Chamber Music and Principled Dissent: Cross-Over Art Music of Hanns Eisler

S  omeone who knows *only* music understands not one thing about it. A composer with integrity knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it. A musician with integrity must be an activist in his or her society, and stand up and say loudly what is wrong in that society and try to fix it. It is not right to make pretty, docile music. I could well understand it when in 1933 Hitler put a price on my head and drove me out of Germany. He and his lying bandits were the evil of the period. In fact, I was proud to be driven out. There was honor in this! But today I feel heart-broken over being driven out of the U.S.—this beautiful country—in this ridiculous way, by these ridiculous people. [black-listed by McCarthy Committee]”
  —  Hanns Eisler, public statement before being expelled from the U.S. in 1948.

D  uring his lifetime, Eisler, who was one of Schoenberg’s favorite pupils, created a massive body of work. But these songs—written to inspire and enlighten a world gone mad with alienation and rampant greed—are his most immediate and successful musical contributions. The seventeen individual songs on this album classify as ‘agitprop’; they are political, anti-Nazi, pro-worker, pacifist—but their stirring sentiments and clear-eyed melodic and rhythmic appeal make them art songs as well.”
  —  Stephany von Buchau, review of Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, and Stephen Roans quartet CD, ‘Eisler: Nothing Quite Like Money’, in High Notes.

Mendacity cannot go unopposed.

Hanns Eisler (1898 - 1962) knew this. Eisler’s time with Schoenberg coincided almost exactly with the transition from atonal to twelve-tone music, and some of Eisler’s early compositions might be mistaken for Anton von Webern’s or Alban Berg’s.

But by the mid-1930s, Eisler became fed-up with the hermeticism and inaccessibility and elitism that typified the music of the Schoenberg School. Social responsibility and relevance were the moral justification for serious music, in Eisler’s view.

So he broke with Schoenberg, and Eisler’s new music—choral music, chamber music, music theater—came to be a fusion of atonal, jazz, cabaret and pop. Most of his pieces have political back-stories. These pieces (‘anthems’, ‘battle songs’) were intended to influence the feelings of performers and listeners, and to change their attitudes. The pieces were not merely entertainment. They didn’t behave nicely, re-upping for more of the ‘same’.

In 1942 Eisler moved to Hollywood, at that time also home to many well-known refugee artists. He continued his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, wrote the music for a number of films, and taught at USC. In 1947, one of Eisler’s accusers was Richard Nixon, who testified that ‘the case of Hanns Eisler is perhaps the most important ever to have come before the Committee.’ A dossier with song texts which Eisler had set to music was brought as evidence against him. When the leading witness was asked why he was reading out so much material, the reply of the official was: ‘My purpose is to show that Mr. Eisler is the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field, and he is well aware of it.’

Eisler was nominally the first one of what was to become a very large number of artists and intellectuals who were blacklisted in the U.S. on account of real or alleged political views. An international support group came to his defense—including Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin—but to no avail, and in 1948 Eisler was deported from the U.S.

His film-score credits include:

• Aktion J (1961)
  
• Les Arrivistes (1960) [The Opportunists]
  
• Geschwader Fledermaus (1958) [Bat Squadron]
  
• The Crucible (1957) [Les Sorcières de Salem]
  
• Katzengräben (1957) [Cat Ditch]
  
• Bel Ami (1955)
  
• Nuit et brouillard (1955) [Night and Fog]
  
• Schicksal am Lenkrad (1954) [Fate at the Steering Wheel]
  
• Frauenschicksale (1952) [Destinies of Women]
  
• Das Leben unseres Präsidenten (1951) [Life of Our President]
  
• Rat der Götter, Der (1950) [Council of the Gods]
  
• Unser täglich Brot (1949) [Our Daily Bread]
  
• Křížová trojka (1948) [Three Cross]
  
• So Well Remembered (1947)
  
• The Woman on the Beach (1947)
  
• The Life of Galileo (1947)
  
• A Scandal in Paris (1946)
  
• Deadline at Dawn (1946)
  
• The Spanish Main (1945)
  
• Jealousy (1945)
  
• None But the Lonely Heart (1944)
  
• Hangmen Also Die (1943) [Lest We Forget]
  
• The Forgotten Village (1941)
  
• A Child Went Forth (1941)
  
• Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939) [oil and political oligarchies in 1939!]
  
