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Xenharmonic triad, part 3
Alois Hába: Suite for Quarter-Tone Guitar No. 2 (1947). Fifth movement, “Allegro energico”
Downloaded from the Huygens-Fokker Foundation
Rounding out our brief tour of microtonal and xenharmonic music is this movement for quarter-tone guitar by Czech composer Alois Hába. The most prolific microtonal composer of the 20th century, Hába announced his mission in a 1927 book entitled New Theory of Harmony, which was one of the earliest systematic treatments of the harmonic foundations of microtonal composition. The book fused Schoenberg’s principle of the “emancipation of the dissonance” with the microtonal impetus of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 pamphlet Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music.
Taking advantage of his position as leader of the Department of Microtonal Music at the Prague Conservatory (the first such institution in the world), Hába spearheaded the development of a number of new instruments specially built for microtonal performance, including quarter-tone pianos (1924-1931), a sixth-tone harmonium (1936), a quarter-tone clarinet (1924) and trumpet (1931), and a quarter-tone guitar in 1943. Hába was especially fond of this last instrument, for which he composed the accompaniment of a number of song cycles, as well as two suites.
The Suite No. 2 is, in the context of Hába’s compositional idiom, a strongly tonal piece, gravitating toward the pitch center of E, with varying major/minor inflections. Still, the music is athematic and freely circulates all 24 pitches of the quarter-tone scale, creating a decidedly strange duality of modernist chromaticism and historical reference. (The fifth and final movement, heard here, opens with a flamenco-esque flourish and ends with a wonderfully out-of-place blues chord of the dominant seventh.) A performance of first movement of this suite by guitarist Tolgahan Çoğulu is available on YouTube, in case you were wondering what a quarter-tone guitar looks like.
Hába’s resplendent Suite for Four Trombones in the Quarter-tone System, composed in 1950, makes for an interesting point of comparison with the Suite No. 2, composed three years earlier. Together, the two pieces give a very good impression of Hába’s mature, mid-century compositional voice.
Played 130 time(s).
August 21, 2011, 11:27am
