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Alois Hába: Suite for Four Trombones in Quarter-tone System, Op. 72 (1950)

From the album Centenary: Alois Hába

Alois Hába is one of the most important composers associated with microtonal music in the 20th century.  Born in 1893 in Vizovice (present-day Czech Republic), Hába moved between Prague, Vienna, and Berlin from 1914 to 1923, when he permanently settled in Prague.  Beginning in 1924, Hába offered courses in quarter-tone music at the Prague Conservatory; these developed into a full-fledged department of microtonal music, which lasted from 1934 to 1949, although its operation was interrupted by the war.

Jiří Vysloužil’s claim in Grove Music Online that Hába “may justly be regarded as the originator of the use of quarter- and sixth-tones in Western art music” is dubious in the extreme, considering the contemporaneous endeavors of composers such as Ivan Vyschnegradsky, Willi Moellendorff, and Richard Stein, not to mention the considerably earlier experiments of Jörg Mager and Julián Carrillo. But Hába’s success in propagating microtonal music within the mainstream of European “classical” music is likely unsurpassed.  Beyond his work as a composer, Hába oversaw the construction of new instruments for the performance of microtonal music, including three types of quarter-tone piano (1924–31), a quarter-tone (1928) and a sixth-tone (1936) harmonium, and a quarter-tone clarinet (1924), trumpet (1931) and guitar (1943).

This lovely mid-century suite for trombone quartet comprises five short movements, marked Maestoso, Andante cantabile, Allegretto scherzando, Moderato cantabile, and Allegro risoluto.  Hába’s music, by turns magisterial, elegiac, and playful, demonstrates irrefutably the expressive viability of quarter-tone composition.

February 25, 2010, 1:14pm

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Julián Carrillo: Preludio a Colón (1924)

From the album Julian Carrillo (date unknown)

Born in Mexico City in 1875, Julián Carrillo is a fascinating and little-known composer of the 20th century.  Around 1895, Carrillo began using his violin to experiment with microtonal intervals— distances between notes smaller than the semitone or minor second which is the smallest difference between two pitches in the conventional Western system of tuning.  The realization that a virtually infinite world of tones lay dormant between the notes of the equal-tempered scale took on revelatory significance for Carrillo, who christened his discovery “el sonido trece” (“the thirteenth sound”).  Carrillo’s experiments in microtonality were among the first efforts in what would become a major strain of new musical investigations in the 20th century— perhaps first brought to public awareness by Ferruccio Busoni in his Outline of a New Aesthetics of Music, written in 1907.  (N.B.: The link is to the 1911 translation of the text, which is faulty, but alas, the only English version available.)

Carrillo’s music met with great public success during his lifetime.  Championed by Leopold Stokowski from the 1920s on, his works were premiered in several cities in the United States.  In 1930, Carrillo returned to Mexico from abroad and formed the “Orquesta Sonido 13,” a group dedicated to his microtonal compositions.

He had a set of 15 microtonal pianos built for him and exhibited at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels— the same event which saw the famous Poème électronique of Varese, Xenakis, and Corbusier.  Carrillo’s “metamorphic pianos” were admired by other microtonal composers such as Alois Hába and Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

Carrillo also developed a new system of notation meant to rationalize musical production and make it easier to write microtonal intervals.  Like the many other efforts in this vein undertaken in the 20th century, Carrillo’s innovations did not catch on.

The title of this piece translates as “Prelude to Columbus.”  It is written for soprano, flute, guitar, violin, octavina, and harp.

December 09, 2009, 5:31pm