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Article Excerpt
We must exercise a certain caution when using the word "school" in the sense of a musical movement. Admittedly it is now conventional in music history to employ terms like the "Low Countries", "Neapolitan" and "Venetian" schools to characterise particular trends in music of the Renaissance and Baroque, the "Mannheim" and "Viennese" school for the Classical period, and the "Second Viennese School" for the circle of Arnold Schonberg and his followers (not to speak of the "national schools" that appear everywhere in the literature), but the most recent historical analysis has challenged this blanket use of the concept. The fact is that the definition and application of the term "school" is very changeable and relative, like historical knowledge itself. When a new musical phenomenon appears, it is either rejected or accepted by those contemporaries who encounter it, but neither rejection nor acceptance is the result of truly objective aesthetic judgment; since this is impossible when the phenomenon is so new. The initial experience is not, therefore, the criterion of subsequent evaluation. If the new phenomenon is to any degree accepted, however, what follows is a phase in which efforts are made to universalise and stabilise it, and at this point the distinguish marks of the new phenomenon become a measuring rod, and the first "continuers" appear. Only then, as the new movement starts to identify its own historical position, does a search for "forerunners" ensue, subsequently enabling us to talk of a "school", a "personal style", the "style of a generation" or "epoch" and so forth. Bearing all these caveats in mind we find that it is both possible, and impossible, to talk of anything like a "Haba School". In his attempts fully to integrate microtones into European musical language and give them a place equal to that of traditional tonal and harmonic techniques, Haba remained an isolated solitaire in the history of European music, but as we shall show, he was not without his continuers. His rejection of the classical romantic doctrine of musical forms and his promotion of "athematism", was supposed to open the way to absolute creative freedom and emancipate the composer from dependence on a given compositional canon. Some considered this to mean the loss of a firm footing, not a negligible aspect of the creative process of composing (whatever the extreme avant-garde may have thought), and perhaps even less negligible when it comes to the reception of the music by the audience. On the other hand theory is one thing and its application another. Haba himself was not a purely microtonal nor a purely athematic composer. His musical talent was spontaneous and his music was never contrived.
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It was another feature of Haba's personality that he managed to gather around him a very large circle of kindred spirits. These included his pupils in the strict sense of the word, i.e. those who attended his courses in microtonal music at the Prague Conservatoire, and his "pupils" in the broader sense, i.e. people who met him at his innumerable lectures (at home and abroad), who worked with him in musical associations and societies, and studied his articles in the music journals and books.
Entry into Musical Life
Alois Haba was undoubtedly one of the most influential people in Czech music in the period between the two world wars. He was a composer, theorist, organiser, propagator of modern music and a teacher. Active in music clubs and societies, he used them as a platform for applying and promoting his views. In the world of Prague associations he developed this activity first and foremost in Pritomnost [Presence], becoming its chairman at the beginning of the 1930s, and in the Czechoslovak section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, ISCM. In both societies he had the deciding voice in the most critical years, when political and national conflict was becoming ever more intense. Haba always remained a convinced member and representative of his nation (one could even say his ethnic group) and he also remained a convinced supporter of international co-operation without regard to linguistic, racial, religious or other barriers. In the mid-1930s his tolerance did not make life easy for him. As Hitler's Germany became ever more aggressive he was often accused of tolerating "Jews and Germans" around him--a double criticism fired by the Czech nationalism and antisemitism that grew in direct proportion to the nationalism and racism of the Nazis.
Haba's class at the Prague Conservatoire contained a lively mixture of nationalities; over the years it was attended by students from the Kingdome of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia (from 1929 Yugoslavia), Lithuanians, Turks, Poles, Bulgarians and others. Haba taught for ten years at the Conservatoire on the basis of an annually renewed permission to hold "courses in microtonal music". Microtonal music was not a separate subject in the curriculum, but was considered a department of the composition class and could only be taken by students who had already taken the usual obligatory composition subjects. Not until 1934 was Haba appointed a professor of composition at the Conservatoire.
When he started his courses at the Conservatoire he already had the first practical tests of his ideas behind him. He must have been immensely gratified when his quarter-tone quartet (String Quartet no. 2 op. 7) was performed by the Have-mann Quartet in Berlin and especially when another quarter-tone quartet (String Quartet no. 3 op. 12) was performed by the Amar-Hindemith Quartet at the ISCM festival in Salzburg in 1923. At the orchestral part of the ISCM festival in 1924, held in Prague, Haba had been able to present a quarter-tone piano, newly made by the August Forster firm and built according to Haba's design, as part of the subsidiary programme. During just five years, when Haba moved from theoretical exploration of the possibilities of microtones to their practical application in composition, he had managed with the help of performers to prove that music of this kind was possible.
Haba's graduation piece in Franz Schreker's composition class in Berlin (Ouvertura op. 5) was well constructed, effective, melodically inspired, and harmonically and instrumentally rich, but it did not venture beyond the post-romantic style. The gulf between this piece and the String Quartet op. 7 that he wrote practically at the same time is a gulf between two different musical worlds. Yet Haba's creative development had its own logic. It was the result of an encounter between a unique individual talent and the unique creative conditions offered by the period immediately after the 1st World War. Creative enthusiasm was a reaction to ordeal, and the young generation of artists bore a genuine resemblance to a phoenix risen from the ashes (the comparison was frequently made). The Czechoslovak republic too had arisen from the ashes of the Habsburg Monarchy. Its musicians, artists and writers felt the need to show that they could give it its own, unique, competitive and modern art. Haba's internationalist sentiments combined perfectly with the inheritance of his roots in the Moravian countryside, and with the social sensitivity and breadth of culture through which he transcended these rural roots.
An Example of Courage
Haba's path to teaching the theory of composition was undoubtedly made easier by the teacher training that he received at the pedagogical institute in Kromeriz before he decided to set out on a composer's career. Music teaching was at that time an obligatory part of teacher training and he was also able to test out his music teaching skills in practice during a period in Vienna. It has recently come to light that in 1918/19 he taught violin and musical theory at a private music school (Schallinger-Schule) where pupils of Franz Schreker, including Felix Petyrek and Heinrich Knoll also taught. Haba undoubtedly obtained the job--just like a post as an editor at the Universal Edition--through the good offices of Franz Schreker, who was accustomed to helping his pupils...
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