Some years ago, it seemed extremely unlikely that what is commonly described as ‘minimalism’Footnote ¹ in musical composition would make any real impact in Portugal. The landscape of contemporary composition seemed, with very few exceptions, uncompromisingly ‘maximalist’.Footnote ² Such a position had arisen from the very gradual appearance of avant-gardism in Portugal, most particularly in the work of Jorge Peixinho (1940–1995), whose qualifications as a student of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and as a composer who was willing to experiment with collage, aleatoricism and electroacoustics, in addition to his political engagement, made him in some sense a cultural symbol of the Revolution of 25 April 1974.Footnote ³ Peixinho's aesthetic range was much wider than such a characterisation would suggest, however; as Alexandre Delgado has written, ‘his greatness goes vastly beyond the mere capacity to absorb significant tendencies of the period. It is precisely the aspects in which Peixinho distanced himself from the dominant fashions – whether postserial or postmodernist – that make him a great composer who will withstand the passage of time.’Footnote ⁴ At all events, it was Emmanuel Nunes (1941–2012) who would come to be the focal point for many Portuguese composers; his reputation stretched far beyond Portugal, but he returned regularly to his native country to give seminars in composition, with the support above all of the Gulbenkian Foundation, and the number of younger composers who attended these is considerable.

Much has changed in the interim, however, not least the abandonment of an uncritical acceptance of an artificial and unbridgeable opposition between the terms ‘minimalism’ and ‘maximalism’. To quote António Pinho Vargas (b. 1951), undoubtedly the Portuguese composer who has considered and written about these questions in greatest detail, ‘Though I recognise here the historical importance of serialism, I cannot forget the other side of the problem: the progressive emptying of this historical raison d’être, the bottleneck of the creative potential of this technique and, above all, its institutionalisation, whether as an unquestionable norm, or a regulatory teaching.’Footnote ⁵ Pinho Vargas is emblematic, in fact, of the generation faced precisely with the institutionalised avant-garde and the search for a way forward, a way out of the ‘bottleneck’.

It is useful, therefore, I think, to situate minimalism and its successors and variants within the notion of postmodernism. This is important in this context precisely because of the way in which composers have increasingly tended to situate themselves within aesthetic currents, in part because of valuable initiatives such as the series of interviews with composers resident in Portugal carried out by the Portuguese Music Information Centre.Footnote ⁶ But if minimalism is part of the array of postmodern possibilities, how precisely is it part? Jonathan D. Kramer, in an essay published in 2002, attempted to arrive at some definitions in this regard:

This list is notable for its inclusion of radically different expressions of postmodernism and for the questions of reception it raises: for example, Górecki's Third Symphony was widely considered, at the time of its first performance in 1977, as conservative – a nostalgic attempt to return to the past;Footnote ⁸ Reich's Tehillim seemed, in its instinctive melodic reactions to the Hebrew texts, a surprising move away from his established minimalist stance; and Schnittke's First Symphony (1969–74), though, bizarrely, it was authorised for performance by the Soviet authorities, was premiered as far away from Moscow as possible, in the remote city of Gorky (Nizhny-Novgorod). While an argument could be made for minimalism as a manifestation of antimodernism, it is clear if one subscribes to Kramer's categorisation that it must be seen as postmodernism, for it does not engage with nostalgia. It may spring from a yearning for an innocence untainted by the complexity and confusion so often thought to be concomitant with modernism, but it is an innocence yet unheard, not dependent on any kind of reactivation of earlier musical vocabularies.

