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Miloslav Kabelac and percussion: Miloslav Kabelac was featured in the Profiles supplement to Czech Music 2/2004. Much of his legacy consists of pieces for percussion or with prominent and major parts for percussion, and in this category Kabelac's work is exceptional in the context of classical music internationally, and not just the Czech tradition.

Article Excerpt
Miloslav Kabelac (1908-1979) showed a serious interest in percussion from the very beginning of his career as a composer. From the beginning, too, this interest was associated with another of Kabelac's interests, also relatively undeveloped in the Czech music world--fascination with the music of non-European cultures. While still at Conservatory he had already acquired a "better than average" knowledge of this music through Alois Haba, who was for some time his teacher. Another of Kabelac's teachers, Erwin Schulhoff, also broadened the young composer's horizons beyond the traditional limited focus of thought on percussion. Kabelac later remembered an important initial stimulus that increased his interest in percussion instruments: it was the performance by the Indian dance and instrumental ensemble Uday Shankaar in Prague in 1935. We can cite the relevant passage in Kabelac's commentary, published in 1970:

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"In 1935 (to be exact the 17th and 18th of March 1935, author's note) the famous Indian dance and instrumental Uday Shankar ensemble came to Prague. The impression the performance made on me was so strong that I didn't just walk about as if dazed for a few days, but consciously and subconsciously tested out and re-evaluated my entire musical development. I found lessons and enrichment in the music of the ensemble. Including the richness of the percussion and the way it was exploited, musically, acoustically and technically exploitation. All at once our way of using percussion instruments seemed to me barbarous. The fact that the only thing we know how to do with percussion is to create an overwhelming crescendo and then crown it with the cymbals.

My interest in percussion instruments grew deeper. I became more and more aware that percussion instruments were not just a rumble, sound or effects. That you could entrust music to them, that they were real musical instruments. The results of this interest and my deepening knowledge were already reflected in my first serious pieces: the cantata Neustupujte! [Do Not Retreat!] op. 7, (1939), the 1st Symphony for Strings and Percussion Instruments op. 11 (1941-42), and the 2nd Symphony op. 15 (1942-46). In these compositions the percussion instruments already appear as an independent element either joining with the other instruments or even standing against them. Interest in percussion is growing in Europe generally. Suddenly we are all realising that we are backward in the use of percussion instruments, and that we have plenty of catching up to do. Ensembles are being formed consisting only of percussion instruments. Pieces are being written for them. The number of instruments used is increasing. The art of playing them is improving and at present some performers are achieving a virtuoso, almost acrobatic level."

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Let us look in more detail at the first serious pieces in which Kabelac, as he says himself, used percussion in a way that goes beyond usual practice. In the first piece that he names, the cantata Neustupujte! for male choir, wind orchestra and percussion (1939) he employs an unusually large percussion group: four kettle drums, a small drum, large drum, snare drum, two cymbals and a hanging cymbal and pair of tam-tams. The role of the percussion instruments, which sound practically for the entire duration of the piece, is unusually important and varied (with the parameter of timbre used in a very plastic way as well as rhythm), especially by the standards of Czech music of the time.

This differentiated approach with an emancipated and relatively large group of percussion instruments goes even further in Kabelac's 1st Symphony in D op. 11 (1941/42). Here a large group of membranophones and idiophones of various sizes, played by a no less extensive group of sticks, is added to a string orchestra. Apart from the obligatory pair of kettledrums, the composer uses a small and snare drum (with strings and without), a large drum, two tom-toms (small and large--designated in the score as "tamburini cinesi"), a large tam-tam, two cymbals, a hung cymbal and a triangle. The percussion's role in the musical events of all three movements is richly differentiated: the timbre diversity of the group has opened up undreamt of possibilities for the composer, especially when juxtaposed with the acoustically homogeneous string orchestra. The piece is based on the thorough and consistent exploitation of the formal and expressive potential of elementary melodic-rhythmic structures of modal disposition in co-ordinated classic formal types (the sonata form in the first and third movements, the three-part form with modified reprise in the slow middle movement).

Starting with the 1st Symphony, percussion instruments are lavishly represented and exploited in many different ways in more or less all of Kabelac's orchestral work (not only the symphonic) and it can be demonstrated that the role of percussion instruments in forming the distinctive marks of Kabelac's musical idiom and in the specific sound and meaning of individual...

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