Four Portuguese Minimalists? Iberian Reflections

The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent institutionalisation of post-serial and other avant-garde thinking meant that approaches to other kinds of modernism – and whether or not ostensibly post-modernist approaches could be included in such categories – only gradually came to be employed, during the course of the 1990s. This article discusses the work of four composers, Luís Tinoco, Nuno Côrte-Real, Eugénio Rodrigues and Tiago Cutileiro, as part of this context. Their approaches are radically different from each other, but each of these four demonstrates an engagement with compositional approaches from outside what Paulo Ferreira de Castro calls the ‘sacralised avant-garde’ that is proof of the remarkable stylistic expansion evident in contemporary composition in Portugal during recent decades which is, in its turn, closely intertwined with a perceptible aesthetic and philosophical broadening in the teaching of the subject.