Similarly, Keith Potter notes that,

The question becomes, then, one of perspective. Historical and political perspective on the work of the original minimalists – Potter's Four Minimalists are La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, a list that is now a standard litany – has become not only necessary but essential. As long ago as 1993, Edward Strickland had complained of ‘… the specious chronological delimitation of Minimalism to the 1960s…’, yet the possibilities of what once seemed a unified aesthetic have splintered and spread though the postmodern catalogue.Footnote ¹⁰

In discussing the situation of contemporary composition in Portugal, Manuel Pedro Ferreira, writing in 2005, divided his panoramic view of the twentieth century into five phases, the last of which bears the title ‘The changing of the (avant)-garde: faces of postmodernity (c.1990-)’.Footnote ¹¹ He speaks of ‘a postmodern spirit, until then more advocated than practised’, appearing in the works of younger composers and leading to a ‘highly diversified aesthetic panorama’; further, he notes that ‘in spite of the aesthetic crystallisation of the Encontros Gulbenkian [an annual festival of contemporary music hosted by the Gulbenkian Foundation], younger composers came, from the mid-1990s, to dominate the attentions of the more attentive audiences, effectively changing the old (avant)-garde’. Without at all wishing to repeat or reinforce tired stereotypes concerning centres and peripheries of artistic production,Footnote ¹² it is nevertheless clear that it was only with some surprising programming choices in the 1997 edition of the Encontros, which included performances of Pärt's Fratres and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (both 1977) and the commissioning of Giya Kancheli's Diplipito (1996), given its first performance by the countertenor Derek Lee Ragin and the Gulbenkian Orchestra under Michael Zilm, that other approaches to contemporary repertoire began to become apparent in institutional programming in Portugal.

Further examples of this change are provided by the commissioning by the Comissão para a Comemoração dos Descobrimentos Portugueses of the opera O Corvo Branco, by Philip Glass (1991), to a bilingual libretto by Luísa Costa Gomes,Footnote ¹³ and of the Cycle of Disquietude by Michael Nyman, on poems by Fernando Pessoa and Kevin Power, commissioned by the 100 Days Festival (part of Expo ’98). Both received their premieres in Lisbon in 1998 and were at the time remarkable deviations from the ‘aesthetic crystallisation’ of contemporary music in a more general sense. As important as these events, however, and of more lasting impact, was the sense of horizons opening in the teaching of the composers Christopher Bochmann (b. 1950) and António Pinho Vargas at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, which had and continues to have a genuinely liberating effect on the many younger composers who have passed through their hands. Pinho Vargas especially, having studied in Rotterdam with Klaas de Vries, and coming from a jazz background, was instrumental in introducing a plurality of ways of thinking about composition to his students.Footnote ¹⁴

Luís Tinoco (b. 1969), and Nuno Côrte-Real (b. 1971), two of the composers whose work I shall discuss here, were students of both Bochmann and Pinho Vargas, and Côrte-Real followed in Pinho Vargas's footsteps to the Netherlands, also studying with Klaas de Vries as well as Peter Yan Wagemans and Rener Uijlenhoet. The trajectories of Eugénio Rodrigues (b. 1961) and Tiago Cutileiro (b. 1967) were rather different, as I shall discuss, but it is important to note here that the time lapse with respect to the acceptance of elements of minimalism by Portuguese composers has meant that, in the music of these four, there is an attitude towards musical aesthetics that does not simply derive from a felt imperative to simplify and communicate, as was the case for the early American minimalists, but one that is inevitably acutely aware of the vast array of other aesthetic possibilities available to composers in the twenty-first century, and consciously positions itself accordingly.

The oldest of these four composers, Eugénio Rodrigues, was born in Lousã, and his earliest musical experiences were in the field of traditional music – he learned to play the accordion – later he played drums in a rock band. He continued his interest in Portuguese folk music when he moved to the USA, founding his own ensemble, and he began to study composition at Western Connecticut State University, the Yale Summer School of Music, Duke University and, in 1994, with Louis Andriessen in The Hague. He returned to his native country with a fully formed style and a portfolio of compositions that were unlike anything being written in Portugal at that time. The string quartet Mata Hari (1992) is representative in its obsessive quality and in its use of ‘pure’, viol-like string tone, already suggesting Andriessen, who so often calls for vibrato-free playing. The review of its premiere in the Washington Post describes its character well:

This kind of gradual flowering, a multiplication of lines and increasing complexity of rhythms, is found in a good deal of Rodrigues's music. In Fontis Amorum for soprano and strings, written in 2002 to a commission from Cistermúsica, this technique is used in the purely instrumental sections that separate the three verses intoned to a very simple, recurring melody in modally tinged A major (see Example 1). The strings are divided (violins and violas in four, cellos in two), and the pervasive use of inexact canons – hinting at heterophony – enables the composer to build up dense, lush textures whose intensity both contrast with and set the stage for the simple melody sung by the soprano; a contrast the more effective when a child's voice is employed.

