Joana Carneiro – Listening to the world
Joana Carneiro is a free-spirited woman with large, tender and adventurous eyes. At the age of 33 she has the ability to seize all the energy that the universe has to offer. And the universe seems to give itself up to her when she is conducting an orchestra.
—
Joana Carneiro was only nine when she first said that she wanted to be a conductor. The following year her godfather gave her a baton so that she wouldn’t forget her dream. But it wasn’t necessary. She received so much encouragement and her family had so much confidence in her ambition that by the time she had reached adolescence the dream had turned into her life goal. Even ballet classes and all the work required to go on to study medicine didn’t get in the way.
Musical language
It is engrossing to listen to Joana talking about music and composers, as well as the scores she studies and the reverence she shows for those who composed them. She breathes music. Her training started when she was six – as did that of her eight siblings. In the family home musical training was given as much importance as maths, Portuguese or any other subject on the school curriculum. The orchestra is Joana’s instrument, but she started out by playing the viola.
Listening to music is a direct way of people moving beyond the physical to reveal their spirit and the feelings inherent to their condition as sensitive beings. When Joana was 18 she conducted her first concert at the Academia Nacional Superior de Orquestra: Beethoven’s First Symphony. “I felt great joy, the sort of feeling you get when you have high expectations of yourself and then manage to meet them”. She doesn’t recollect how the orchestra sounded, “but I physically remember conducting it. And I also remember thinking that I was finally putting into practice the gestures I’d been endlessly practicing on my own, in front of the mirror, in the air … finally I had an instrument at my disposal – that’s how I saw it – finally being able to have an instrument I could play, after so many months of practising these gestures”.
[DDET READ MORE]
The power of the gesture
As a conductor Joana Carneiro is entrusted with leadership. She has already learnt that that leadership will only be effective if it stems from the humble act of listening and feeling wholeheartedly. The musicians in the orchestra will sense that humility and play the score in the most honest way possible. For Joana Carneiro the whole act of conducting an orchestra is “a relationship of great responsibility; it involves going to the heart of what the composer intended, the imagination of someone who reflected about what they felt or saw and wrote about it in the language of music”. Her role as a conductor is the clarification of the composer’s intentions, “and that’s where I focus all of my energy. It’s the only thing that I can fully control. It all comes down to my preparation and my commitment to serve the music and the composer through my efforts. And the rest is form.” She studies scores by Shostakovich, Brahms, Ravel, Debussy, Schumann, Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart…you immediately sense that you are before a woman who is a romantic, a fighter, methodical and strong.
Joana Carneiro is also keen on living composers. As an optimistic, positive person, who is full of hope, she relates to the vigour of contemporary music. Thus she works with the music of classic composers as well as the energetic contemporary language of composers like John Adams (the 63 year old North American minimalist composer who was awarded the Music Pulitzer Prize in 2003), Du Yin (the 33 year old Chinese composer, who was born in Shanghai but lives in New York), or Enrico Chapela (the 36 year old Mexican, with electro-acoustic musical training and one of the most sought after names in contemporary Mexican music).
In the midst of such distinct musical landscapes, Joana identifies percussion instruments as those which have been put to best use in the musical dialogues of our time. She also recognises the capacity for innovation common to all types of instruments (wind, string and keyboard) as a result of advances in technology: “Composers have tried to explore the limits of each instrument, even those which have existed for a long time. The possibilities, in terms of technique and invention, are infinite nowadays. And the music clearly reflects that. There is even a composer called Paul Thresher, from Berkeley, who I’ve been working with, who is famous for inventing instruments and composing pieces for orchestras using those instruments”. The environment is one in which imaginative technique is enhanced by practitioners who are very different from those of previous centuries and who are experimenting with the infinite capacity of the human imagination. Joana Carneiro has been forging her own path in such an environment since the beginning of last year when she took over as music director of Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in the US.
Joana is convinced that she couldn’t have found an orchestra more suited to her projects than Berkeley. The city of the same name, located on the west coast of the US, is renowned worldwide for its academic and artistic excellence. The latest scientific research is being carried out there and there is a spirit of creative freedom in the field of arts. Joana is happy to be part of a community that seeks innovative approaches, artistic challenges and daring personalities. Everything is possible there, and, as part of a group that is waiting to be surprised, Joana couldn’t have found a more generous working environment.
