Focusing on this aspect of the qualification Miso Music Portugal has played a key role in the promoting of the live music festival. What are the importance of this event at the national level and its 18 years of existence?
MA: That's all true and there is a downside. The neoliberal society that has developed over the last twenty years and that this rapidly worsening alarmingly, it appears with perestroika, the fall of the Berlin world and end the so-called Eastern bloc, opened the way for a series of excesses and a manipulation of the individuals. And instead of being evolving as a civilization in the philosophical sense of life, in matters of life and death that occupy human over the millennia, (of been equal that are the philosophical and metaphysical order that has occupied mankind), happens the reverse. What would became of us, Portuguese without Camoes, Fernando Pessoa Vieira da Silva and this goes for everything in the end there is a legacy, a heritage in terms of thinking that suddenly seems not to exist for anyone living in this hegemony of the market that destroys memory, the land and even jeopardizes humanity. It is a negative aspect which resents what is the availability of most people for what they are not foisted by marketing and television. Now having said that, to put this in perspective for twenty five years in a very broad sense, while in 1985 it was all expectation, hope and development in 2012 everything is shrinking, concern and we have much less activity. Returning to the festival, we actually played an important role (in full consciousness and modesty) in the development of new generations of musicians who are major artist worldwide. We also evolved in the new composition with new performers, have fostered the creation of music, so much so that there are many orders. We gave opportunities to many young people to present themselves for the first time in the festival; some of them had an illustrious career and are musicians still unknown to the Portuguese public. The festival follows a curve, started small, then grows and we arrived at 2005 with an event with 25 concerts in 2012 and we have nine concerts, best, seven because two are students, i.e. we are reduced to one third of the activity we had until a few years ago. There was an increase to a certain extent, but now we're falling like everything else. It is a problem that has financial fundamentals, but deeps denote a policy option that is not about humanity and of course it worries me. In conclusion, the art is structuring and fundamental to human existence and whatever happens will persist and may even have worse times, but I believe that true artists create under any circumstances, it may cannot reach all people, but patience. How many contemporary Portuguese poets know? There are a few and the ones that exist are good, but we haven't seen them all.
Going back to the festival, although there is a financial setback, the public is aware and continues to appear?
MA: It continues to appear and to be aware. I would even say it has grown slowly; we operate in an area that needs substantive work to be done. In this case, people come to us, the television today does not give us any space, with the exception of the "light camera" were I've been one year ago. In spite of all, although we do not have these means of mass dissemination to reach more people, the public has grown and today we have a festival with a full house.
The Miso Music Portugal has made a commitment in showing electro acoustic music for children and even an opera was created for this purpose.
MA: Yes, we have done many courses for children. Encourage, instigated professionals, more for those who have a vocation, because not all artists have the ability to deal with children. In order to face this overwhelming dominance of the market, it is essential to take them to other paths, broaden their imaginations, so that this is a path of expansion, growth and curiosity and in this respect we have invested heavily in various professional projects. We developed several programs, for children and youth, tales counted with sound and other approaches with new technology we called electro acoustic music. They have access to machines, to iphones, the graphics tablets and computers. Thus, the technology has become a kind of common language, which is cross-cultural and economic and –cross-sociological that everyone has access, some more and others less. It is an interesting language, there is a great responsiveness, and such as is the case of the opera "girl drop of water".
But in that context there an opera for children?
MA: Well, it's a very specific context, there is children's choir in Portugal, from the Lisbon University, directed by Erica Mandillo, is a unique project not only our country but in terms of children's choirs is one the best in the world. It is a remarkable work by its vocal quality, its movement on stage and acting, which is far beyond the idea of a concert in which you only hear music, I was interested to create a project that was developed with the means we have at Miso Music Portugal. It also involved a hundred children and their drawings who in real time manipulate them in interactive tables. The "girl drop of water" is an extraordinary poem of the mid-sixties, is a total work of art referring to Wagner, which involves various means, a redundancy, since the word means exactly that.
The other aspect of Miso Music Portugal is the award of scholarships for musicians. How the rest of the world does see these musicians?
MA: There is much to be done, I apologize once again, and modesty aside, that is the feedback I get, the Miso Music Portugal and the Center for Research & Information of Portuguese music (MIC) are certainly an open window for foreigners about what we do in our country. We have an extensive network of partnerships with international counterparts, such as the international music council and other organizations in which we bind many works, dozens of songwriters and musicians abroad. There is a knowledge that has been boosted by us in this country, even with little disclosure. We see a growing interest in this area, but let me do parentheses, we have to put ourselves into a planetarium perspective, Portugal is tiny in global terms. In this sense we develop the MIC, which is the largest repository of classical and experimental music, with more than 600 online music by Portuguese composers, depicting 40 live musicians, have a repository of 10,000 works of the XX and XXI century and we are now walking backwards, instead of starting from past to present, because we want to promote people in life, we retreat into the past and we are now in the mid-nineteenth century. We're making the catalog, but also intend to make an inventory of these scores, we found that José Ferreira Gomes was a composer, he wrote symphonies that nobody knew. Then we are going to make available music, like iTunes, but only Portuguese. We could extend this survey to all genres, but it is a matter of choice, mainly has to do with availability of funds and human resources, which is the same thing. I know my area well and you need specialists for this and it is now impossible.
