The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) dealt a cultural blow to Spain, as did World War II to the whole of Europe. By the end of the civil strife in Spain, many of the nation’s most important composers and performers had left their native land and musical life had come to a virtual standstill. In 1949 some composers in Barcelona made the first attempt to revive Spanish musical activities and to bring musical composition in Spain more into line with what was and had been happening elsewhere in the world. This group, calling itself the Manuel de Falla Circle, was influenced by the works of Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and the Viennese school. The members of the Circle were Juan Cornelias, Alberto Blancafort, Manuel Valls, Ángel Cerdá, Josep Cercós, and Josep Mestres Quadreny. Their activities, which continued until 1955, were sponsored by the French Institute and Club 49, a group of private patrons in Barcelona. Another important event for Barcelona was the first concert of new music (Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen) in postwar Spain, presented in 1955. By 1959, a more avante-garde group, Música Abierta, had been formed in Barcelona by Juan Hidalgo, Josep Cercós, Josep Mestres Quadreny, Joaquim Homs, and Luis de Pablo.
Though Barcelona made the first strides in “modernizing” Spain’s music after the war, Madrid was not far behind. In 1958 the Grupo Nue va Música was formed in Madrid. The membership included Ramón Barce, Cristóbal Halffter, Antón García-Abril, Luis de Pablo, Fernando Ember, Manuel Moreno Buendia, Enrique Franco, and Manuel Carra. In 1965 the Alea Electronic Studio was founded in Madrid by Luis de Pablo.
In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, most Spanish composers sought musical training in Paris. Since World War II, studies of new techniques have been centered in Italy and Germany, especially at the summer courses in Darmstadt.
Though since the 1950s many Spanish musicians have been trying to break away from writing nationalistic music, Tomás Marco contends that Spanish composers have rarely been able to write completely from a point of abstraction. He claims that the “Spanishness” of their creative personalities is bound to come out in some fashion and finds the following Spanish characteristics in some twentieth-century works: (1) a direct expressive quality that intentionally avoids over-elaborate techniques of composition, (2) a certain quality of violence or forcibleness, and (3) particular spatial-temporal relationships that include a highly individualistic conception of rhythm, incessantly repeated elaboration of certain materials, and remarkable handling of the aleatory factor.1 Though a case could be made for items (1), (2), and part of (3), it seems difficult to envision a “Spanish” way of handling aleatory procedures.
Many of the contemporaries of Manuel de Falla have continued to write piano works since World War II, but most have not experimented with the new techniques ushered in during the 1950s. This chapter will concern itself mainly with the new generations and the new trends in piano music adopted by Spanish composers from outside influences. One only has to examine a few piano scores published by Editorial de Música Española Contemporánea (Madrid and Barcelona) to see that Spanish composers are incorporating the latest techniques in writing for piano.
JUAN COMELLAS (b. 1913), of Barcelona, was self-taught, for the most part, in composition. He has produced numerous works for orchestra, for the theater, for chamber and choral groups, and for voice and piano, as well as a substantial contribution to the literature for piano. His piano works consist of Home naje a Ravel, Tonadas infantiles, Homenaje a Falla, two Sonatinas, Las sonatas de Paris, a Sonata, Homenaje a Mompou, Nanas, Les voltes, Tres andorr anas, and Los acordes de v er ano.
ALBERTO BLANCAFORT (b. 1928), of La Garriga, Barcelona, studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen, René Leibowitz, and Nadia Boulanger. Besides his excellent Sonata for piano, he has written numerous film scores.
The Sonata contains three contrasting movements. The first, in sonata form, opens with a narrow-range melody, hauntingly lyric, accompanied by a difficult undulating pattern. Though contrasting ideas are presented, this material provides the most interest. The second movement is in ternary form, the first and last sections being basically chordal, but graced with beautiful ornamentation in the Spanish style. The middle section features a plaintive melody in the treble set off by a walking basso ostinato, an effective contrast to the first and final sections of the movement. The finale proves to be of the perpetuum mobile variety, marked prestissimo, and presents a constant swirl of sound from beginning to end.
