Creation: 11 June 1991, Portugal, Lisbon, Fifteenth Gulbenkian Encounters of Contemporary Music, by the Ensemble Modern, Les Percussions de Strasbourg and the Gulbenkian Orchestra, direction : Mark Foster and Emilio Pomarico
Commissioner: Fondation Gulbenkian
Musicians: 6 percussionistes
Duration : 56′
Publishing: Ricordi, München, nº Sy. 3107
Dedicated to: Luis Pereira Leal
Quodlibet: a Latin term – literally: “what one wants” – which designates a musical form characterised by the freedom with which the composer can integrate and confront – sometimes with humour – heterogeneous material from disparate sources. In Quodlibet, Emmanuel Nunes worked with material from different periods, but exclusively from fourteen of his own works. In Quodlibet, Emmanuel Nunes worked with materials from different periods, but exclusively from fourteen of his own works. Moreover, there are no collages here, and almost no quotations: all the materials have been somehow freed from their original instrumental realisation, to be recomposed, reworked from their raw state. To use an expression of Levi-Strauss’s that the composer made his own, Quodlibet goes back and forth between “raw and cooked”. So much so, in fact, that it is probably impossible to establish any relationship to the source works on hearing them. And this was certainly not the project. Indeed, Quodlibet is perhaps above all a piece in which space is written. The score was conceived for the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon – a place full of resonance and memories: from his childhood, Nunes attended the most diverse performances there – from circus, gymnastics, zarzuela and operettas to classical music concerts, for which the imposingly proportioned enclosure was home to the greatest performers. A space in which the composer carried out a veritable preliminary reconnaissance work, chronometer in hand, in order to measure travel times from one point to another, in the galleries or in the stands. For the score provides, in addition to the orchestra and the seven musicians on the stage, twenty-one mobile instrumentalists scattered throughout the floors. Figure 1 reproduces the plan of the Coliseu, where the composer has indicated the positions that these travelling performers will occupy.