"Following a composer made of curiosity and restlessness"

Mário Lopes | Público, 21.02.14

We met Vasco Mendonça in his office in Largo Camões in Lisbon, just two days before the opening of The House Taken Over in Lisbon, an opera premiered last July at the prestigious Festival d' Aix-en-Provence.

Inscribed by Télérama magazine in a genealogy which includes Debussy´s unfinished The Fall of the House of Usher, after Edgar Allan Poe´s tale, and described by belgian newspaper Le Soir as "a little gem of concentration and precision," this opera confirms VM as one of the most prominent portuguese names in contemporary music these days. The route of the 1977-born composer illustrates it well. He has studied with Klaas de Vries and George Benjamin, won the Lopes -Graça Composition Award in 2004, been the resident composer at Casa da Música, and it was him the Gulbenkian Foundation commissioned a new piece (Group Together , Avoid Speech) to celebrate its orchestra´s 50th anniversary.(...)

We are, therefore, with VM in his office. In a nearby room, we had been speaking of his fascination with the voice and the role it will have in future works, and addressing a late starting, initially jazz-influenced career. We'd been hearing him speak of his appreciation for the "unerring economy" of the english language.

After the interview, we are hunched over a box of rocks of various types. He scratches a piece of shale and praises its sound. He then tells us not long ago he bought and broke a handful of glasses in order to analyse and register its sound. On the wall is attached an excerpt from Beckett´s Molloy, in which the protagonist describes his sucking-stone sequence.

By now, the opera that´s been touring last month in Luxembourg and Belgium competes with VM´s attention to his next step. A piece for Drumming percussion group. "I'm trying out things I´ve never done before, such as working with the actual matter of the instruments, that is, to use what they are made of as a compositional element": for example, by striking the wood of the Portuguese guitar stored at a corner. "This is quite distant from the more traditional context of opera, but it is a type of work that truly excites me."

From this, we could infer that VM is a composer between two worlds, tradition and the avant-garde, between an experimentalist fervor and the depuration of traditional forms. We could, but that would be a simplistic, reductive reading. "I think the opposition tradition vs experimentalism is a false issue," he says more than once thoughout the interview. "Subversion can occurr in both fields," he adds. This statement grafts onto a generational trait. In his generation, VM points out, "there is certainly less prejudice in the way we look at things, there aren´t any forbidden territories": "If you recognize potential in something, be it Bel Canto repertoire or Drum'n'Bass, there is no reason not to go there." But this trait is a generational context. Beyond that, a composer. Another world.

VM began studying music at age 13, "too late to be a soloist, or even a performer." He came to music through jazz and the Hot Club in Lisbon , where he was first a student and then a teacher. At Academia de Amadores de Música, he did his piano studies. But something seemed to be missing. "I never had that obsessive, selfless relation" with the instrument. His obsession was elsewhere. Flash forward to the present.

VM composed The House Taken Over in six months. For half a year he worked for "twelve hours a day, every single day" - "I have a small son who didn´t see me during that period." It is in designing, composing and creating that he feels accomplished. An activity he was doing even before entering the world of contemporary music. That came when he joined Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. "I was regularly surprised by things I didn´t understand." He was guided by an innate curiosity, a willingness to learn more, to understand. He was overwhelmed by the " astonishment one has before a cliff, in the sense of the Kantian sublime. "It was the moment he discovered Messiaen and Stravinsky that made him jump. "From then on I´ve been creating my own genealogy as a composer, an endless and constantly evolving process."

Later on, we find him in Holland. He´d finish his MMus Composition at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, supervised by Klaas de Vries. "It was clear for me I needed to be in a place where I could try, and try, and then try some more. I needed to make music and listen to it, to get it wrong and get it right, and in that process to find my own voice. " In 2004, he would candidly explain to Independente newspaper the urgency to leave: "In Portugal I´ve had two pieces peformed in four years, in the Netherlands there were more than thirty performances in under two years ." Returning to Portugal, then leaving again, this time to London. Not for what London had to offer, but because of a composer, George Benjamin.

VM was working on his first chamber opera, Jerusalem, (based on the book by Gonçalo M. Tavares and directed by Luis Miguel Cintra), premiered in 2009. Benjamin, in his turn, was starting Written on Skin, the opera he would premiere in 2012 at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. With Klaas de Vries, VM had learned to think music, and his goals as an composer, in a different way. With Benjamin, " a kind of genius craftsman", he refocused his attention on music "as sound event" and music-making as "craftsmanship."

Here we are, then, two days before the Portuguese premiere of The House Taken Over, a work which concentrates two of his major interests as a creator. On one hand, the voice. "It's the most extraordinary of all instruments. Because of its ability to carry text, but not only that. The combination of risk and fragility it represents, and at the same time, the level of expressiveness it can achieve, make it very important to me. I'll probably be busy with the voice in the next few years." Besides the voice, a recurring interest in drama - mirrored in the Cortazar tale, where two syblings startle over a house occupied by no-one-knows-what. "I'm very interested in human behavior. What do certain people have an unusual behavior? What 's behind that? ".

In him, we could say the keyword is curiosity. To question more, to discover more, to get somewhere else. Whether by re-reading Samuel Beckett, who has been a creative trigger for a number of pieces ("there's something in him that moves me deeply"), or by exploring the human voice, or multimedia when it is called for (it happened in Ping , a piece made in 2011 with filmmaker Sandro Aguilar), or the natural plasticity of sound (as he´s doing now in the Drumming piece) or even through the desire of composing a large-scale opera - "hopefully it will happen in the future, I certainly want to do it".

Vasco Mendonça. Composer born in Portugal, but not necessarily a Portuguese composer. "I´m not interested in this element of "portugality", I see myself as a composer, not as a Portuguese composer - it runs the risk of becoming superficial when everything is globalized and we have contact with the work of people from all over the world." A creator that looks with "deep sorrow" to the state of portuguese culture in 2014. "This sticking of economy to culture, through the jargon of creative industries, is a dangerous speech", he points out. "Of course there is an economic benefit from cultural activities, but we need to acknowledge that part of what is done in culture can and should not aim to make profit."

But that is the country outside. In here, in the office that became his workshop, VM will go on. "I just want to keep doing what I do. Always with the willingness to do things differently than I have done in the past, and to venture myself into unknown territories." This dimension of risk is rather important to him. He wants to explore different artistic fields, to search for new combinations. To avoid complacency: " What defines most of the artists I admire, musicians or not, is that element of restlessness," he says.