MANUEL VALLS GORINA (b. 1920), of Badalona, Barcelona, studied at the Conservatorio del Liceo and the University of Barcelona. He was one of the founders of the Manuel de Falla Circle. Valls describes his style as “free atonalism” in which the influence of Bartók, Roussel, and Stravinsky can be heard.2 Though today he is known mostly as a writer on music, Vails has composed for piano Tres prelúdios, Suite (homenaje a Falla), Sonata, Tocata, and Preludio alegre.
ÁNGEL CERDÁ (b. 1924), of Oviedo, has written three sonatas for piano and, according to Manuel Vails, the first two represent some of the best modern works from Catalonia in that genre.3
JOSEP CERCÓS (b. 1925), of Barcelona, began writing in a style influenced by German Romanticism, but soon moved on to a style reminiscent of Webern and Henze, passing through Wolf, Mahler, Schönberg, and Hindemith. Though introduced to the twelve-tone method by Hermann Scherchen, Cercos has shown a preference for synthetic scales instead of a specific compositional system such as a serial technique.4
For keyboard, Cercós has written two Sonatas for harpsichord and Preludios ambulantes and Sonata for piano. The piano Sonata in four movements shows an angular, rugged, dissonant style that often smacks of Hindemith. The first movement is a long, complex sonata form. The second is marked prestissimo and features fast, repeated chords for the accompaniment. The third movement, Tempo de Forlana, displays the characteristic dotted patterns in 6/8 commonly associated with this dance form. The movement coneludes with a cadenza section that leads into the finale, a rondo. Cercós’s pianistic style is difficult, often unidiomatic to the instrument and at times austere.
JOSEP MESTRES QUADRENY (b. 1929), of Manresa, studied at the University of Barcelona, but is self-taught in contemporary techniques. He has worked in the Electronic Music Laboratory of Barcelona since it was established in 1968. His serial technique, which he started in 1957, evolved toward procedures of continuous variation based on interval-duration relationships. In 1960, Mestres Quadreny began experimenting with chance elements in his music, and since 1965 has been incorporating electronic processes in some works.5 His piano works are early compositions, including Tocata, Suite en do, and Sonata, a serial work written in 1958.
JOAQUIM HOMS (b. 1906), of Barcelona, has been an industrial engineer as well as composer. Though mostly self-taught in piano and composition, he studied composition with Roberto Gerhard from 1930 to 1936. In 1959 he joined the group called Musica Abierta, which introduced avant-garde works of North America to Barcelona.
Homs’s piano works consist of a series of Impromptus, numbers 6 and 7 (1960) employing the serial technique. Though he was familiar with the works of Webern as early as 1936, he did not adopt the twelve-tone method until 1953.6
XAVIER MONTSALVATGE (b. 1912), of Gerona, studied at the Barcelona Municipal Conservatory with Enric Morera and Jaime Pahissa. He has taught in Barcelona at the San Jorge Academy of Fine Arts, the Destino Seminary, and, more recently, at the Munieipal Conservatory. He has also been an editor and music critic for the Barcelona newspaper La vanguardia since 1962. In 1970 Montsalvatge became president of the advisory council of the music commission of the General Directorate of Fine Arts.7
Montsalvatge was primarily self-taught as a composer, his music being influenced in the beginning by Stravinsky, Bartók, and the post-Impressionistic French composers. His early works were nationalistic, yielding to poly tonal, twelve-tone, and post-serial methods.8 The piano works do not form a major genre in his total output, but certainly merit discussion. They include Tres impromtus, Tres divertimentos, Ritmos, Bourée, Divagación, Sketch, and Sonatine pour Yvette.
Sketch, a habanera, was one of Montsalvatge, searliest works, forming part of a ballet written in 1936. Later it was used as part of the symphonic suite Calidoscopio, and in 1944 it was transcribed for violin and piano and retitled A la moda de 1912. Further revisions were made in 1968, resulting in the version for solo piano. Divagación also underwent a change. Originally it was an interlude in the opera El gato con botas.
The Three Divertissements (On Themes of Forgotten Composers) have an air of the Stravinskian burlesque style, according to Manuel Vails.9 Through a friend, Montsalvatge became familiar with these dance melodies, which supposedly enjoyed popularity at village feasts. The three works represent the schottische, the habanera, and the waltz (with the flair of the jota), respectively. They all show Montsalvatge’s skilled use of polytonality, and the habanera displays a careful awareness of voice leading. These dances can be considered Montsalvatge’s opus one, since they appeared in 1941, the year that he considered himself an independent composer.