Berkeley Symphony Orchestra’s work is focused on establishing a solid relationship between contemporary and non-contemporary music, as well as investing in relations with living composers: “We have to bring them to our community; and they are composers with completely different aesthetic approaches. Berkeley has that capacity to have concerts in which the first part might include a composer like Messiaen and a Chinese composer such as Du Yun, and then in the second part a symphony by Beethoven”. From an artistic point of view, the young conductor has no doubts that “it’s paradise!”
State of freedom
The world of opera is proving to be a steep learning curve for Joana. It combines her work as orchestra director with stage production, dramaturgy and dialogue with the singers on the stage set. All of these components are brought together in a show and establish a relationship between words and music, or what Joana calls “a total recreation of human experience”.
Joana is a woman who feels total freedom in what she does. It is a freedom that she conquered from an early age. In spite of growing up in a family with eight siblings, every child was treated uniquely. She recognises that her parents were crucial in transmitting the importance of respect and thoughtfulness in relations with other people. Joana also can’t forget how enthusiastically they always embraced her life goals and gave her their constant support. “I often say that I was 9 when I first said that I wanted to direct an orchestra, but it’s deeper than that. During my adolescence I continued to say that it was what I wanted to do, and I was always told that if that was really the case then I would fulfill that objective, even if it was a male-dominated profession”. She never once thought that it was a difficult profession. It was simply what she wanted to do, and she was provided with all the conditions, material and affective, to get there.
When Joana was 19 and asked about how she felt in a profession made up mostly by men, she had already been working for a long time with such a degree of freedom that the question had little relevance.
Melody of our days
For the young Portuguese conductor music is a field full of knowledge and at the same time a great deal of affective variety. “You get composers using different languages and aesthetic approaches, demonstrating their feelings and reflecting on the different cultures in the world. There is a great deal of variety”.
Composers have always been attentive to what happens in history. As an example, Joana cites On the Transmigration of Souls, by John Adams, which was based on the events of 11th September, 2001 in New York. There is also the play which she recently directed about the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Contemporary music celebrates cultural diversity, and Joana therefore feels that “we are living in very fertile times in terms of musical composition”. Innovations in technology and communication have accentuated this situation. The internet, especially, has resulted in a democratization of musical experiences. Joana feels that contemporary music’s greater accessibility makes it less elitist.
The role of maestros and musicians is to re-create what was thought up by a composer, “in other words to clarify through physical sounds and our sensibility what was created and imagined by someone. So in that sense I am a re-creator”, explains Joana. When she studies a score before rehearsing and conducting a concert, her background research is of fundamental importance. Besides learning the score and the musical language she has before her, Joana tries to get to the core of the composer’s imagination. She has to immerse herself in the life and times of the artist and try to understand the personal reasons that led them to compose that particular score. Once she is in the concert hall before the orchestra, in addition to the gestures and techniques that the musicians recognize and expect from a maestro, there is also the aspect of feelings: “Ideally I need to be able to transmit the music and the feelings behind the music with my body”.
Joana’s profession is a solitary one and therefore contact with her mentors is of crucial importance. They are the only members of the music community who can in fact work alongside a maestro: “they can come to our concerts and rehearsals, and we talk to them, show them our videos, and ask them questions”. Without such precious contact with musicians who have more experience in this life of composition, interpretation and orchestra directing, Joana would feel much more difficulty in carrying out her functions confidently. She sees them as masters, teachers with whom she establishes relationships based on professional respect and admiration. She turns to them when she has any doubts or is faced with an important decision.
A maestro’s profession is characterised by longevity. Joana Carneiro is at the beginning of her career and is aware of its long-term nature: “The possibility of exercising this profession for many years also allows us to mature. Up until the age of 50 you are considered a young maestro”. Joana is enjoying the youthful stage of her career. And she intends to continue to be attentive to the music and melodies that reflect our current lives and the world we live in.
[/DDET]
by Cláudia Almeida
—
