CINCO QUADROS PARA ALICE (Five portraits for Alice)
In response to composer Eduardo Patriarca’s challenge, I wrote the fourth piece in this small cycle – Do cats eat bats? – for flute and piano, for the 2009 Marília Rocha Competition. However, as I was composing this piece, I sensed that it would be part of a cycle that had not yet been written. With this feeling, I wrote the remaining pieces, seeing it as inevitable, that this was how it had to be…
This cycle of pieces, written in a flash, recounts, in the form of a fantasy, five moments from Lewis Carroll’s adventure “Alice in Wonderland”: the first moment – Down, down, down – describes Alice’s seemingly endless fall into the hole that will take her to Wonderland; the second scene – White Rabbit – introduces the character who aroused Alice’s initial curiosity, the White Rabbit; the third moment – Who am I then? – conveys Alice’s constant unease about her surroundings, whether they are part of her real world or her new world of fantasy and discovery; the fourth scene is, expressly, the curious Alice’s second question – Do cats eat bats? – which symbolises some of the nonsense evident in most of the little girl’s questions (at a certain point in the story, she reverses the characters by also asking if bats eat cats!); the fifth and final moment – Off with her head! – literally describes the succinct phrase uttered by the despotic character Queen of Hearts: “Off with her head!”. This final order from the queen is textually emphasised by the rhythmic cell: eighth note, two sixteenth notes, eighth note = Off with her head!
When I finished these pieces, I immediately thought about publishing them, if only because of the lack of repertoire of this kind in Portuguese music, and that this could only be done by the Centre for Studies of the University of Minho, specifically by Dr. Elisa Lessa. Her initiative and courage, given that she has already edited a very significant musical heritage in the field of music for children, was all that was needed to ensure that this music did not end up, like so much other music, “at the bottom of my drawer”.
Finally, I would like to thank my friend Sofia Leal who, from faraway lands, created these wonderful illustrations for me, where the music takes on image, line and contour.
The first edition of this work was produced by the Centre for Studies of the University of Minho. I would like to express my special thanks to Dr. Elisa Lessa for the enthusiasm with which she received these “pictures” and brought them to life. Paulo Bastos
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