A Secret Language: an interview with Emmanuel Nunes

UH/ 6 - interview

A Secret Language

Q: In a self-portrait a few years ago you wrote: “I was born in Lisbon on 31 August 1941: this was the very first stage of my learning process.” Does this have anything to do with the fact that you have been physically disabled from birth?

A: For me learning is a way to penetrate to the essence of things. It leads to the centre, it is not a way round, and it is in no sense a form of compensation. For me learning happens mainly in the field of music. Even as a child I was interested in all sorts of sounds, although up to my fourteenth year I wasn’t particularly interested in music. At fifteen I started the piano and then I started going to concerts regularly. I heard very many concerts in Lisbon and began to study harmony, partly for its own sake and partly as a duty to myself. It was the traditional course of study: harmony, counterpoint, fugue… At the same time I was listening to more and more music, but only up to Stravinsky.

Q: How did you come to be interested in new music?

A: In 1963 I went to the Summer School for New Music in Darmstadt. As well as being able to experience the general atmosphere I found that Henri Pousseur’s course was particularly important for me. Pousseur gave an introduction to electronic music which impressed me profoundly. At the end of 1963 I was able to leave Lisbon and settle in Paris. There I studied privately. I studied fugue with Bach and worked my way through Pierre Boulez’s book, “Music Thinking Today”. I also had a good look at Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly his thoughts on “the inner consciousness of time.” In 1965 I went to the Rhineland Conservertoire in Cologne and for the next couple of years attended Karlheinz Stockhausen’s courses. Courses with Pousseur, Jaap Spek and Georg Heike, with whom I studied phonetics, were also important to me.

Q: Why phonetics?

A: Phonetics has an extraordinary significance for me. Everything to do with foreign languages fascinates me. Also linguistics, although I am no specialist in this field and although I reject fashionable theories about the relationship between linguistics and music. Phonetics was important to me because I had never used voices in my music until then. I simply felt that I wasn’t ready to work with human voices.

Q: But later you did bring the voice into your composition. It is in the title of you work Ruf - “Shout.”

A: That was much, much later. I didn’t write a work for voices until 1974. Before that I wrote many instrumental work, like Seuils, Purlieu, Dawn Wo, The Blending Season. At the same time, in Paris, I began a doctoral thesis on Webern’s Second Cantata. I never finished it but it was an important part of my inition into new music. Until 1971 not one of my works was performed. Then I heard some of my chamber music performed in public. In 1974 came the first performances with orchestra, with synthesiser too and tape - and with voices, language. Language became important for me because it has a manifold potential which is not directly concerned with meaning. Every language has a secret language beyond its lexical aspect.

Q: Is music a secret language of that kind?

A: Of that kind, I don’t know. But music is a secret language, yes.

a translated extract from an interview with Emmanuel Nunes by Wolfgang Max Faust