Montsalvatge’s largest work for piano is Sonatine pour Yvette, in three movements. According to the composer, he wrote it as agile and youthful music, reminiscent of his daughter.10 Of course, the work is not what one would call “music for children.” The first movement abounds with spirit and lightness, displaying rippling 6/8 patterns and a fliud chromaticism that is very logically worked out. The second movement, more serious, is unified by a series of chord clusters with a repeated rhythmic pattern. The finale, a flashy toccata movement, uses a popular children’s tune for its main thematic material. Ex. 1 shows the theme in a virtuosic figuration near the conclusion of the work.
JUAN HIDALGO (b. 1927), of Las Palmas, Canary Islands, studied at the Marshall Academy in Barcelona with Montsalvatge and later with Boulanger. He continued his studies with Bruno Maderna in Milan and participated in the activities at Darmstadt in 1957. In 1958, he returned to Darmstadt, where he met John Cage, who had a great influence on his style. In 1960, Hidalgo, along with Walter Marchetti, organized the contemporary music society Música Abierta for the Club 49 in Barcelona. Since 1973, Hidalgo has lived in Milan.
Hidalgo has contributed several avant-garde works for piano, including A Letter for David Tudor, for a pianist, piano, and as many objects as are necessary; a series of four works entitled Armandia, involving from three to eight pianists; Aulaga; Milan Piano, for one pianist, grand piano, and any kind of instruments or objects with which one can produce undetermined sounds; Tamaran, for an undetermined number of pianos; and Wuppertal Dos Pianos, for two pianos.
XAVIER BENGUEREL (b. 1931), a native of Barcelona, lived for some time in Santiago, Chile, where he began his musical studies. He returned to Spain in 1954. For the most part he is self-taught, but has been influenced by the Impressionists, Bartók, Schönberg, and Webern. In the mid-1950s he embraced serialism.11
Benguerel’s Suite for piano shows expert handling, in a twentieth-century manner, of the Baroque suite. This modern set of dances consists of Preludio, Corrente, Sarabanda, Gavotta, Musette, Badinerie, and Giga. The Gavotta and complementary Musette especially are in the Bach style, with a typically restricted register for the accompaniment in the Musette. Benguerel has also written a Sonata for piano.
JOAN GUINJOAN (b. 1930, of Riudoms, Tarragona, studied at at the Conservatory of the Liceo in Barcelona and at the l’Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. Between 1958 and 1960 he supposedly gave more than two hundred piano recitals in Spain, France, and Germany. He has won numerous prizes in music, participated in several seminars on music, and written many articles. His compositions are beginning to capture the attention of audiences in Europe and America.
Guinjoan’s works for piano include Tres pequeñas piezas, Scherzo y Trio, three Preludios, El pinell de dalt, Momentos No. 1, Digraf, Fantasia en do, Chez Garcia Ramos, Celulas No. 1, and Celulas No. 3 (Celulas No. 2 is for celesta, marimba, and piano).
Celulas No. 1 (1967) belongs to the composer’s twelve-tone period. The title comes from the structure of the material composed by segmented series, superimposed and related by means of diverse combinatorial methods that establish a pointillistic style.
JAIME PADRÓS MONTORIOL (b. 1926), of Igualada, Barcelona, has contributed Preludio y danza, Sonata, Estudio y Sardana, and Zapateado to the Spanish piano literature.
NARCISO BONET (b. 1933), of Barcelona, began his musical training in his native Catalan city, but soon went to Paris to work with Boulanger. He returned to Barcelona in 1955 to become very active in the musical life of that city. His piano works include Cinco nocturnos, Octaedre, and Sonata.
JORDI CERVELLO (b. 1935), of Barcelona, began studying the violin at age six. Later he studied in Milan at the Verdi Conservatory. Though he leans more toward string music, he has written an homage to Arthur Rubinstein for piano entitled Balada.
JOSEP SOLER (b. 1935) has written Tres peçes per a piano, three difficult works that cover the gamut of the keyboard using modern techniques associated with the post-Webern era.
