To compose is to 'apprehend'. To compose is to reveal. To compose is to select. The selected sound, the one that is composed, the piece itself, is beyond an overcoming and confirmation. The piece lives according to the original sound. (...) To compose is to serve and not to be served!
Emanuel Nunes
The recently reactivated Portuguese Association of Composers (APC) has the mission to support and develop the conditions, means and necessary circumstances for the creation of contemporary music. In this sense, no matter aesthetical current, age, provenience, social, academic or economic status, APC assumes with its associates the compromise of moving the compositional tradition towards the future, challenging the creation of music by Portuguese composers and the elevation of compositional thought to a status of seriousness, integrity and an aesthetic level of reference.
Towards these goals, APC will be working, during this year, to develop several mechanisms that will support music formations dedicated to the repertory of the 20th and 21st century, offering resistance to any form of cultural inertia through the expansion of the universe of access to sound experimentation to a broad palette of Composers, interpreters and audiences.
It is also APC's goal to work towards the development of protocols that offer its associates access to both privileged conditions of creation and diffusion of their creative and performative output and the use of an enriching diversity of activities in the domain of contemporary musical creation.
Context
In 1992 a group of young composers gathered around the necessity to articulate between interpreters, institutions and creators the production of new musical works with the greater objective of promoting and defending the Portuguese creation, particularly contemporary music.
This project gave origin to the registration of the Portuguese Association of Composers and its legar formalisation by Carlos Gomes, Filipe Carvalheiro, Nuno Vasconcelos, Paulo Pontes e Pedro Pinto Figueiredo, many of them still students of the Composition Degree, but all of them, certain of the importance of the moment in which they participated and who’s efforts we recall today, by reactivating the project and by expanding it to all the communities of composers, because the most important is still today, the profession of the composer and the act of composing.
Structure
Board of Directors
Pedro Figueiredo
João Quinteiro
Nuno Henriques
General Assembly
Emanuel Frasão
Marco Fernandes
Pedro Berardinelli
Fiscal Council
Jaime Reis
Paulo Pacheco
Marina Camponês