JdOHello. This geographical question is very relative. We carry with us our origins, our life; mine was around the world. I lived in different countries, but I always think of Rio de Janeiro’s sea. Curitiba was incidental in my life. I was born in Aquibadan Street, in my great grandparents’ place, but I didn’t live there, and I don’t carry bonds besides the memory of the sad passage rite of my father’s and my grandmother’s death. They no longer lived there, but happened to be in Curitiba in those days of their deaths.

I like Berlin. I’ve been there many times and presented five of my operas, including the premiere of Kseni – Di Fremde at Berliner Festpiele.

JdOI lived in New York for 20 years. The meeting could have happened there or in any other place. Besides, everything is mixed up in [the] virtual [world], nowadays.

JdOIt’s the first time someone asks me this much about the place I was born. Since this seems relevant to you, here it is:

We lived in Batel in a futurist house with Art Deco furniture, a very big yard, and a German Shepherd dog that belonged to my mother. One morning, out of jealousy of her, [it] bit my leg, leaving a scar. I was less than three years old when we moved to São Paulo, and there I was raised and studied. The scar remained.

JdOYes, this reflects a provincial mentality. Many states in Brazil support and value their artists. Paraná, on the contrary, ignores.

JdOIt wasn’t a transition. I believe we keep making the same thing, but we find different ways of expressing ourselves—sometimes more complex, sometimes simpler (which is quite difficult). But I can’t say I’ve changed radically, despite hopefully having matured, and therefore perfected, my creative process. In different stages of my life, my pieces were considered pioneers for different reasons. I always pursued invention instead of routine, and I continue in the same search. At the time of Música Século XX,¹⁴ I was twenty years old, and my destiny in music was already written as a pianist performing concerts as soloist of great orchestras in Europe, USA, and Brazil. In the Sixties, I played a lot of contemporary music and many composers wrote for me, such as Luciano Berio, Xenakis, Cage, Cláudio Santoro, in addition to having been two times soloist under Stravinsky’s conduction. At the same time, I was beginning to conceive an electronic drama Apague meu spot light (in partnership with Berio) that premiered in Rio and São Paulo’s city theaters during the VI Bienal de Arte, in 1961. The exceptional cast included Fernanda Montenegro, Sérgio Britto, Ítalo Rossi, and scenic direction of Gianni Ratto. This piece caused great impact, and it is still remembered as the first time electronic music was made in Brazil.

As for the Música Século XX vinyl, it was a unique event.

Advice? Follow your intuition and work hard.

JdOThis “divisional” question of popular music and classical music is something that exists in the whole world. In France they go even further as to calling it musique serieuse, musique savant; musique classique versus musique populaire. In Germany there is also klassik muzik. In English, “classic” and “pop” music. But cases where things get crossed—more difficult to tag—do exist. I don’t really expect this division to be abandoned. Each day more we’re living in bubbles—tribes—few are the exceptions that cross different fields and exceed barriers.

JdOI think invention is a lot like in science. We all contribute a little until someone suddenly finds a new path. In my case, for many years I’ve been focusing on an investigation in multiple fields—through music, theater, video, text, [and] installations—with the conviction that the sonic expression is inherent to all forms of life. [I’ve been] trying to reach an organic development of composition/performance with no borders between life and art.

In general, my work—the choice of the sonic material—encompasses elements from both my musical and my life experiences. That way, my impression of a sadhu (holy man) singing a raga to Shiva in a temple in Delhi is as important as the reminiscence of a Renaissance counterpoint, a cantilena, the use of sounds generated by computer, or the heritage of years and years playing Messiaen’s piano works and living his new notion of time.

This sonic tissue can be developed from multiple series: sound clouds in constant textural transformation, a tala, a European post-serial tradition, the Eastern non-periodicity, nature’s timelessness, chance, or our anthropophagic cultural roots. It’s the integration of all those elements with a view of the world shaped as more than thirty years of life in different countries, and of sharing with some of the 20th century’s masters.

Sometimes it can happen that music from other cultures—many of them deemed as “primitive cultures” in the West—are more innovative to our ears than just the formality inherited from Eurocentrism. The world isn’t only the Western Northern
hemisphere!

But I was lucky to have lived the discoveries from the late 1950s and 1960s up until the 1970s. At twenty years old, I had the opportunity of working and collaborating with Cage, Berio, Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, Lukas Foss, and mainly Stravinsky.²² In those decades, I lived in the USA and Europe. They were extremely innovative and instigating years; for me, [they were] watersheds in the cultural and political fields. Even at that impactful time, the “vanguard” was already questioned—maybe vanguard only ever existed with Dadaism in the beginning of the 20th century.

JdOI don’t know. You all see this from outside; you are capable of formulating this narrative. I immerse; I work and don’t think much about what it is that will survive. But it makes me glad that some have this perception and anticipate such dimension.

JdOI don’t worry about the market, about the public. I managed to trail a long path with no concessions, and I wish to remain like so.

As for the segments of Kseni – A estrangeira or Inori à prostituta sagrada, they are multimedia operas. For decades, I have explored the timelessness of myths in my multimedia operas. I search for a moment of poetic intuition, a moment of true complicity between artists and audience, a moment in which our perception of time and space expands and dives into our interior. Absorbing time in its unstructured essence becomes one of the primordial issues in my music.

This leads me to work with the timeless vision of myths in matriarchal societies from classical antiquity such as the “holy prostitute” from fairy tales, the “Diva” as the character deemed to die or the victim in conventional operas. In Kseni – A estrangeira, I bring back the myth of Medea, transported to contemporaneity as a transgressor woman—discriminated [against], heroic—and all those myths connected to the woman figure and their values, [are] contained in excerpts of my texts to many of my multimedia operas.

JdOYes, there is a research in that sense, of approaching my oeuvre as a stellar constellation where it all integrates, interconnects, and follows simultaneous paths; where there isn’t preoccupation about linearity. Since the beginning, I’ve never had this preoccupation in my works—approaching intuitive time or the circular form with no beginning or end or the quantic time state, if I may put it like that.

JdOYes, we live in a visual-oriented society where listening is being lost, but I don’t think the artist needs to be guided by the market’s demand. If your artistic conception demands multimediality, that’s what you should do; if not, I see no reason to.

JdOOnce more, it regards the search for an intersemiosis between music and other art forms; better said, a multimediality in the molds of my successful and internationally awarded cinematic opera Liquid Voices – A história de Mathilda Segalescu, produced in 2017 at SESC in São Paulo and filmed as a feature film in the ruins of Cassino da Urca in Rio; exhibited and awarded in cinema festivals in London, Nice, Madrid, Antwerp, Warsaw, Israel, New York, and Santiago.

My new cinematic opera, also a feature film, entitled Realejo de vida e morte,²⁸ shows the solitude of two characters in magical-realism scenes in the desolated landscape of a planet in the process of extinction. I have finished the script and the music, but the work is only beginning. I hope to release it in 2023.

JdOI don’t think so. Life is living each moment; we know that wanting to be Faust doesn’t work.

JdOPleasure was all mine; I wish you success in your trajectory throughout this world.