• The 400 Million (1939)
  
• Vie est à nous, La (1936) [The People of France]
  
• Nieuwe gronden (1934) [New Earth]
  
• Dans les rues (1933) [Song of the Streets]

What a great lot of these have to do with progressive themes and social justice!

So Hanns Eisler is fascinating for his having both embraced and dismissed Schoenberg and serialism—switching abruptly to accessible ‘pop’ idioms. It is not so much that he tried to ‘bridge’ the gap between classical and popular music. And it is not the case that he resorted to composing for musical theater and films simply to make a buck. He refused to conform (even though he did later return to a sort of variety of serialism that he felt was emotionally accessible and non-elitist). His String Quartet Op. 75 (1938) in two movements (Variationen, Finale) is an illustration of his principled idiosyncrasy.

The Op. 8 (1925) has lots of internal symmetry between pairs of trichords—pitch-class/set-theory, Allen Forte-style: [0,2,5] [0,3,7] [0,2,5] [0,3,7] for the No. 2, and [0,1,4] [0,1,2] [0,1,4] [0,1,2] for the No. 6. The String Quartet has [0,3,6] [0,1,3] [0,1,6] [0,1,2]—far less symmetry than Eisler’s earlier pieces; almost a rejection, as it were, of the symmetries he had previously found beautiful and meaningful.


Or was it? In the Op. 8 No. 2 row, is the third trichord not a subversion of the series initated by the first trichord? Is it not a private rebellion against the politics of the serial method, rankling from inside the method—a minor third and a whole tone within a perfect-fourth interval [0,2,5]? Aren’t the Variationen of the Streichquartett de facto subversions-by-permutation? Or even the Op. 8 No. 2’s second and fourth trichords—both triads but a whole tone apart, an equal amount of permutation in their reversal of major-third/minor-third intervals?

Rather than revealing a change of heart on Eisler’s part, as David Blake interprets things, it seems to me that these features illustrate a consistent and durable attitude toward free will and the human quest for meaning. Principled dissent! Agitprop!

Blake does explore (p. 109ff) Eisler’s election not to use transpositions or explore some combinations—he says these remain ‘latent’ in the works.

Yes, but their latency or absence is itself conspicuous, like white-space in paintings or sculptures or like un-pursued back-stories in novels. And that, I think, is the source of considerable beauty in Eisler’s writing:

• he creates a humanistic architecture that demands freedom;
  
• he devises ironical serialist edifices that demean doctrinaire serialism and other isms; and
  
• he engineers musicocosmological worm-holes that enable us to escape political oppression and live to fight another day.

Eisler insists on an emotional integrity that, as he saw it, serialism threatened. He deviates deliberately from a literal ordering and prefers intuitive permutations of the tone-row. If we perform it or listen to it, we perceive this directly. You don’t need an advanced degree in music theory to figure it out. And we can only imagine that this was Eisler’s deep intention, a pre-compositional and editorial mantra: create inherent radical liberty, where expressive freedom takes precedence over the tyranny of the tone-row.

The obsessiveness of some serialists, versus the iconoclasm of Eisler? Oh, but Eisler did indulge in a sort of meta-obsession. He is not an anarchist. He has his own detailed methods and values. The Streichquartett series is built from motivic ideas and is an ‘organic’ expressive space, in a way that’s reflected in how the piece progresses. But these series are not casual, ‘throw-down’ explorations. They are [obsessively] calculated so as to be precisely suited to [suitable for] the subsequent contrapuntal variations. The architecture for variation is itself the result of variation. Eisler draws and re-draws the architectural plans; surveys the building site; digs the holes for the piers and foundation; and begins constructing his building from the ground up, so to say.

But wait! He has architected the thing with provisions that anticipate the demolition of the building 50 years later, with provisions that facilitate the deconstruction and reclamation of the land, and its re-use for subsequent construction, for subsequent societies.

Wait again! He has architected the thing with provisions anticipating the return to a verdant naturalism. The departure from strict serialism reflected Hanns’s belief that innate and spontaneous motives will eventual prevail; reflected his deep mistrust of any ‘system’. Poetic license is not merely ‘taken’; according to Hanns Eisler, it must be taken, to produce anything of aesthetic value.

Not all Eisler’s music is challenging or ‘in-your-face’ political. In fact, some of his piano parts have an almost Schubertian tenderness. Other of his pieces are ironical or over-the-top comical. Some are combinations of all of these things.

