Interview with
composer/guitarist Arthur Kampela
April 2009
Arthur Kampela (b. 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), winner of the 1995
International Guitar Composition Competition (Caracas, Venezuela) and winner of
the 1998 Lamarque-Pons Guitar Composition Competition (Montevideo, Uruguay), is
internationally recognized both as composer and virtuoso guitar player. He has
received commissions and awards, from the New York Philharmonic, the
Koussevitzky Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation Rio Arte Foundation and
fellowships from the Brazilian Government (CNPq) and Columbia University, among
others.
Kampela has broken new ground in
two particular ways: first, in his native country he has fused popular and
vernacular styles with contemporary textural techniques. His 1988 CD "Epic..."
uses popular music forms deconstructing samba, jazz, musical theater, with new
music resources creating a true hybrid genre. Second, working with new extended
techniques for acoustic instruments. In his series of "Percussion Studies" for
solo guitar, Kampela has created an entirely new playing technique which he
extended to many acoustic instruments. His "Tapping Technique" exploits timbre,
pitch, texture and complex rhythmic designs where ergonomic considerations take
a prominent thematic role.
Some recent achievements include: Premiere of "Happy Days," for flute and
electronics at the Slam Festival in Seattle; "Elastics II" for flutes, guitar
and electro-acoustic sounds and "Percussion Study V" for viola alla chitarra"
and electroacoustic sounds at the Museu of Modern Art of Strasbourg, France by
the Linea Ensemble; Premiere of "Antropofagia" at the ISCM 2006 (World Music
Days) by the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin and Wiek Hijmans on electric
guitar. Presentation of "Layers..." and "Exoskeleton" by the Linea Ensemble,
from Strasbourg in their "Champs Libres" series (2006) in a "Kagel - Globokar -
Kampela" program; Debut of “Percussion Study IV” for solo viola (played “alla
chitara”); "KLANG," trio for Bass clarinet, harp and percussion played by
Speculum at Merkin Hall NYC; Series of concerts/shows with his new music band at
Schwaz (Austria), Strasbourg, Satalla and The Cutting Room (NYC), Escritório de
Música (São Paulo), Morelia Guitar Festival and UNAM (Mexico) among other
places; Festival Archipell in Switzerland with his piece "Quimbanda" for
electric guitar; "Sonidos de las Americas" at Carnegie Hall, NYC ; guest
composer for the "AVANTI" Ensemble, Helsinki; Helsinki Biennial with Bridges"
for viola played by Paul Silverthorne; "Phalanges" for harp solo by Anne Bassand
at the 'Kammermusiksaal des Kongresshauses', Zurich; Festivals 'Synthese'
(Switzerland), 'Aquila'(Italy) and at the 'ICMC' (Canada) with his piece "TEXTORIAS"
for computer-generated guitar, etc.
In 1998, Kampela received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University,
studying with Mario Davidovsky and Fred Lerdahl. In 1993, he received private
lessons from the British composer Brian Ferneyhough. Kampela's works have been
performed in the leading forums for Contemporary music in South-America, Europe,
Asia and the USA. In many of his pieces, Kampela employs new extended techniques
for acoustic instruments and micro-metric modulation -- a rhythmic system he
devised (after Carter and Cowell) to bridge complex rhythmic relationships. A
recent DMA graduate from CUNY, Graziela Bortz, wrote her dissertation (“Rhythm
in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finissy and Arthur Kampela: A Guide
for Performers.” CUNY, 2003”) based on Kampela's theory (and music) in order to
analyze the rhythmic strata of her thesis' subjects.
www.arthurkampela.com
Which projects are you working on at the moment?
At this precise moment I am working on many fronts. I have been composing a duo
for two guitars for Pablo Marquez and Cristina Azuma (in fact is a “quartet for
2 guitarists” since I use two guitars and two violas – played like a guitar); I
am working on a piece for piano solo and possibly and extension of it for piano
4 hands using a very unusual playing technique of my own invention. In the past
6 months I have also been writing a philosophical book on my approach to
composition, hearing/listening, perception, etc., commissioned by a group of
intellectuals and philosophers from New York… However, my main project at this
very moment is a piece for the New York Philharmonic New Music Ensemble to be
premiered in December of 2009 conducted by Magnus Lindberg. It is a commission
that happened at the beginning of this year (2009) and I was one of the
composers selected and honored to create a piece for this distinguished
orchestra. This piece which is called “Macunaíma” (after Mario de Andrade an
intellectual from the Brazilian Modernist Movement of 1920’s) is a continuation,
somehow, of my previous piece “Antropofagia” for electric guitar and large
chamber ensemble, a 30 minutes work premiered at the World Music Days, in
Stuttgart in 2006 by the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. Wiek Hijmans was the
electric guitarist at that occasion. My new piece, alongside six other
composers, will be opening the 2010 season of the NY Philharmonic, when Alan
Gilbert, the new music director (conductor) will officially assume the New York
Philharmonic’s podium. I have also been working on another very important
commission, given to me by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. I will be creating
a new work (in this case, an “opera for musicians”) for the Linea Ensemble of
Strasbourg.