Example 1: Eugénio Rodrigues, Fontis Amorum, p. 14

Tágides, a more recent work (written in 2013), is rather different. Scored for symphonic band, it includes an optional theatrical element: the title refers to the nymphs of the River Tagus, the muses invoked by Portugal's national poet, Camões, in his Lusiads, and the poet may be represented by a figure who walks through the midst of the audience before the music begins and reappears at the end, ringing a ship's bell. The poet asks for a ‘fúria grande e sonorosa’ (‘a grand and sonorous fury’) in the form of a ‘tuba canora e belicosa’ (‘a resonant and warlike clarion’), and this is the image that underlies the opening gesture of Rodrigues's work, a loud fanfare that moves immediately into a chugging rhythmic section employing Andriessen-like hockets. This material returns, as does the fanfare, alternating with quieter, more reflective sections, and the works ends with the instruments blowing air while two vibraphones play a repeated bell-like pattern, signalling the return of the Poet.

What is noticeable about Rodrigues's work is the way it has moved beyond ‘classical’ minimalism to incorporate a genuinely luxuriant melodic writing but without any sense of neo-romanticism, or any recourse to the multiple stylistic references characteristic of much work by John Adams, for example. The work of Tiago Cutileiro, on the other hand, could be described as radically minimalist. In relation to this, Strickland's bemoaning of ‘the specious chronological delimitation of Minimalism to the 1960s’, quoted above, is interesting. When questioned about the aesthetic of minimalism and how it might relate to his work, Cutileiro commented,

Indeed, Cutileiro's views on the later trajectories of minimalist composers, both American and European, are trenchant: ‘As for European minimalism, especially the Nordic kind that arose in the 1980s, and also the work of Glass and Reich from those years, I don't consider it truly minimalist.’ This is a point of view that has its basis in technique; for Cutileiro, in this repertoire

In a work such as Para Dez Instrumentos (2003), this approach is demonstrated very clearly (see Example 2). While the repetition of blocks of material is obvious, there is ambiguity in their number (4–8 or 5–10 repetitions), and the instruments are synchronised in pairs. The musical material is, harmonically, very unlike that of ‘classical’ early minimalism.

For the composer, the work arises purely from the processes: ‘I never seek results, but processes. It is always a more conceptual matter of processes and models of construction (another relation with the minimalism of the visual arts).’ Nevertheless, what arises from those processes must undergo scrutiny and selection:

This is very much evident visually from the score of Para Dez Instrumentos, which occupies a single page, and the abstractness of Cutileiro's titles (‘For Fourteen Instruments’, ‘For Ten Instruments’, ‘For Flute and Piano’, etc.) reinforces the idea of the inexorability of these processes.

Example 2: Tiago Cutileiro, Para Dez Instrumentos

The work of Luís Tinoco, on the other hand, makes overt use of elements of the kind that Cutileiro considers ‘not truly minimalist’, within the context of a musical language that is both rich and diverse. The composer himself acknowledges, for example, the presence of certain gestures that come from minimalism, in such works as Short Cuts, Ends Meet, Invenção sobre Paisagem and Antipode, citing specifically Adams, Reich and Andriessen,Footnote ¹⁷ but notes that he only began to examine minimalism as a phenomenon in depth when he began to teach at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, some years after returning from London, where he had studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Paul Patterson. The composer whose work he points to as particularly influential before that time is Ligeti, as may be clearly heard in the early String Quartet (1995).Footnote ¹⁸

Nevertheless, Tinoco is anxious to point out that, ‘in spite of this connection which, I repeat, I consider more than legitimate, I think that it comes basically from my listening to Stravinsky and a great deal of jazz, in which there are obvious points of contact with the harmonic and rhythmic language of some minimal works’, noting that as a teenager he was an assiduous listener to the work of Pat Metheney and Lyle Mays, and that he maintains a very high opinion of Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett. Certainly, jazz and Stravinsky may be heard as ancestors in some degree of a work such as Antipode (2000) (Example 3), but filtered in such a way as to suggest the music of Andriessen, particularly in terms of the repetition of motives that become ostinati, and the instrumentation, which favours saxophones and brass.

