Languages are an instrument of common and practical verbal communication, but can also be literature, prose and poetry. Transcribe a text into music implies a vast and complex network of interactions. We can read, translate and discuss Pessoa and his heteronyms in depth, but we can only theorise or barely imagine how it will be transcribing them into music; and each composer will have their own way of doing it, their own interpretation and their own way of setting text in music.
Tell me again the music of that Tale is a dialogue not only between two languages, English and Portuguese, but also a a dialogue between cultures, life experiences and a dialogue between Pessoa, his heteronyms and myself. A dialogue between a pre-existing text and a composer can be developed through multiples forms of interactions, from the most unanimous to the most conflictual and estranged. The dialogue between Pessoa, his heteronyms and my own perception was like a visit to a library: wander through the corridors, grabbing some of the books on the shelves, selecting the ones I enjoyed and putting them on the trolley. After, in a more selective way, I made my final decision.
Vocal music can deal with the totality of its configurations, including the phonetic one and including the ever-present vocal gestures. It can be useful for as composer to remember that the sound of as voice is always a quotation, always a gesture. For that reason, I worked, in each text, their musical gesture, phonetics, accentuation, pauses, crescendos and diminuendos. This allowed me to understand the phonetic, the accentuation, the pauses and also the gesture of the sentence: where and how it starts, how it develops, and how and where it finishes. This implies the possibility of transforming and even abusing the text’s integrity so as to perform an act of constructive demolition of it. Also there is a possibility of exploring and absorbing musically the full face of the language.