With the series of percussion studies you have created a very original
language of extended techniques for the guitar. How did you develop these
extended techniques?
Well, this answer will have to be thorough. So, bear with me…
The guitar is at the center of my compositional project. Not because it is a
crutch that I need to rely on to compose, but because of its flexibility and for
being a micro-cosmos when thinking about certain compositional strategies. The
percussion studies series as the name indicates, is a way to extend the gamut of
sounds found in a traditional instrument incorporating percussive and noise
oriented effects/objects to the palette of its possible, known or expected,
sounds. The idea of a composer tweaking the traditional way an instrument is
normally approached or played seems to disturb the purists. For in their view it
“desecrates” modes of playing compatible to the very construction of the
instrument. The very idea of a perfect instrument is an equivocation in terms.
For me nothing is finite or taken for granted. All things are evolving somehow,
in a state of incompleteness, independent of the degree of functionality they
exhibit. Therefore, the percussion studies, strive to question not only specific
compositional views, but also the very instrument that propels those views,
their sounds. As if, prior to exposing the music, you have to re-expose the
instrument in order to awaken perception of its slumber, its expectancies, and
its repetitions. Again, nothing should be taken for granted! Not even the
instrument. And this brings us to the centrality of music’s enterprise: what is
hearing? How do our senses endow hearing with a higher perceptual capability,
that of listening? In the actual world where music might be viewed as a
commodity and all is a form of entertainment, people, although listening
massively nowadays, are very much unaware of their own habits, routines and
repetitions. This is the first paradigm where I based my project on. The
“Percussion Studies” are attempts to disturb the way a guitar should necessarily
be played, or sound, in order to re potentialize its voice. When working with
the instrument, I noticed that in its “imperfect perfection” lied many possible
ways to produce sounds. From nails hitting the sides (bottom and /or top), to
the percussive, although delicate, soundboard possibilities, among other means.
Thus, I invented a technique called “The Tapping Technique,” that enables me to
intersperse percussive and pitch oriented sounds in a continuous way, where the
hands alone maintain the traditional techniques of playing while incorporating
new gestures in between the traditional, plucked ones. Even for the traditional,
plucked techniques, there are approaches rarely used! For example, the “ligados”
(pull off or hammer on) are generally done in adjacent moves. You pluck a note
and then you pull the next one adjacent to it with your left hand. How about if
you pluck a note, let’s say a G, on the 3rd fret of the first string and then
pluck sequentially two or three other notes on the strings above, allowing the "ligado"
from the first string to be finally released, after all is plucked? So there you
have an interesting technical strategy, one that promotes non-adjacent "ligados"
and makes the hands acquire a higher degree of independence from each other.
It’s just a little tip to say that even the traditionalists didn’t figure all
that’s possible or is implicit in the very domains of an instrument’s
traditional techniques.