RAMÓN BARCE (b. 1928), of Madrid, studied at the Madrid Conservatory and at the University of Madrid, where he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. In 1958, together with other young composers, he founded the group Nueva Música. Since 1967 he has directed the Sonda concerts and the magazine of the same name, which is dedicated exclusively to contemporary music. Barce has written numerous articles and edited a Spanish version of Schönberg’s Style and Idea and Treatise on Harmony.
Taking Schönberg as a point of departure, Barce began composing in an atonal style quite early. A collection of piano pieces entitled Estudios seriates demonstrates Barce’s “extreme vanguardism,” to use the composer’s own term.12 Regarding Estudio de sonoridades, from the above set, the composer says: “I intended, for some years, to create new forms for each work.... In Estudio de sonoridades, for piano, I employed a counterpoint of dynamics, registers, and sonorities.”13 Arthur Custer states that this work “is concerned almost exclusively with timbre. A rhythmic cell serves as the foundation for the entire work, and its manipulation employs all types of effects typical of virtuoso piano writing since World War II.”14
The set also includes Estudio de impulsos, Estudio de valores, and Estudio de densidades. In the last piece, each section employs ten or eleven notes and excludes the remaining note or notes of the chromatic scale. Then follows a passage saturated with the missing notes. Thus the work is played with the absence or predominance of certain notes.
Barce has also written Homenaje a Reger, Nueve pequenas preludios, and sixteen Preludios for piano.
CRISTÓBAL HALFFTER (b. 1930), of Madrid, nephew of Ernesto and Rodolfo Halffter, studied composition with Conrado del Campo at the Madrid Conservatory. He also studied privately with Alexander Tansman. From 1955 to 1963, C. Halffter conducted the Orchestra Manuel de Falla; from 1965 to 1966, he was music director of the Madrid Radio Symphony Orchestra; and from 1962 to 1966, he taught at the Madrid Conservatory, becoming its director in 1964. His works have received international recognition, and he stands as one of Spain’s most important composers since World War II.
For the piano, C. Halffter has written a Sonata and Introduction, fuga y final, Op. 15. The early Sonata is a well-constructed Neoclassic work that deserves more attention by pianists. In the development section it is reminiscent of the style of Rodolfo Halffter’s Dos sonatas de El Escoriai but it is more extended than either of them. C. Halffter’s Sonata is typically Spanish, with its interplay between 6/8 and 3/4.
С. Halffter was attracted to the music of Ernesto Halffter because of its “original treatment of Spanish folklore,” but it was the “decisive influence” of Rodolfo Halffter’s polytonality that led him ultimately to write atonally.15 In 1956, C. Halffter began writing serial pieces. His first twelve-tone work was Tres piezas for string quartet, Op. 9. Later came his important serial work for piano, Introduction, fuga у final, Op. 15. He once stated that his greatest aspiration was to “Latinize serialism.”16
Introduccion, fuga у final is based on the following tone row: E-flat-G-C-sharp-D-F-C-B-E-F-sharp-G-sharp-A-B-flat. Ex. 2 shows the conclusion of the Introduction and the beginning of the Fugue (m. 30, Allegro Molto Moderato). The fugue subject presents the original form of the row while the answer presents it transposed to start on B־flat, in the traditional tonic-dominant relationship. An unusual aspect of this twelve-tone fugue is Halffter’s use of the head motif in its original form as well as inverted. This procedure plays an important part in the entire section.
It should also be mentioned that C. Halffter has written an aleatory work, Formantes, Op 26, for two pianos.
ANTON GARCÍA ABRIL (b. 1933), of Teruel, studied composition with Manuel Palau at the Valencia Conservatory and with Julio Gómez at the Madrid Conservatory. He also did work at the Accadèmia Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and the Accadèmia di S. Cecilia in Rome. Garcia Abril has taught at the Madrid Conservatory since 1957 and has composed numerous scores for theater, film, and television.
He has written a concerto for piano and orchestra, Danzas concertantes for piano and orchestra, a piano quartet, and a very attractive Sonatina for solo piano. The Sonatina is in three movements—Allegretto, Arieta, Finale—and is wholly pianistic and quite satisfying in its entirety. A Neoclassic work, it is clear, fluid, and readily appealing. The first movement contains a most effective main theme in a modal style. The second movement features widely spaced sonorities and lends itself to telling voicing of counter-melodies in the tenor register of the piano. The finale is a vivacious rondo with a time signature of 3/4 6/8.
