodic flow that is formed by a sequence of ‘melodies’ and ‘episodes’. Spatial layout and the spatialisation of individual sound sources is a constant in the whole of Nunes’ output, and reaches its provisional climax in Lichtung I-III (1988-2007) for ensemble and live electronics. Composed at Ircam in Paris in close collaboration with Eric Daubresse, these pieces involve live electronics comprehensively, and in a variety of ways, though based on the same compositional principles as the instrumental parts. This results in dense contrapuntal relationships between instrumental and electronically spatialised conceptions of music that ceaselessly evoke quite different aural landscapes. But the movement of the notes in space is not aimed at conveying geometric figures acoustically, but at the refined shaping of a plastic spatial quality: not a matter of figures, but of con-figurations.
Just one year later came the next major project: Machina Mundi (1992) for four soloists, mixed choir, orchestra and tape. This was a Portuguese state commission, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the discoveries of Portuguese seefarers. Taking as his basis the national epic Os Lusiadas by Luís de Camões and the poem Mensagem by Fernando Pessoa, Nunes sought to construct a discourse of his own from adapted reorderings of these texts. The aim here was to develop a new textual continuity independent of that of Camões’ poem. The succession of parts and the score’s inherent dramatic qualities suggest an almost theatrical conception of the music, such that one could talk of a quasi-oratorio or quasi-opera.
4. Spatialized Monuments: Works composed in parallel to Cycle 2 (1982-2002) Since 1982 there have been numerous works which are independent of both cycles. They may actually contain elements or passages from previous pieces belonging to the cycles (as is explicitly the case in Quodlibet), but their construction does not obey the latter’s strict lexical or grammatical rules.
Nunes’ predilection for the classics of literary history becomes clear once again in Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (1996). In contrast to Machina mundi, which ‘traverses’ almost the whole of Camões’ epic poem, in Omnia mutantur Nunes concentrates on just a small poetic excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book XV, Pythagoras), thus giving the work a compact dramaturgy. A female choir and 16 instrumentalists (including six percussionists), located around the audience, make music in third- and sixth-tones. As in other choral works there is a typical block-wise swinging between spoken text, singing distributed syllabically among many voices, and rhythmic unison. As the last piece from this creative phase, one can nominate Musivus for a large orchestra deployed at four levels, a forty-minute work written for the 1998 Worlds Fair. Rather like in Lichtung, one is
After Voyage du corps, 73 Oeldorf 75 II and Minnesang, Vislumbre (1986) is Nunes’ fourth piece for a cappella choir. The lexical and phonetic potential of the poem by Mário de Sá-Carneiro on which it is based is explored here through six different readings, to which end the text is allocated to various levels, and phonemes and words are comprehensively investigated. By this means, a universe of a previously unknown sonic depth and wealth of relationships is opened up. Clivages (1978/88) for six percussionists is based on rhythmic figures that go back to Minnesang. They endow
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