Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira
Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira
Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira was born in Oporto in 1921. From the age of 6 to the age of 10, he studied piano with his mother, graduating afterwards from the Music Conservatory of Oporto, where he was a pupil of Cláudio Carneyro and Maria Adelaide Diogo de Freitas Gonçalves. In 1948 he travelled to Italy, where he attended a holiday course in orchestral conducting with Hermann Scherchen. On his return to Portugal, he passed through Paris, where he made the acquaintance of a new system of musical notation, which he adopted as his own. In the same year, he began work on his compositional treatise, “Sound Symmetry”. Recently, João Pedro Cunha defended a master’s thesis in England on Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira’s compositional system. “My point of departure is sufficiently different from others that I cannot say that I belong to this or that school. There are two phases. I had a phase in which I composed freely, but I wasn't satisfied with that, because in composing freely one ends up by also composing like the others. In order really to be different, it’s necessary to be different from the beginning. (...) The system of composition and composition as such came into being at the same time, because it always seemed to me that it was the works that have rise to the system, and not systems that give rise to works. So that, in order to work out a system, which is what I did, I did not first make the system and then the works – the works are made in accordance with the system and the system came into being at the same time as the works.” Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira, January 2004