    [50-sec clip, Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, Stephen Roane Quartet, There’s Nothing Quite Like Money, ‘Abortion Is Illegal’, 1.9MB MP3]

Sadly, Eisler’s communist leanings have caused his music to be long neglected in the West, although the Vogler Quartett and others have added his works to their repertoire. There is much to be admired in Eisler’s compositions, and I hope more ensembles choose to perform these works. In the current political season in the U.S., Eisler’s music feels like ‘relief’—like a much-needed antidote to the relentless neoconservative, theocratic onslaught that is upon us; like an inspiring call to ‘mindfulness’ in this terrible era of the proudly ignorant ‘low-information’ voter.

E  lias Canetti asked me how I got on with my father. When I pointed out that Hanns had been already dead for a dozen years, Canetti answered that he did in fact know this, but nevertheless wanted to learn from me how I got on with my father. ‘Very well,’ I replied. Canetti then assured me that the relationship with my father ‘would be still better in the future’ [than it has been thus far], a remark which seemed to me extremely odd, aggressive, and troubling... During my childhood, I saw my father rarely and at irregular intervals. My parents’ separation and divorce, which from my point of view occurred relatively early, was partly to blame for this, but above all it was due to events of the time. The meetings in Vienna are particularly clear in my memory—visits together to the Café Museum where my father met his friends, members of the Schoenberg circle... Because my mother was a singer and pianist I spent a significant part of my childhood amongst a circle of musicians, whose specialized language was familiar to me from an early age. My father was for a long time perceptible to me primarily through his ‘reflection’, through impressions I have of the people who were his friends... I often reflect on life in a musical family: the frequent chamber music [played by my parents friends, in public concerts and in the household of my childhood] signifies for me the ‘submerged’ world of childhood, the essence of childhood.”
  —  Georg Eisler, quoted in Blake’s biography of Hanns Eisler, p. 73.

• Eisler Collection at Feuchtwanger Library at USC
  
• Hanns Eisler Society website
  
• North American Hanns Eisler Forum
  
• Vogler Quartett
  
• Anders S, Noll J, Stephen Roane Quartet. Eisler: There's Nothing Quite Like Money. (Labor, 2005.)
  
• Blake D. Hanns Eisler. Routledge, 1995.
  
• Eisler Chamber Music. (Berlin Classics, 1996.)
  
• Eisler Dokumente. (Berlin Classics, 2005.)
  
• Gruber H. Roaring Eisler. (RCA, 1998.)
  
• Vogler Quartett. Eisler String Quartets. (Nimbus, 2004.)

Dallapiccola on Children’s Rights and Duties: Quaderno di Annalibera

Luigi Dallapiccola was was 48 years old when Quaderno was composed, nominally as a gift for the eponymous Annalibera, his daughter, on the occasion of her eighth birthday. [Annalibera Dallapiccola was born on the day of the liberation of Italy, whence the ‘libera’. Prof. Annalibera Dallapiccola is now a scholar in Asian and Indian art and is an Honorary Professor of Fine Arts at University of Pennsylvania and the University of Edinburgh. Formerly she was Professor of Art History, South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University.] The Quaderno is composed of eleven variations on a twelve-tone sequence based on the name B-A-C-H (the pitches B-flat, A, C, and B).

Surely we can wonder whether Luigi meant Quaderno as a veiled criticism of government: projecting children as analogous to the general public (under Mussolini, or under subsequent regimes). After all, other of Luigi’s compositions were famously political.

But there is plenty of evidence that we should take Quaderno at face value—as a collection of etudes addressed by father to daughter. For one thing, the title ‘Quaderno’ recalls Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Notebook’ for his daughter, Anna Magdalena. Other correspondences include Dallapiccola’s recapitulation of Bach’s contrapunctus subtitles for movements in strict canon, as in Art of the Fugue.

Quaderno’s movement titles are (in English) as follows:

• Symbol;
  
• Accents;
  
• First Counterpoint;
  
• Lines;
  
• Second Counterpoint (Canon in contrary motion);
  
• Friezes;
  
• Andantino amoroso and Third Counterpoint (Canon cancrizans);
  
• Rhythms;
  
• Colors;
  
• Shadows; and
  
• Quatrain.

These movements are lovingly didactic in a fatherly way—their names and their playful, thematically-expansive musical content are difficult to construe as covert political polemic.

