Paisagem sonora e história recente na obra A Casa do Cravo, de Carlos Marecos. Análise e Interpretação

Abstract

A Casa do cravo, for piano and electronics, by Carlos Marecos, was written in 2019 and premiered at Lisboa Incomum in the same year. The commission, from the DME Festival, was carried out in the scope of the Erasmus+ project "The Soundscape in Which We Live” and presupposed the use of soundscape recordings made previously by the project partners, among other elements at the composer's choice. Several dimensions of soundscape, historical and current, coexist and interact in the work. Both in its instrumental and electronic dimensions, A Casa do Cravo uses heteroclite sound materials, although symbolically related, such as: recordings of bells from a church located in Alentejo, made by the composer; songs by José [Zeca] Afonso, Sérgio Godinho, José Mário Branco, and Grupo de Acção Cultural - Vozes na Luta; recordings of radio broadcasts from the years 1974-75, recovered in the meantime; phonograms of current soundscapes, made by partners of the aforementioned Erasmus+ project (selected, among multiple possibilities, because they correspond to sounds related to manual or agricultural work). Through the collection of sound and process elements related to the electroacoustic component, as well as the auditory analysis of the reference recording and the musical analysis of the score, I will try to highlight how the different aspects of soundscape shape the work and relate to each other in order to produce a coherent symbolic representation of the identity and recent history of a given territory, namely the Alentejo, and its experiences of the 1974 Revolution, the hot summer of 1975 and the agrarian reform.