The next step when conceiving my technique was to avoid by all means all types
of gimmicks, creating a pastiche of guitar playing. In order to do that I
conceived moves that were specific to the right or left hand alone. Thus, while
something were being done with the right hand alone the left had the time to
catch up and intervene at the right moment and sometimes at a very far region in
the frets or soundboard. For example, hitting a G# on the 6th string (hammering
on) with the LEFT hand alone and subsequently producing a B Nat. (fret XIX)
harmonic with the index finger of your RIGHT hand. This is what I would call a
“machine gun” approach. Both hands coordinate and intersperse their moves
independently and sometimes they “click” together. So, I invented all sorts of
independent movements for each hand, in order to promote the “braiding” of the
materials. This is a fundamental point for me, since “braiding,” means creating
a constant interspersing of timbristically differentiated materials moving at a
fairly high speed. This tight rhythmic coordination between the hands, states,
implicitly, two points that are extremely important for me: First, it shows that
such a tight coordination between pitch and noises objects, seem to be part of a
unique perceptual continuum, and not separate entities. (In this aspect, we try
the opposite approach to the gimmicks we see everyday in the web (youtube and
all) where people using percussive effects to play the guitar, constraint the
materials to a specific pop form or format, making the guitarist look
ridiculous, as he becomes a mixture of a bad guitarist and a terrible
percussionist! The overall effect is so disjointed that they would be better off
having a percussionist and a guitarist playing separately.) And this brings us
to my second argument. Thus, Second, the technique I employ brings to the
foreground a type of “sculpted melody” where a limited set of effects implies,
compositionally speaking, rhythms of irregular or angular contour. (Nobody, at
this speed and between those highly coordinated gestures can substitute the
guitar or the guitarist as the only means to “propel” that complex web of
rhythms, and technical interspersing!!) Compositionally, this is due to the fact
that if you repeat the effect many times with the same rhythm, in a minimalist
fashion, the very effect becomes banal and predictable. Since the effects return
many times, as they are limited, it is important to make them surface at
unexpected points in the continuum. This has fantastic implications from both
the compositional and technical standpoints since it subverts the mere novelty
of the effect to upgrade it to a functional element of the continuum. (And this
is definitely something that the web “gimmickry” can’t comprehend, the fact that
it is almost a necessity to “cover” our tracks “as percussionists” in order to
optimize the very percussive outcome of the pieces we are trying to compose or
show.). In other words, it is necessary to insert the braiding of materials of
different weightings using asymmetric, complex, means, in order to value
constantly their appearance in the musical flux. That way the potential for
surprise refocuses our listening expectancies regenerating our interest. Thus,
my very choice of language was conditioned by the implicit possibilities found
in the manipulation of these sonic objects. I perceived that a gesture could be
stretched or compressed, interrupted by pauses or elongated by glissandos and/or
tremolos. My vocabulary of rhythmic materials had to be scrutinized and had to
allow for complexity if I wanted to have a qualitative distribution of my purely
technical, braiding, strategies. (Therefore, my use of Micrometric modulation
processes for rhythmic subdivision. This is the theory I’ve developed when
working on my D.M.A. research at Columbia University and extends the work on
metric modulation initiated by Cowell and Carter. I will explain a bit more of
it later in this interview.
Another important point that has arisen in the trajectory of the Percussion
Studies was the fact that they are a compositional enterprise, a project that
touch upon the mobility of musicianship where the very guitarist and the guitar
itself are questioned from the start. Questions that at first would seem
superfluous, such as “Why the use of the guitar at all? And “Why to compose with
the given means and techniques (i.e. strings, plucks, "rasgueados," etc.)
acquired certain urgency in the history of each piece. The Studies, being not
simply a set of pieces whose difficulties and technical demands increase
accordingly, functions for me as a type of compositional diary, a place of
charged “mistrust,” a trace of my compositional intentions…
In the first study, Percussion Study I, the underlying analytical storyline has
to do with the acceptance by pitch-oriented materials allowing for a broader
palette of sounds to coexist and emerge. Thus, there is constant “battle” or
counterpoint between these fields that are seen as separate entities of the
melodic or timbristic totality. At the end of this first study, there is a kind
of struggle between an open A (pure pitch) and a "buzz-like" sound/effect
(noise, done with the 6th string pulled over and plucked at the top of the neck
while an upward glissando towards the end of the fret board happens). The very
last note is an open E plucked violently as a ‘Bartók’ pizzicato, that
marvelously synthesize, on my view, the confluence of both fields, the
noise-percussive one and the pitch oriented one.
From that point of confluence sprang Percussion Study II. It is a piece that is
born after the conflicted structure of the first study. This piece can be seen
as a fusion of semantic fields, whose sonic grammar encompasses indiscriminately
noises, percussions and pitches. The main insight of this second piece was to
create a still more compressed rhythmic state in order to force the technical
demands to be more accurate and flexible. Here ratios and sub ratios are not
only existing in three levels of subdivision, but are even cut or interrupted
midway, creating a type of hypertrophied context full of “irrational” bars (i.e.