Some 15 years ago David Lewin published a detailed transformational analysis of the Simbolo movement. Simbolo is marked ‘Quasi lento, misterioso’ and fully lives up to the misterioso. Regarding Simbolo, Lewin said: “The group [of transformations] is not a list of immediate aural intuitions or intentions ... Rather than trying to make our transformations denote phenomenological presences in a blow-by-blow narrative, we can more comfortably regard them as ways of structuring an abstract space ... through which the piece moves” (Lewin, p. 34).

If Dallapiccola wrote that the tone row in Simbolo isn’t meant to be perceptible to the listener, then we should take him at his word. He was, at the ripe age of 48, in a period of rapid change and learning—we hear plenty of discovery and exploratory gestures in these ‘etudes’. We can also readily conceive of what the intense, inquisitive Annalibera may have been like at that age—and imagine the motives that may have been at work in the father, trying to create something beautiful and highly symbolic ‘for her’, to be hers. It is one hell of a birthday gift. And, as things go in the Age of Reason—late in childhood and before the onset of adolescence—it was the perfect time for Luigi to make such a gesture. Misterioso—one of the duties of a composer (of a musician; of any artist) is to trade on the novel and non-obvious. Il Luigi ci istruisce così!

There is no reason why music theorists should give undue emphasis to tone-row or other serial compositional methods—giving priority to the ‘system’ seriously mis-represents the compositional process. It does violence to the music and dishonor to the composer! Dallapiccola especially was no slave to the [twelve-tone, serialist] ‘system’.

Even in Quaderno where a tone-row is perceptible, it does not dominate. As the canon or other variations progress, the role of the tone-row becomes less and less clear. Or, more accurately, the force of the ‘system’—the thematic mechanics—begins to cope with the accretion of other equally-legitimate guiding principles, other thematic genera. How like a Bach fugue this is! Once a theme is developed, it is absorbed into layers upon layers, variation upon variation. Futile to analyze a fugue by exhaustively identifying subject, counter-subject, and so on! Dried insects preserved in an entomologist’s collection have more fidelity to nature than this!

Based on the evidence we see in Quaderno, I don’t believe Dallapiccola relied on twelve-tone rows compulsively. There are so many other factors, that present themselves to the ear, that should inform a faithful analysis true to Dallapiccola’s motives and intentions. Above all, analysis should enlighten the performer and the listener.

So my speculation is this: Luigi Dallapiccola created Quaderno not only as a special gift, but also as a way of memorializing his sentiment(ality) about childhood. He was concerned about children as well as other members of society, both before the war and in the post-War period. A highly private man, he maintained a traditional idea that what went on in the family was nobody’s business, least of all government’s. But he was not a traditionalist as concerns the rights and duties of children, from what we can tell in his writings. Poverty and social exclusion may be resistant to solution by public means, but that simply implies that individual families must redouble their efforts. Children, too, have moral standing and therefore have duties commensurate with their rights. The childhood privilege of engaging in fanciful, creative and artistic pursuits carries with it, for example, an obligation to exert effort in good faith, to pay attention—for the children to avail themselves of the opportunities that the parents set before them.

If there is a better way to talk about this than through the notions of ethics and children’s rights, perhaps Luigi Dallapiccola knew such a way. The embarrassingly prevalent and pernicious (U.S.?) ideology—which insists that parents should be like gods to their children and that children are basically property, in a status of utter subjection to the will of the parents; and which defers to some distant time in adolescence any accountability by children for their acts—surely had no place in Luigi’s world-view.

Of course under U.N. and E.U. resolutions, children are emphatically not property, but they are nonetheless ‘extensions’ of the parents’ identities. Emotionally and biologically, this is natural. And, legally, this is true as well. Children progressively acquire autonomy or sovereignty—increasing rights, commensurate with increasing responsibilities and abilities. They discover and progressively grow beyond the parents’ identities. Quaderno is a gentle exhortation, by Luigi to Annalibera, to have serious fun in this process—of finding her own identity, of finding her own voice, of finding the good in the world and in other individuals and other cultures.

