Flamenco, Fractals, and the Refigured Past: Three Creative Paths for Implementing Microtones in Contemporary Spanish String Quartets

Abstract

FLAMENCO, FRACTALS, AND THE REFIGURED PAST: THREE CREATIVE PATHS FOR IMPLEMENTING MICROTONES IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH STRING QUARTETS JOSÉ L. BESADA OUNTLESS COMPOSERS, especially in the last few decades, have implemented any number of systems of microtones in praxis, mainly quarter-tones but also even smaller intervals. This fact aside, their technical and aesthetic reasons are varied: current compositional practices are far from normalized these days, which helps to avoid a global approach to the subject of microtonality. The aim of this article is therefore to discuss a range of attitudes and solutions related to microtonal writing in recent Spanish instrumental music. In the interest of obtaining relevant results from a vast potential repertoire, the field of study is restricted to string quartets.1 This article relies on a total sample of thirteen scores signed by three composers who were born in the 1960s: Mauricio Sotelo (Madrid, 1961), Alberto Posadas (Valladolid, 1967), and Ramon Lazkano (San Sebastián, 1968). All of them draw frequently on microintervals, yet they do not C 6 Perspectives of New Music share the same creative motivations. Seven string quartets from the aforementioned sample will be duly discussed in order to provide evidence about the practices of these composers. A reminder of Julia Werntz’s academic contribution for a categorization of the cardinal reasons giving rise to a microtonal compositional style by “adding pitches”2 could be helpful: first, to build compact and blurry harmonies, often in order to obtain denser clusters or sound masses; second, to allow subtle inflections in diatonic or chromatic writing; and finally, to enlarge twelve-tone compositional logic with new formal and functional consequences. Although such categorizations can provide an analytical frame that works well in several contexts, and we could feel tempted to apply it to the present case studies, they do not necessarily match the poetics of these composers. Indeed, more complex seem to orient each composer’s implementation of microtones, not exactly fitting in with Werntz’s scheme yet converging with it in a subtler way. Before analyzing the proposed case studies, the article will provide a synoptic overview of the historical advent of microtones in Spain during the twentieth century. It will not only take into account a material accomplishment of microtonal scores—a relatively late milestone—but also several earlier theoretical writings. BRIEF HISTORICAL REMARKS Microtones implicitly emerge in several oral traditions within Spanish music, with flamenco, to be discussed below, being the most often cited. Nonetheless, microtonality in Spanish art-music appeared much later than the effervescent experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s, mainly theorized and developed in Czechoslovakia, Russia, Mexico, and the USA. Only a very narrow elite of Spanish musicians and critics kept abreast of such international avant-garde proposals. It was the case of Adolfo Salazar, who published in Spain an article with regard to microtonal music, after an exhibition he visited in Frankfurt in the summer of 1927, the Internationale Ausstellung “Musik im Leben der Völker.” The Spanish critic, among the most influential personalities within his country’s musical milieu, reported the Czech “specialization in quarter-tones,”3 though it should be pointed out that Alois Hába is not explicitly quoted in his text, comparing it with Julián Carrillo’s Sonido 13, though Carrillo’s music was not represented in the exhibition. Salazar’s article remains one of the earliest references to microtonal music from the Iberian Peninsula, despite its contingent provenance and its almost anecdotal character. Flamenco, Fractals, and the Refigured Past 7 Perhaps Salazar’s close relationship with several members of the Group of Eight, an important group of composers in various ways indebted to Manuel de Falla’s modernist attitudes,4 could explain the irruption of microtonality in their theoretical discourse, even if no systematic trace of microtones can be detected in these composers’ music during the 1930s. Even so, Gustavo Pittaluga’s conference prologue introducing the first public concert of the Group of Eight at the Residencia de Estudiantes in the autumn of 1930 contained an absolutely explicit allusion to microintervallic music: This innovator [a conscious musician] will start from the point where acoustics and music overlap. One will search the wholetone scale, another will...