LUIS DE PABLO is one of Spain’s most important figures associated with modern music. He was born in 1930 in Bilbao, and studied law at the University of Madrid and music at the Madrid Conservatory. He attended the summer courses at Darmstadt and was greatly influenced by Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and György Ligeti. Pablo founded the performance groups Tiempo y Música (1959) and Alea Electronic Studio (1965), directed the Juventudes Musicales in 1960, and was responsible for arranging the first Biennial of New Music, in Madrid in 1964.
His early works were influenced by Falla and Bartók, but he later withdrew them and labeled his first twelve-tone piece, Coral for woodwinds, his opus one. During the period 1953-1959, the Boulez circle had the most influence on his style.17 Pablo’s piano works consist of Gárgolas, Sonatina giocosa, Libro para el pianista, and Sonata, Op. 3. Movil I for two pianos, shows Pablo’s experiments with aleatory procedures; and Progressus, Op. 8, also for two pianos, is based on two series, one forming the linear direction of the piece, the other controlling the dynamics.
The well-constructed Sonata, Op. 3, a twelve-tone work, is in one movement but is divided into four contrasting sections, giving the effect of separate movements. Pablo labels them Invención rítmica libre, Canon, Grupos verticales, and Final. All sections employ only the original series and its inversion.
The row consists of the pitches E-G-D-sharp-D-G-flat-A-B-flat-В-D-flat-С-F-A-flat. Ex. 3 shows the tone row from the opening of the sonata; Ex. 4 illustrates the canon (inverted); Ex. 5 shows the row material used as “vertical groups”; and Ex. 6 illustrates Pablo’s expert weaving of the two versions of the row, with dynamics playing an all-important part in singling out the original form of the series.
Similar to Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, Pablo’s Libro para el pianista gives the performer “sonorous objects,” the ordering of which is largely a matter of free choice. For example, the third movement is played from a twelve-page manuscript in which the staves are divided by a narrow wooden ridge, making it possible for the performer to play the top staff of page 1 with the bottom staff of page 3, or any of the 254 possible combinations.18
MANUEL CARRA (b. 1931), of Málaga, studied at the conservatory in his native city, then went to Madrid to study piano with José Cubiles. Today Carra is one of Spain’s noted pianists. Transformaciones sobre una estructura de Cristobal Halffter for two pianos and Cuatro piezas breves for solo piano are two of his major works. Arthur Custer finds that the Cuatro piezas breves
show a remarkable cohesiveness and exhibit skilled treatment of the climax in each movement. In the first piece, the climax is represented, a little more than halfway through, by a carefully prepared twelve-tone fortissimo chord, while in the second it is achieved by means of a single accented note. In the third movement, the climax occurs early, in a three-note fortissimo chord that spans six octaves, and in the fourth, a series of closely spaced accented notes leaps out of the figuration, creating a climax that is at once dynamic and linear.19
Especially interesting is the second piece, based on a twelve-tone figure that is palindromic with respect to rhythm, dynamics, and texture (see Ex. 7).
MANUEL MORENO BUENDÍA (b. 1932), of Murcia, has written Sonata and Suite miniatura for piano.
Unlike his brother Rodolfo, ERNESTO HALFFTER (b. 1905) has changed his piano style little since World War II. A fairly recent work for piano, Preludio y Danza (1974), retains the sterner, more severe style in the Prelude, and is reminiscent of his Liant o por Ricardo Viñes (1940). However, the Dance has a mixture of elements, some typically Spanish passages with Phrygian overtones, some Prokofievian wit, and even some Impressionistic harmonies at times. Both movements have tonal foundations, regardless of the level of dissonance achieved.
FRANCISCO ESCUDERO (b. 1913), of San Sebastián, studied at the conservatory of his native Basque city. Later he continued his musical studies with Conrado del Campo in Madrid and Paul Dukas in Paris. He has written Sonata, Veinticuatro piezas breves, and Dos fugas for piano.
MIGUEL ASINS ARBÓ (b. 1916), though a native of Barcelona, has not contributed actively to modern Catalan music. He studied with Manuel Palau at the Conservatory of Valencia and worked for a few years in Madrid. His compositions for piano consist of Cuatro melodias populares castellanas, Tres danzas españolas, Dansa catalana, Suite ampurdanesa, Canción (homenaje a Albéniz), and Flamenco.
