CD – Creative Sources Recordings – CS 803, Lisbon 2024
This live recording was made during a concert by VGO – Variable Geometry Orchestra that signaled the opening, in December of 2023, of an exhibition about the college student struggles against the Portuguese dictatorship in the years 1070-1974. The location was Torre do Tombo, in Lisbon, a concrete building where are secured most historic archives of the country, including those of the secret police, PIDE. The circumstance was very special.
The political moment – the one of the exhibition itself; the polls indicating a rising of the extreme-right after the collapse of the Socialist Party government in a poorly explained and not convincing judicial case of corruption (it seemed like a coup); the problematic situation of the National Health Service, one of the most important conquests of the 1974 revolution; the tourist-capitalist gentrification, pushing populations and traditional commerce outside the oldest parts of the city; the war between Israel and Hamas, with the genocidal politics of the first – re-enacted the identity of improvised music. After all, this tendency was born in Europe in the final years of the Sixties, emerging from the midst of the student movement and assembling artists aligned with Trotzkyst, Maoist, Eurocommunist, Situationist and Anarchist convictions.
At some point of the performance, Ernesto Rodrigues invited all the musicians to vocalize together and he, himself, repeated the phrase «This concert is dedicated to the people of Palestine». The left activism of the last years of Portuguese fascism was there musically reassumed and actualized, and that’s the first note to take from this public session. In a era of multiple bleaching in which many improvisers seem to forget the social and political foundations of what they play, it was of maximum significance to remember it.
Why? Because the music was collective and collectivist, attempting to reconcile freedom of expression and semantics with an equal responsibility and presence of the individuals, with no hierarchies or orchestral suits, either methodologically or in terms of its signification. But Ernesto Rodrigues, the mentor of this ensemble of variable dimensions – in this circumstance with only 16 participants – did this adding an extra element: his gestural and maestro conduction. If in other VGO concerts the violist “directed” it with his own instrument, giving subtle signals to the others for changes of musical flows, this time he introduced the factor of “authority”, but deconstructing and subverting it in such a way that he was no longer conducting, but improvising the materials with the instrumentalists. Some didn’t follow him, or didn’t follow him immediately, but that was part of the game. To all effects, the title of the exhibition was “There’s Always Someone Who Says No”.
It was a kind of metaphor of the acts of a student leader: in the dynamics of a political movement he´s no longer managing it, but learning/organizing the pulses and purposes of everyone, in order to have a fixed intention among unfixed performativities. What happened was a sonic mapping of desires, affections and enthusiasms. And of a spirit of revolt, dissent and defiance. When the status quo is of resignation and conformity, acting music as a struggle against was precious. Rui Eduardo Paes
1. Conduction #50 - 30'57''
VARIABLE GEOMETRY ORCHESTRA
Ernesto Rodrigues - Conduction, Viola
Maria do Mar - Violin
Maria Radich - Voice
Miguel Mira - Cello
Anna Piosik - Trumpet