In summary, children are by nature ‘becoming’, not yet arrived into the fullness of identity. Of course, all of us are all always still ‘becoming’ no matter how old we may be, but children are more so. To Luigi Dallapiccola, children were persons to be taken seriously, as subjects with moral standing who have complex and evolving interests that merit public concern and complex and evolving duties that require the attention of the children as well as the attention of their parents and of society. Etudes are at this boundary: they are emblems of the social duty to give (parents’ and society’s duty of care), and they are emblems of a complementary duty to receive (the child’s duty of care). In a way, Quaderno is a meditation on ‘children as children’ and ‘parents as parents’ instead of as proto-adults and gods, respectively.

• Art History Dept., School of Fine Arts, Univ of Edinburgh
  
• Nolan C. Thoughts on Klumpenhouwer Networks and Mathematical Models: The Synergy of Sets and Graphs. MTO 2007: 13(3).
  
• BBC. Neglected Genius: Luigi Dallapiccola. BBC Radio3, 2006.
  
• Dallapiccola page at Wikipedia.org
  
• Dallapiccola page at CompositionToday.com
  
• Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera sheet music at Hutchins & Rea.
  
• Alegant B, Levey J. Octatonicism in Luigi Dallapiccola’s Twelve-Note Music. Music Analysis 2006; 25:39-87.
  
• Archard D. Children: Rights and Childhood. Routledge, 2004.
  
• Archard D, Macleod C, eds. The Moral and Political Status of Children. Oxford Univ, 2002.
  
• Earle B. Dallapiccola’s Early Synthesis. Music Analysis 2006; 25:3-38.
  
• Ensemble Dissonanzen. Musica da camera: Dallapiccola. (Mode, 2005.)
  
• Fearn R. The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola. Univ Rochester, 2005.
  
• Fernando J, ed. Children's Rights. Sage, 2001.
  
• Forte A. The Structure of Atonal Music. Yale Univ, 1977.
  
• Kohlberg L, Gilligan C. ‘The adolescent as philosopher: The discovery of self in a post-conventional world,’ in Mosher R, ed. Adolescents’ Development and Education. McCutchan, 1979, p. 76-9.
  
• Lester J. Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music. Norton, 1989.
  
• Lewin D. Musical Form and Transformation: Four Analytic Essays. Yale Univ, 1993 and 2007.
  
• Monetti M. Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera. (ASV, 1998.)
  
• O’Neill T, Zinga D, eds. Childrens Rights: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Participation and Protection. Univ Toronto, 2008.
  
• Perle G. Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. 6e. Univ California, 1991.
  
• Straus J. Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. 3e. Prentice-Hall, 2004.
  
• Center for Practical Bioethics.org page on Pediatric Palliative Care and children’s rights
  
• Vijayanagara Research Project website

La Pasión de Rubén Lorenzo: El Sentimiento Falla’s Fantasía Bética Dentro y Fuera de España

I  f Europe as a whole distinguishes today between Norwegian and Russian music it is because many years of practice in their grammar have taught us to distinguish them; yet, it would be easy to demonstrate that what Europe understands as ‘Spanish’ ... is nothing but a very limited aspect ... no more than a certain idiom fashioned principally on an Andalusian base ... Formal schematicism and brevity are essential qualities in the Concerto ... Not only is there never any filler or adornment in the instrumental parts, but these appear with abstemiousness in the extreme. Even the softness of the most idiomatic ranges is avoided, resulting in a timbre like that of old music played by primitive instruments, rude and astringent.”
  —  Adolfo Salazar, El concerto, 1927.

I  n the present Blair-ite age of cultural thinness, it’s all too easy to feel depressed at the comparative indifference shown towards serious music and the arts, and deplore their lack of purchase on our national life. Imagine such contemporary figures as Birtwistle, Benjamin and Ades being conscripted into the search for a redefinition of Englishness in the face of the threatened breakup of the UK and further integration into Europe... By contrast, Carol Hess’s excellent study, ‘Manuel de Falla and modernism in Spain, 1898-1936’, reveals the composer in the context of the Generation of ‘98. Appalled by their country’s shattering defeat by the USA in the Cuban War, these passionate intellectuals proceeded to conduct intense self-examinations on questions of national identity and foreign influences. Musical controversy at first reigned over the merits of the indigenous zarzuela—its conventionalised nationalism (españolismo) appealing to isolationists as opposed to the more Eurocentric cult of Wagner which gripped cosmopolitan Barcelona. … With an agenda of his own, uniting the Latin cultures of Spain and France, [Falla] defended European music’s ‘racial borders’ from the hegemony of the German tradition, and joined Unamuno in condemning the rationalistic legacy of Protestantism with its lack of ‘sensory grounding’… In the eyes of his numerous detractors, however, the modern French school had now replaced Wagnerism as the musical threat to the Spanish sense of ‘race’.”
  —  Andrew Thomson, Musical Times, Autumn 2002.