FRANCISCO CALÉS OTERO (b. 1925), of Madrid, has composed Sonata, Scherzo-fantasía, and Divertimento for piano.
AUGUSTÍN GONZÁLEZ ACILU (b. 1925), of Alsasua, Navarra, began his musical studies in his native city, then continued at the Madrid Conservatory. He has also done studies in musicology related to the Navarra region. As have many of his colleagues, he has attended courses in new music at Darmstadt. Gonzáles Acilu has written Presencias, Rasgos, and Tres movimientos for piano and Pulsiones for harpsichord. A product of his stay in Paris, Tres movimientos represents one of his first serial works.
CARMELO ALONSO BERNAOLA (b. 1929), of Ochandiano, Vizcaya, studied with Francisco Calés and Julio Gómez at the Madrid Conservatory as well as with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome. He also attended sessions at Darmstadt. Though he has written serial works and experimented with newer techniques, his piano work Tres aires Castellanos belongs to his early period of composition. A work using more modern trends is Morfologia sonora, written for Pedro Espinosa (b. 1934), one of Spain’s most important interpreters of contemporary piano music.
CLAUDIO PRIETO (b. 1934), of Muñeca de la Peña, Palencia, studied in El Escoriai, Madrid, and Rome, to include work with Bruno Maderna and Goffredo Petrassi. The list of awards and prizes to his credit is quite lengthy. Among his compositions can be found an avant-garde work for piano entitled Juguetes para pianistas.
GONZALO DE OLAVIDE (b. 1934), of Madrid, studied composition and piano in the conservatories of Brussels and Antwerp. From 1960 to 1964 he participated in courses at Darmstadt, under the direction of Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio. At present, he lives in Geneva. Olavide has done much work in the field of electronic music. A recent work for piano is the Sonata della Ricordanza.
ÁNGEL OLIVER (b. 1937), of Moyuela, Zaragoza, began his musical training with his father and eventually went on to study at the Madrid Conservatory. His teachers included Cristóbal Halffter and Jesús Guridi. Oliver also studied in Rome at the Academy of St. Cecilia and later took courses at Darmstadt. He has numerous awards to his credit. Since 1965 he has been a professor at the Madrid Conservatory and the Escuelas Universitárias del Profesorado. His piano scores include Invenciones and Psicograma No. 1 (No. 2 is for guitar and No. 3 is for violin, viola, cello, and piano).
MIGUEL ÁNGEL CORIA (b. 1937), of Madrid, attended the Madrid Conservatory and from 1966 to 1967 studied at the electronie studio of the University of Utrecht. In 1964, with Luis de Pablo, he founded the Alea Electronic Studio. For piano, Coria has written Jue go de densidades, En rouge et noir (actually twelve proposals for any instrument), and Dos piezas para piano.
The brief Dos piezas consist of “Ravel for President” and “Frase.” The first piece presents Impressionistic devices such as harmonic planing and tremulando effects, but concludes with the lyrical Ravel-like melody accompanied by cluster chords. In order to shape the second piece, the composer has made use of musical “kitsch,” with indications such as Ardente d’amor e and agitato, along with the air of a waltz.
JESÚS VILLA ROJO (b. 1940), of Brihuega, studied clarinet, piano, violin, and composition at the Madrid Conservatory. He also studied electronic music in Rome at the Academy of St. Cecilia. He was the founder of the Forum Players in Rome and is the artistic director of LIM (Laboratory of Musical Interpretation) in Madrid. For the piano, Villa Rojo has composed Neuve piezas breves.
FRANCISCO CANO (b. 1940), of Madrid, studied at the conservatory there, having been a student of Cristóbal Halffter, Francisco Calés, and Gerardo Gombau. Cano was the recipient of a scholarship from the Ministério de Educación y Ciencia and from the Juan March Foundation. One of his recent works for piano is entitled Continuo.
