Torre da memória

The opera Torre da Memória premiered on 4 August at the SABSEG Nautical Activities Centre – Fórum Esposendense. Its thematic impetus is a tribute inspired by the territory of Esposende, its local communities, and their close and centuries-long relationship with the ocean. The artistic creation also revisits the historical episode of the shipwreck of the lancha of São João Novo, which occurred in 1888, providing a chronological anchor and emphasising this theme within the operatic narrative.

In one of the sections of the penultimate scene of the opera, an additional extra-musical layer was developed, relating to the event portrayed. As this was such a profoundly human tragedy — with only one of the twenty-five fishermen surviving — the first and last names of the twenty-four victims were appropriated as cryptographic data, through processes of transcribing words, syllables, and letters into musical material; in this case, shaping the structuring and harmonic context of the entire scene: José Eiras, Jacinto Loureiro, David Loureiro, Manuel Loureiro, José Eiras, Manuel Eiras, José Mota, Silvério Barros, António Afonso, José Soldado, Clementino Soldado, Manuel Soldado, José Belo, José Loureiro, José Vieira, Afonso Sacramento, Carlos Maciel, Luís Lemos, Secundino Lopes, Manuel Barbosa, Victor Gomes, João Lima, José Eiras (another), José Moura.

By its conception, this fragment is intended to be categorised as a Synthetic Soundscape, more specifically as Anthropophony, consisting of sounds produced by, or relating to, humans and human-made objects. This is one of the three divisions proposed by composers and researchers in the fields of Soundscape and Acoustic Ecology, among authors such as R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, or Bernie Krause.

This fragment of “Winter” from the opera Torre da Memória may therefore be understood as a Synthetic Soundscape: artificially composed through the synthesis of processes of sonification and cryptography applied to data (human — Anthropophony), which refer to the world around us — in this case, an event/occurrence — and which gave rise to an acoustic event, subsequently experienced.