3/4 + 5/6) where the technique is subsumed to a more tightly woven structure,
having to stand the test of its efficacy. In this piece, I also incorporated
extended objects in order to completely deconstruct and distort the expected
sonic landscape. So, I use a pencil to mute the strings at the end of the piece
and at the very end, I use what I believe is one of the most impressive and
fortunate effects I invented: a metal spoon that functions as a wa-wa “pedal” as
it compresses the string on the top of the bridge while the right hand hammers
that very string. It sounds like a live wa-wa reverb – which is exactly what it
is!!
Percussion Study III prolongs the idea of timbristic fusion to envelope the
interpreter, the very guitarist in its melodic and timbristic continuum. This
piece explores what I call the “mobility of musicianship.” It has to do with my
compositional philosophy. For me, the physical extension of my pieces, as they
project beyond the mere instrumental mechanics to involve the performer as a
whole - his/her body as a donator of sounds - is a fundamental aspect of my
understanding of the ambiguities between gesture and sound. The re-channeling of
energy spent in performing can acquire the status of "structural" cell if we
view the bodily "reaction" to the music being played as a complementary detail
of its utterance. A scream, a click-tongue, a hum, the tapping of the feet,
etc., can be enlisted in the contrapuntal presentation of the sonic materials.
However, I might add, minus the “gimmicks. The works “works” because of these
ergonomic aspects are tightly woven in the compositional fabric though complex
rhythms. And the sounds coming out of it can be exciting...
“Exoskeleton” (my Percussion Study IV, for viola played ‘alla chitarra’ and
meaning: the outer shell of insects) is a metaphor for the exporting of my
“tapping technique” (created specifically for the guitar) to the viola’s
morphologic context. This piece for me is a true insight, one of these moments
where an entire compositional perspective solidifies. Again, in this piece
working with a palette of percussive sounds, noises and pitch oriented material
(pitch is not precisely indicated in the piece only rhythm); I tried to
accomplish a true deconstruction of the expected sonic qualities of viola!
First, a violist cannot play this piece, but only a guitarist. This first
“subversion” betrays traditional modes of motoric and gestural demands that are
incrusted in the tradition of viola music making. Secondly, the compositional
byproduct of such posture is not necessarily “viola music” but “pizzicato music”
played at speeds never heard before within the instrument. Therefore, (on top of
the playing speed), the compositional newness and integrity of the piece (and
the instrument) is maintained since the viola is submitted to complex technical
demands where ergonomic considerations play a fundamental role. To turn things
upside down, by the very end of the piece the guitarist plays with a metal bow,
holding it in the same way a violist would. Another subversion this time towards
the guitarist technique, a type of revenge of the viola, I might say… However
the sound produced is a harsh, “Geiger-like” sound, full of friction. The piece
ends with these small “pops” done with the metal bow, slowly pressuring against
the viola’s C string.
In my Percussion Study V, also for viola ‘alla chitarra’ starts with the last
“pop” of Exoskeleton.” However for this piece, I added an electronic part. This
piece’s insight follows the trajectory of “Exoskeleton” where I “exported” the
guitarist to play the viola, leaving the guitar behind. This perceptive ”short
circuit” is prolonged this time when, by the very end of this piece, I allow for
the guitarist to keep playing without the instrument through pure mimicry, while
the tape keeps going. The final “disappearance” of the interpreter’s instrument,
sends a sign to the audience that is suddenly confronted with a specialist whose
vanished instrument exposes him momentarily “naked,” as a fragile “singer” of
his own inner tune… This is for me, the ultimate insight onto the very condition
of music and musicians. We are sonic entities, “vibratory beings,” not
necessarily defined by the constraints of our instrument! Having the instrument
disappear at the end of the piece, like magic, foregrounds the musician’s human
condition. Well, you'd have to see it for yourself...(no it's not magic it's
just music...)
I have more to say in relation to the future development of the Percussion
Studies series. In fact, I have already started numbers 6, 7 (for cello!) and 8.
But they are still surprises in the making, and I will keep them secret, for
now…
I have heard different compositions of yours: some are very complex and
avant-garde, others more leaning towards Brazilian music. How would you describe
the relation between these elements in your music?