CARLOS CRUZ DE CASTRO (b. 1941), of Madrid, studied at the Madrid Conservatory as well as the Hochschule Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf. He has worked in two electronic studios, the Alea in Madrid and the Robert Schumann Laboratory in Düsseldorf. Cruz de Castro’s piano works include Domino-Klavier (for any keyboard instrument) and Llámalo como quieras, a large score. The preface to the latter work contains performance instructions for the various symbols employed. Ex. 8 shows the opening page from this unusual work. The score has indications for vocal sounds, the snapping of fingers, a stroke on the leg, and the clapping of hands, in addition to the standard notation. The metronome continues throughout the work.
TOMÁS MARCO (b. 1942), of Madrid, has studied law, psychology, sociology, and Germanic philology in addition to music. In the area of composition, he has worked with such notables as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and György Ligeti and has published important works on modern music. From 1973 to 1976 he was professor of music history at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and since 1973 has been professor of new techniques at the Madrid Conservatory. His music has begun to attract international attention.
Marco’s works for piano include Temporalia and Fetiches. The title of the latter refers to certain fetishistic elements in the music at the moment of its composition. The intervals employed are expanded parallel to the changes of register, moving from simple events, through a brilliant passage in octaves, to clusters at the conclusion. The piece consists of 41 segments of music separated by three different classes of pauses—short, mid-length, or long. Though the work is subject to various interpretations in certain passages, it is by no means a chance piece, as is Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI.
MANUEL CASTILLO (b. 1930), originally of Seville, studied first in his native city then went on to work with Lucas Moreno and Conrado del Campo in Madrid. From Madrid, he went to Paris for further study with Nadia Boulanger. He became a member of the piano faculty at the Conservatory of Seville in 1956 and its director in 1964.
In 1959 Castillo won Spain’s National Prize in music for his Preludio, Diferencias y Toccata (sobre un tema de Isaac Albéniz in honor of the famed composer who wrote so many Andalusian works. Other piano compositions by Castillo include Tiempo de danza, Andaluza, Apuntes de Navidad, Allegro, Suite Nocturnos, Preludio para la mano izquierda, Tres impresiones, Sonata, Sonatina, and Tocata.
The Preludio, Diferencias y Toccata is an exceptional work based on the main theme from Albéniz’s “El Puerto” (Iberia, Book I). The source of the thematic material is not readily apparent in the Preludio, which uses only a motive from the original tune. However, Castillo produces the borrowed theme at the opening of the Diferencias and takes it through a myriad of pitch and rhythmic transformations. The Toccata emphasizes the “hammering,” repetitive aspect of the theme, giving the finale a motoristie quality.
MATILDE SALVADOR (b. 1918), of Castellón, is one of the few women composers from Spain. She regarded her husband, the Valencian composer Vicente Asencio, as her mentor in piano and composition. Salvador is mostly known for her vocal music, but she has written a Sonatina and Planyivola for piano.
MANUEL ANGULO (b. 1930), of Campo de Criptana, Ciudad Real, has written a Suite for piano.
RODOLFO HALFFTER (b. 1900), a citizen of Mexico since 1940, began composing with the twelve-tone technique in 1953; Tres hojas de album, Op. 22, is his first serial work for piano. Others that followed include Música para dos pianos, Op. 29; Tercera Sonata, Op. 30 Laberinto, Op. 34; and Nocturno, Op. 36. Halffter states that his serial works are the result of a slow evolution and that they are really very similar to his earlier, poly tonal works.20
R. Halffter’s third Sonata, Op. 30, is a tightly knit work in four movements based on the same tone row: D-E-B-flat-F-sharp-A-F-G-C-sharp-D-sharp-C-G-sharp-B. In this sonata Halffter updates his basic style since World War II and employs some unusual symbols: e.g., indications for long notes of undetermined duration, for pressing down notes without their sounding (a technique that dates back to Henry Cowell), and for repeating a pattern a certain number of seconds. Laberinto (“Labyrinth”), Op. 34, employs similiar new techniques. It has the amusing subtitle Cuatro intentos de acertar con la salida (“Four Attempts to Locate the Exit”). All four movements are entitled Intento, and all conclude with the note F in the treble and bass, spaced six octaves apart. This sameness gives the work a certain unity but causes one to wonder if the exit was indeed found.