I  n the reception of Falla’s works in Spain, self, circumstance, and music intersect in compelling patterns that expose the innate idiosyncrasies in the
‘narrative urge’. It also reinforces the idea that music cannot exist as ‘the score itself’, reified in some utopian preserve where aesthetics alone holds sway, but as an utterance whose meaning will shift depending on the premises of a particular environment. The political Right promoted both Falla’s music and his character, emphasizing the period from 1932 on. In concentrating on this period, the Franco government was able to find powerful ammunition for its propaganda machine so that, with censorship wiping out all other points of view, franquismo singlehandedly laid the foundation for Falla’s legacy in Spain. There were, of course, some major discrepancies between this Rightist orientation, with its fustian diction and warped nostalgias, and the reality of Falla’s life... There is nothing to suggest that Falla actively opposed the principle of religious freedom. He was willing to criticize the administration and practices of the Church as he was the vandalism against holy sites. The latter he saw not so much as an attack on a corrupt power as a direct assault on God, and he feared that the Republic was bent on destroying not only the external trappings of the Church but the religious impulse itself... We do not know the composer’s understanding of the darker aspects of the Nationalist enterprise, namely, the role of its German and Italian allies, the effects of fascism throughout Europe, and Hitler’s designs. Nor could Falla have had foreknowledge of the virulence of Franco’s post-war reprisals. Having gone to Latin America for professional reasons and with every intention of returning, he was not a political exile, as is sometimes suggested. His rejection of Franco’s enticements no more indicates opposition to the regime than his donations to Republican camps and advocacy for friends on the ‘wrong’ side imply support for the vanquished Republic.”
  —  Carol Hess, Sacred Passions, p. 285-7.

Rubén Lorenzo provided an intriguing and passionate account of de Falla’s Fantasía Bética as part of his recital on Monday at Carnegie Hall. Lorenzo is noted for devising programs that he calls ‘monographic’ in their anthology-like scope, surveying the Spanish piano repertoire. But Monday’s recital was no dry academic monograph. Instead, it had more the impulse of an exciting suspense novel!

According to Carol Hess, the rejection of ‘localist andalucismo’ and adoption of a ‘universalist neoclassicism’ was a strong and recurring theme in Spanish modernist compositions in the first half of the 20th Century (2002, p. 4) and Falla was one of Spanish modernism’s leading exponents. Hess takes universalism to be stylistically and philosophically equivalent to neoclassicism, in part based on the force of Stravinsky’s enthusiastic endorsement of Falla’s late works and Stravinsky’s analysis of the compositional structure of Falla’s oeuvre. Like Hess, Falla biographer Tomás Marco (pp. 31-42) also notes Falla’s use of neoclassical compositional techniques in place of strictly nationalistic, andalusian ones—especially in his later compositions.

De Falla’s output ranges from late-romantic pieces to evocations of flamenco to the later neoclassicism. Lorenzo’s Bética emphasizes the piece’s flamenco features, maybe with more force and less restraint than is typical of flamenco. It seems that Falla was reluctant to let go of idiomatic flamenco elements, even if he eventually felt hemmed in by them. Maybe his life also manifested psychological ‘retentiveness’ in other ways, too: his conservative-flavored Roman Catholicism reportedly brought him both comfort and trouble throughout his life.

Incidentally, Bética is the Spanish name for the Roman province that is now Andalusia, transliterated from ‘Baetis River’ (now called the ‘Guadalquivir’). Fantasía Bética was dedicated by Falla to Artur Rubinstein, who used to play frequently in Spain and liked to perform vernacular Spanish music, including the Ritual Fire Dance. Bética’s nominally the final piece in Falla’s flamenco period, flanked by ‘El Amor Brujo’ and ‘Three-Cornered Hat’.

