‘From the Monkey Mountains’: The Body, the Grotesque and Carnival in the Music of Pavel Haas

Abstract

ABSTRACTIt has been claimed that Pavel Haas's string quartet ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925) demonstrates the composer's alignment with the ‘Western’ musical avant-garde of the 1920s. However, Haas's avant-garde affiliations remain largely unexplained, as does the influence of Leoš Janáček, with whom Haas studied. Combining the methods of music analysis, semiotics and discourse analysis, I explain how Haas reconciled Janáčekian compositional technique with the ideas underpinning the contemporary Czechoslovak avant-garde movement known as Poetism. Focusing particularly on notions of the body, the grotesque and carnival, I propose an interpretative framework for and a reading of Haas's quartet ‘From the Monkey Mountains’. In doing so, I also illuminate the aesthetic and cultural context of Haas's music from the 1920s, which has received little attention in previous scholarship.