CARLOS SURIÑACH (b. 1915), of Barcelona, studied at the Barcelona Municipal Conservatory, the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf, the Cologne Hochschule für Musik, and the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin. He was conductor of the Barcelona Philharmonic Orchestra, 1944-1947, and the Gran Teatro del Liceo opera house, 1946-1949. In 1947 Suriñach moved to Paris, and in 1951 to New York City, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1959. During 1966-67, he was visiting professor of composition at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute.
Suriñach’s contributions to Spanish piano music are few but noteworthy. They include Sonatina, Flamenquería (for two pianos), Trois Chansons et Danses Espagnoles, and a set of children’s pieces entitled Cuadros flamencos. The Three Spanish Songs and Dances remind one of the successful series by the same title by Mompou. The combining of song and dance, supposedly an old Moorish form, has certainly proved rewarding for both composers.
The first piece of Suriñach’s set opens with a striking Andalusian melody in 3/8, accompanied by chords in 3/4. The ensuing dance employs guitar effects with quartal writing and violent chords, typical of the flamenco style. Contrary and parallel figures provide a stirring climax to the dance. The second piece begins with a beautiful cantabile melody that alternates between 3/8 and 4/8. The dance section, very reminiscent of Mompou’s Danza No. 5 (also in the key of E major), states a simple, but rhythmically satisfying, tune for a most effective movement. The third work of the series, possibly the most demanding, presents a very atmospheric slow section, bordering on the Impressionistic, followed by a dance that reverts eventually to 3/4 against 3/8. This section is capped off with an agitato coda that features swirling patterns of parallel motion in thirds, fourths, tritones, and finally unisons spaced two octaves apart for the stunning conclusion.
The Neoclassic Sonatina proves more difficult, in general, but not always as idiomatic as the Songs and Dances. The first movement is cast in the Scarlattian binary form without repeats, showing that the eighteenth-century composer still has an impact on Spanish composers. The second movement is an expressive study in notated trills (five-note groups) for both hands. The finale, marked presto, has the design of a sonata-rondo, with a main theme of the perpetual-motion variety.
Gilbert Chase probably best summarizes Suriñach’s style when he states that his music
achieves an effect of novelty by exploiting all the familiar clichés of the “Spanish idiom” with new technical resources and with a completely non-Impressionistic sensibility. Sharply etched lines, dissonant clashes, emphasis on sheer primitive power of rhythm, and strong reliance on percussion give to his music a midtwentieth-century accent that contrasts with the post-Impressionistic language prevalent in most contemporary Spanish composition. . . . Surinach brought his disciplined technique to bear mainly on the Andalusian idiom, which he galvanized into new life by treating it not as romantic atmosphere but as raw material for firmly structured and tautly textured scores, in which individual instrumental lines are thrust into sharp relief against a strongly percussive rhythmic base.21
The Spanish Civil War and World War II brought a halt to much of the musical activity in Spain from 1936 to 1945. Since World War II, Barcelona and Madrid have been the centers of new music for Spain. In Barcelona (1949), the Manuel de Falla circle promoted new music, and in Madrid (1958) the Grupo Nue va Música helped acquaint Spain with some of the newer techniques in composition. By the 1960s both cities could boast of electronic studios for musical composition.
Spain was late in being introduced to serial techniquesx. Rodolfo Halffter began composing twelve-tone works in the early 1950s but was living in Mexico after the Civil War. Consequently he did not have an impact on younger Spanish composers at that time. Later in the 1950s came serial works for keyboard by Luis de Pablo and Cristobal Halffter. Since that time, numerous Spanish composers have written serial compositions.
After World War II, many Spanish composers began going to Italy and Germany, instead of Paris, to learn new techniques. They sought study and advice from such notables as Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Post-serial works for piano have been written by Ramón Barce, Cristobal Halffter, Luis de Pablo, Carlos Cruz de Castro, Tomás Marco, and Juan Hidalgo, to name only a few.
No less important in this picture of new piano music in Spain is the performer. Pedro Espinosa (b. 1934), originally of Las Palmas, Canary Islands, has become known as one of the most important interpreters of avant-garde piano music, Spanish and otherwise. He has won numerous awards, had many new piano works written especially for him, and has given the first performances of several avant-garde works.
Many of Spain’s composers since World War II have purposefully rejected folkloric elements in their music in an attempt to avoid any association with nationalism. They strive or have endeavored to create a more universal musical language with the adoption of serial and post-serial techniques.