Ahead of workshopping Rafael Marino Arcaro’s brand new piece i swallow clouds on 31 May at LSO St Luke’s, Arcaro gave us some insight on the inspiration and process behind writing his new work. His piece is inspired by the playful and free-form poetry of Manoel de Barros manifested in the idea of creating something big, like an orchestra, into something equally small and fragile simultaneously.
Manuel de Barros’ poetry has always had a tremendous impact on me and much of my artistic attitude as a composer comes from the learnings I gathered from his writings.
i swallow clouds is a piece about how one can feel mighty (+big) and fragile (+transitory) all at once; how the orchestra can play with a musical material with childlike imaginative freedom (like clouds suggesting fleeting figures); how systems can be erected only to be broken and scattered; and how simple musical materials can exist as both vulnerable melodic lines or massive sonic objects. These massive objects, the clouds we see in a clear blue sky may seem mighty and big but they are weightless.
Whenever time allows it, I like to start my composition process with a month or more of just thinking: I keep the prospect of the new piece in the back of my mind and let considerations on both the instrumentation and duration come naturally. I then spend as much as necessary on the piano with pencil and paper doing what I like to refer to as ‘play’: I let my instincts guide me while I play with musical ideas writing down the ones that seem special or show potential for development.
Once the materials found seem promising enough, I start building schematics for the pitch material, I develop rules of restrictions and investigate the musical shape these materials will allow me to produce. This may seem odd but the main reason I create rules for my compositions is to break them later during the composition-writing process. The moment in the piece I realise my own rules need to be broken is where I feel true invention lies – it’s by far my favourite moment within the process of composition.
When I started this process on i swallow clouds, Op 15, for the London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Scheme, I had recently finished work on my violin concerto, Op 14, where I wrote five short movements with a total duration of twelve minutes. Given the time constraint of three minutes for the LSO piece, I thought it would be fascinating to push the challenge further and reduce my music discourse toward even shorter movements. I felt I needed to try and make my musical statements as succinct as possible, with each movement carrying out a clearly outlined and sonically concise exploration. The real challenge then became, how to have three distinctive but aesthetically connected movements without drowning the piece in textural and musical variety.
I felt strongly that these three movements should not be too contrasting. Therefore I used the same core materials in all movements and threaded their path out differently within each movement. One of the core materials in this piece is a humble and stable interval: the perfect fifth.
In the first movement, for example, the interval of the fifth is explored melodically in its barest form in the opening harp material while the winds and strings carry out two melodic contrapuntal lines in contrary motion that’s engendered out of the fifth. These contrapuntal melodies are combined later in the movement generating a scale that I used to produce the chords in the explosive ending of this first movement.
(Enough with the technical talk…)
Manuel de Barros wrote, in his 2007 poem, Poeminha em língua de brincar (Little poem in play-type language) wrote:
(here, I will translate from Portuguese)
‘He had, in his face, a misplaced-bird’s dream.
He talked in languages of bird and child.
He felt greater pleasure playing with the words than thinking with them.
He needn’t thinking.
When he went and advanced towards the tree, he wanted to flourish.
He liked more to make flourishes with words that to make ideas with them.
He had learned in the Circus, in times past, that the word has to reach a degree of toyness
To be serious of laughing.
[…]’
Barros’ poetry has always had a tremendous impact on me and much of my artistic attitude as a composer comes from the learnings I gathered from his writings. He puts forth the idea that words, as creative objects, should be toyed with without the need for reason, and more: perhaps reason is the demise of meaning – or at least this Barros-type-meaning where meanings flourish and give way to deeper indescribable perceptions.
Manuel de Barros here is doing something that to me is deeply Brazilian and that resonates with me in a hard-to-explain way: thinking without thinking, communicating truths by playfully eroding meaning; he’s being ‘unseriously’ serious. He writes in his ‘The dawn maker’ (2001): ‘In all my life I engineered only / 3 machines / They are: / A little crank to fall asleep / A dawn maker / For the usings of poets / And a manioc platinum cover for / My brother’s old Ford. […]’
Another major influence to this piece’s creative vocabulary is Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) and Red Doc> (2013). Carson’s loose and informal poetic prose carries out deep emotional significance without really pointing at it:
‘A SALMON ANSWERS / Ida when G asks. Some / conversations are not /
about what they’re about. / The word conversation / means ‘turn together.’ /
Turn a salmon turn home / turn Prometheus a hopeful / god. […]’
Furthermore, especially on the latter book, the column-like graphic style of the book’s concise paragraphs makes its text, written in informal prose and without punctuation, seem like epic poetry, transforming the reader’s perception. This device that uses the form of presentation to alter the content’s meaning and emotional impact inspired me to toy with musical rhetoric in a different way, searching not only for new musical materials but for different ways to subvert them with an unorthodox presentation.
Balancing meticulous planning and instinctive discovery, i swallow clouds was composed with a particular thought in mind: how does it sound to feel mighty as only a child sometimes can, imagining impossible things, letting themselves be marvelled by the shapes clouds make in the sky? How does it feel to be so innocent and sincere again as to believe one can actually swallow a cloud? (…they do weigh less than air).
