Department of Conservation and Restoration — FCT: NOVA University

Preserving contemporary music today: The case of “Jogo Projectado I” (1979)

Jogo Projectado I (1979) created by the Portuguese composer Clotilde Rosa (1930-2017) and the Portuguese visual artist Eduardo Sérgio (b. 1937) presents itself as an interdisciplinary enterprise, since it was originally conceived as a collaborative work on music and the visual arts, while being based on a poem by the Portuguese poet Marta Cristina Araújo. That poem was used to establish the connection between both sound and visual realms. In fact, the musical composition, written for a solo piano, encompasses 13 sections based on the combination of different verses of the poem. Further, the visual component includes simultaneously: i) a slide projection of the score on a costume made piano rack; and ii) a slideshow of 29 slides featuring the poem’s text written in spiral, which is always changing in position and colour. Those slides used to be exhibited on a costume built projection screen made up of several white fabric strips. Despite the pioneering and extraordinary audiovisual experience that Jogo Projectado I provided by 1979 at the Encontros Gulbenkian de Música Contemporânea it had remained forgotten, lost and apart from the public sphere from about 40 years. This is in part because the visual component was thought to be lost. Fortunately, after a comprehensive research in collaboration with the authors and on the Gulbenkian archive it was possible to recover the  original slides used in 1979 and other specific information absent from the musical text, and yet needed for a modern performance of the work, which occurred with interpretation by the pianist Francisco Monteiro at Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, April 21, 2017. In sum, by retracing the past of Jogo Projectado I, while reflecting upon the preservation process assigned to its restaging, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate the need for the creation of new networks and the implementation of an empirical and ethnographical approach for the preservation of a musical heritage in between artistic spaces.

Key-words: Jogo Projectado I, Clotilde Rosa, Eduardo Sérgio, multimedia, preservation

Biography

Andreia Nogueira is a PhD fellow at the Department of Conservation and Restoration, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her PhD research focus on the preservation of the Portuguese electroacoustic musical heritage through its documentation. She is also interested in reflecting on the concepts of authenticity, memory and archive. Between 2011 and 2013 she was a researcher on the project “Documentation of Contemporary Art”. During that period, she had also completed her master degree in Conservation and Restoration at the same university with the dissertation “Documenting: why, what, how and when? The preservation of Francisco Tropa’s oeuvre”.