My music navigates between hybridism and complexity. Traditional forms such as
“Bossas-Novas” and “Sambas” (popular music forms of my native country, Brazil),
receive similar compositional treatment as my more strictly “avant-garde”
oriented music. My musical and cultural heritage ranges from early modernists
like Webern, Stravinsky and later Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio, Ligeti
Ferneyhough, Sciarrino Lachenmann, to Jobim and João Gilberto (a kind of "Webern"
of popular music of Brazil) and Tropicalismo a counter cultural dissolution of
pop music initiated by Caetano Veloso (a great poet and singer of popular music
in Brazil). I dislike and disbelieve in labels attached to any creative
enterprise. I see myself inserted in a cosmopolitan/globablized world
“frictioning” against innumerous tendencies and musical styles.
Independent of the type of material that I am working with (be it a chamber
piece, a Bossa-Nova, a popular song or a symphony), subverting the means and the
expectations of a specific art form or art format, is part of the business of
being an artist in a world where such function is already confused with a
commodity. For instance, my “pop” album (now CD) "EPOPÉIA E GRAÇA..." (“Epic”,
1981-88) is an experiment that mixes elements from the contemporary music
language and the traditional music (folk and popular) of my native country,
Brazil. It was a true cut with all that was being done before in my country as I
questioned and subverted the very forms of the popular music tradition I was
employing at that time. Thus, the idea behind this project was to create several
pieces where different approaches and techniques were used in order to
"deconstruct" the popular song. Many of the stories I used were inspired by
actual newspaper findings. Therefore, according to the text or story of each
piece, a particular way to treat the music was attempted. My aim during the
recording process was to create new perspectives for the popular 'song,' working
"under its skin", amplifying its conventions, and deviating it from an obvious
standpoint.
What is the role of emotions in your music?
Total. Emotions are at the center of my being. Without it, you cannot even
start. I do react to things, like everybody else, and my unconscious is
constantly spilling out emotional “magma,” con-fusing the mass of information I
receive every moment, from dreams, to love and shocking things. I am not driven
by genre primarily or torn between aesthetic dualities. I am, though, always
aware of a certain notion of craft, where accomplishment is the result of an
emotional dedication to the materials you are working with. Be it a Bossa-Nova
or this New York Phil. commission. Insight is the main purpose of compositional
and creative work. Insight is a “short circuit,” where whatever is taken for
granted is suddenly weakened, and becomes exposed. Without emotional responses
to the things around us, we can’t have this sudden insight, which is this need
to see under a different lens what was a given. “Exoskeleton,” for example, my
piece for viola changes the expected behavior of the guitarist making him play a
viola, not a guitar. This “subversive” break is totally emotional since it is a
happy coincidence that a guitarist can manipulate an instrument such as the
viola taking it to a technical extreme that has never gone before. And using the
very mechanics of the instrument! Isn’t this absolutely joyful, therefore,
emotional? Plus emotions, needless to say, are not only “crying” or sad
reactions: rage, happiness and a wide spectrum of feelings are being spelt over
whatever work you are doing at any given time…
How do you consider the relationship between intuition and intellect in the
compositional process?
Well, they are deeply associated. First I teach composition at Columbia and NYU
in NY and to understand an emotional process it is necessary to decelerate it. I
developed a theory of rhythmic subdivision called Micro-Metric Modulation. It is
based on commutative and associative properties that coordinate the unfolding of
complex rhythmic materials (ratios and sub-ratios). Observe a jazz drummer, the
way he “spills out” complex rhythms, one coming out of the previous one; or a
car decelerating to enter a curve. Physic laws, variables of rhythm, meter,
pressure, etc., somehow envelop all of them. They are creating “rhythmic
mechanisms” to deal with the next “move,” or the next rhythmic object. So, I had
to decelerate what I was doing intuitively in order to understand how rhythms,
complex rhythms, interact. How do you pass from a 7 against 9 ratio to a 5
against 7 one, etc.? The Micro-Metric Modulation I've developed furthers Elliott
Carter's work on rhythm. It extends the scope of his rhythmic practice insofar
as it compresses Carter's approach into a "micro-level" of the beat's possible
subdivisions. Thus, analysis is somehow a way to reach out, to throw you in the
midst of the aesthetic, purely emotional, object. In certain ways the intellect
can be seen as “decelerated emotion.” Also, composing means constantly being
surprised. Being creative is somehow to maintain the flame of awareness going…
It is a very exhausting way of being. But it is not something you quite control.
It is part of who you are. Our capacity for surprising ourselves comes from an
acute involvement with the world and with life, as it happens. The implicit
disbelief that is at the root of hearing (“where is this sound coming from?” “Is
it the wind or the sea?” etc.) makes us aware of our imaginative dwellings,
which is always the terrain where the intellect and intuition meet.