Example 3: Luis Tinoco, Antipode, p. 12

Tinoco says that he reclaimed the ‘gestures of repetition, ostinato and pulsation’ after discovering Ligeti's Etudes, and points to his works Tríptico for violin and piano (1997), Verde Secreto (2007) for saxophone and piano, the wind quintet Autumn Wind (1998) and the quintet Light – Distance (2000) as proof of this. The fact that the dates of composition of these works covers an entire decade is proof of the enduring fascination of Ligeti's work for Tinoco, but his music continues to be a highly eclectic mix, and in conversation he is as likely to locate his musical ancestry in Birtwistle as in Adams or Andriessen. When questioned about ideas of modernism and postmodernism, Tinoco says that his listening is broad in scope, as may be detected from the omnivorous nature of his musical references in the above, and that ‘official assumptions of position in art (and not only) are of little interest to me’.

A similar stance is taken by the youngest of the four composers under discussion, Nuno Côrte-Real, who, while vehemently rejecting any categorisation of his music as minimalist, nevertheless recognises that his customary technique of building pieces from small cells of two, three or four notes that may well then become ostinati, and the fact that sections of his works are frequently ‘somewhat hypnotic’ in character on this account, might indeed suggest some connection with classical minimalism.Footnote ¹⁹ The recent Lembras-te, meu amor, das tardes outonais… for piano quartet (op. 47, 2014) demonstrates this connection well, the use of periodic ‘varied ostinato’ being pervasive, and of particular significance between bars 73 and 102, after which it is replaced by a new ostinato pattern until the end of the piece (see Example 4).

Example 4: Nuno Côrte-Real, Lembras-te, p. 6

As the composer says, ‘everything depends on context; on the narrative and philosophical discourse’, and that discourse, for Côrte-Real, derives as much from his love for the chamber and orchestral repertoire of the nineteenth century. He speaks more readily of Beethoven, Schumann and Wagner than of minimalism, and this affinity is frequently suggested by his melodic and gestural material.

One might usefully recall here Kramer's observation, quoted above, that ‘only in antimodernist music … is the use of traditional sonorities, gestures, structures, and procedures tantamount to a re-embracing of earlier styles. In contrast to such compositions, postmodernist music is not conservative’. Certainly, ‘conservative’ is not a label that can be applied to any of these four composers; indeed, they might in many senses be considered quite radical, and that radicalism is necessarily a product of the cultural context against which it is seen to be a reaction. At the same time, there is, I would argue, little danger of any compositional orthodoxy (whether that be technical or a wider philosophical/aesthetic character) becoming ‘institutionalised’ in the way that one might argue had occurred earlier in the twentieth century with the work of Nunes and others. There are two principal reasons for this. First, today's students have a far wider knowledge of the field of contemporary composition than ever before, in large part a consequence of ease of access, and they are therefore much more likely to be in a position not only to defend their aesthetic choices, but actually to learn in a technical sense from them. Second, the composers now teaching in institutions of higher learning, such as Tinoco, have passed through this phase of aesthetic dogmatism and, flexible themselves in terms of outlook and appreciation, are in general delighted with the challenge of plural aesthetics of the highest technical quality apparent in the work of their students.

Paulo Ferreira de Castro has noted that if this ‘pluralism of stylistic orientations and linguistic choices … is for some an unsettling symptom of a postmodern eclecticism in which anything goes, it is for others a necessary reaction to the determinist vision of a sacralised avant-garde and of its supposed “historical imperatives”’.Footnote ²⁰ I would argue that the plurality of stylistic avenues that has become available during the time all four of the composers under discussion were studying, and that has increased exponentially during their professional careers, makes their aesthetic positioning, in the Portuguese context, the more remarkable and vital.