I  t is easy to let Falla’s ‘complete respect for and loyalty to his Excellency, the Generalisimo’ and praise for Franco’s ‘undefeated soldiers’ slide into complete oblivion. But we must ask to what extent we ought to condemn a sickly [and, by then] old man whose faith, although it blinded him to many bad realities, caused him to make remarks that now seem tragically flawed. Unlike Picasso, who refused to exhibit Guernica in Franco’s Spain, or Casals, who turned down invitations to play there as long as Franco remained in power, Falla could have spoken out after the War. That he did not do so may make us uneasy today. But one who sees God before all else may become curiously tongue-tied over temporal matters.”
  —  Carol Hess, Sacred Passions, p. 288.

Q  ué estimulante pensar en el futuro! Porque la música comienza a avanzar ahora mismo; la armonía aún debe ser un medio artístico. Por ejemplo, las canciones de Andalucía están basadas en escalas con intervalos más sutiles que las escalas en las que la octava es dividida en doce semitonos. Como compositor, todo lo que puedo hacer por el momento, es crear la ilusión de esos cuartos de tono, por medio de la superposición entre acordes de una tonalidad y otra.

[How stimulating to think about the future! Although music begins to advance right now, harmony still should be an artistically legitimate means of expression. For example, the songs of Andalusia are based on scales with more subtle intervals than the scales in which the octave is divided into twelve semitones. As a composer, all I can do for now is create the illusion of [reconciliation between] those realms of tone, by superimposing harmonies of one tonality on another. ] ”
  —  Manuel de Falla, 1919.

It was a revelation for me to discover that in the 1920s and 1930s Falla had remarked on aspects of his works that exhibited what today would be termed ‘microtonality’. Way ahead of his time! The biographers seem either not to have noticed those remarks, or else did not think the concept of microtonality sufficiently important to merit coverage in the context of Falla’s many accomplishments and overall significance in generating a Spanish national identity. Or else the biographers simply weren’t familiar with microtonality per se and didn’t know what to make of the remarks. Hmmm.


And how often do we think of microtonality in the context of solo piano works? Not often! The default prejudice is to think of a piano as tuned to a conventional temperament. It is not like a fretless stringed instrument or a wind instrument that’s amenable to an infinite range of pitch bending. When we think of piano, we think of note heads sitting precisely on staves, of white and black keys whose depression neatly yields sounds that have highly predictable pitches. We do not ordinarily expect a piano to be capable of microtonality. And yet here it was! Had the interpreter been one whose technique and athleticism and emotional exuberance were any less than those of Lorenzo we would not have heard the microtonality that this Falla piece contains. Had the recital hall been one whose acoustic properties were inferior to those in the Carnegie Weill venue we, likewise, would not have heard it. But the confluence of this Lorenzo, this Steinway, and this nice recital hall gave us this unique revelation. I had come with the intention of hearing Lorenzo educate me about Spanish culture and politics, but instead was delighted to receive this unexpected ‘bonus’—a revelation about piano physics and a revelation that Falla had been deliberately exploring microtonality decades before it became fashionable to do.

The Russian physicist Alexander Galembo has done considerable research on microtonal capabilities of the piano. If you are interested in the microtonal possibilities of conventional (‘unprepared’) piano, you may like to try to locate a copy of Galembo’s book. It is out-of-print and it is in Russian. But it’s a relatively slender volume, and Galembo’s writing is clear and concise, so with even a modest ability to read Russian it is possible to comprehend Galembo’s points.

T he microtonal effects are a result, mainly, of velocity effects and both vertical and horizontal motions of the piano strings after they have been struck by the hammers—and a result also of the detailed vibrational modes of the soundboard. The most interesting factor contributing to the existence of aftersound is the presence of more than one string for each piano note, and the consequent dynamical coupling that occurs among the strings struck by the same hammer. The data indicate clearly that we are dealing with two independent modes of vibration, which are producing sound waves through two separate radiating ‘antenna patterns.’ It is a dynamic thing: at various times after the attack, one or the other mode dominates—that is, near the beginning the dominant mode is different than it is near the end of the note. In fact, it is quite reasonable to suppose that the vibration pattern of the soundboard in response to a vertical force at the bridge is quite different from what it is for a horizontal force.”
  —  Gabriel Weinreich, KTH, Stockholm.

[Lorenzo is 48. Besides his extensive repertoire of Spanish music he also has performed and recorded Makrokosmos by Crumb. He is currently professor of the Upper Conservatory of Music of Zaragoza.]

• Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Zaragoza
  
• Fundación Archivo Manuel de Falla website
  
• Center for Iberian and Latin American Music.
  
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