Have you ever used purely intellectual processes in your music?
Well, certainly I used processes that require an amount of rationalization. See
above! But this is part of trying to get to the core of who you are and what the
material that you are dealing with is. The very fact that you can develop
certain compositional strategies in order to “prolong” the first emotional,
creative, drive, is, without a doubt, an implicit desire to maintain the
emotional temperature pressurized and vital. As Marcuse said, after Freud ,
sometimes we have to domesticate the id in order to reap more benefits and
“stretch” pleasure. Thus, the intrusion of the logos, of rationalization, is
inevitable, somehow…
And have you ever used a purely intuitive process in your music?
Yes. But to a point. When asking for a musician to improvise or disposing of
certain compositional mechanisms to further an idea without writing it down. Not
like the instruction texts used by Pauline Oliveros or Stockhausen, though. For
me intuition is part of the process of being. To want something that was offered
in the first place by a vision, to pursue things you don’t even know what they
are, the way memory works, associations, the perfume that takes you to another
time or dimension, insights, in sum, are all intuitive processes in the purest
sense of the word. However, I am always aware of what I am doing. Intuition is
to deal with what you have been accumulating, but also with what you already
“know” but has not yet understood, or reached -- or never will. Because all of
us are “codified” beings, I mean, we all come “dressed up” in “star stuff.”
Atoms, molecules, biological mechanisms are ultimately the house of being. So,
somehow, the way we behave are inscribed already in the physic laws that envelop
us. Therefore, intuition is a fore- or far-sight into possible or impossible
realities, our own flight into multi-dimensional, maybe un-reachable worlds.
What do you think is the role of the composer in the 21st century?
Well, I am not sure. In certain ways similar to the role of composers in all
previous centuries. To awaken the deaf/the dead, to provoke emotional responses
without the intermediation of rational language, etc. However, I see the
creative act as nothing less than strategies of evasion, defection, refusal,
from the very elements that define the foundation of any expressive medium. It
is exactly at the moment that one enhances a medium's entropic potential (when
"refusing" to subscribe to the very elements that constitute it) that the medium
starts to "regenerate" itself, regaining a "healthier profile." This
"invitation" for a given system to renew itself, to act against a background of
accepted techniques and aesthetic polarizations is at the root of any authentic
artistic enterprise. The need to subvert what is a given is inscribed in the
roots of all creative work! If the artist is a representative of social
"misprint," all art can be viewed as sociological "fungus" that grows and feeds
on the cracks of regulated/accepted societal mechanisms. Therefore, I like to
think that one of the ultimate purposes of art and the artist, is to rehearse a
multiplicity of "states of affairs," not possible or not yet represented in the
rest of contemporary society. Its essence is Dionysian and conflicted - whether
showing calm or "blasted" surfaces - since it acquires potency only at the point
of rupture with its own grammar. Composition, in this context, is seen as an
accumulation of "frequential" sediments," a place of "charged mistrust," a trace
- and it is most exposed when it gravitates to the threshold of its own
"opacity." I am looking for a self-sufficient trajectory for my life, beyond
historical/hysterical idiosyncrasies. I don't care to belong to any generational
"-ism," although I know that I'm not beyond "demarcation." So, why this primary
shyness or aesthetic intransigence? Perhaps I don't want to be fully accepted.
Maintaining some kind of contempt or "edge" – in this celebrity inebriated
society is a necessary stand to infuse the creative ethos with a kind of
"threshold integrity" where questioning (yourself) is not totally devoid of
sense. Even being identified as a composer, by this incongruent, name-driven,
industry-oriented, hierarchical society, is a derogatory labeling of who I am.
Regardless of functional attachments, this "refusal" is the very precondition of
artistic mobility. So, that’s somehow the way I see the artist inserted in these
and the times to come…
Do you have something to say as an inspiration or advice to the readers?
Stop hearing and start listening.
Arthur, thank you very much for this interview!
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Agenda
27 April Composer of the Day, radio 4
17 May Concert met violiste Frederieke Saeijs
Nieuwe Kerk, Den Haag
22 May Concert with Cello Octet Amsterdam
Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam
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Marlon Titre is one of Holland’s leading young musicians.
Winner of the renown Pittaluga guitar competition, he performs around the world,
composes, teaches and writes/publishes his own e-zine. He can be reached at
+491771340801 or e-mail to marlon@marlontitre.com
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