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Martin Smolka: a microsentimental composer.

Article Excerpt
"Wherever I mention that I use quarter-tones, sooner or later someone brings up the name of Haba. But I came to microintervals as part of the common equipment of post-war New Music and didn't concern myself much with Haba". We would be hard put to it to find any other composer in contemporary Czech music who has focused as systematically, conspicuously and successfully on the use of microtones as Martin Smolka (*1959). The basic idea behind his approach to microtones is in fact relatively simple and in itself not so uncommon. Smolka does not introduce "new tones" into the tempered system, but just "detunes" intervals as a means of emotional expression.

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Martin Smolka appeared on the Czech music scene in the Eighties, when together with the composer Miroslav Pudlak he founded the Agon ensemble. Later the composer and conductor Petr Kofron joined the group and Agon soon became the most important ensemble for contemporary music in Czechoslovakia. Not only did long-term co-operation in Agon provide the composers with a platform for performance of their work and for experimentation, but Agon also functioned as (almost the only in Czechoslovakia) mediator of the repertoire of world avant-garde music. Somewhere at the beginning of Smolka's career as a composer we can find, to a greater or lesser extent, the influence of essentially all the important movements and aesthetics of post-war music. In general, the 1980s were a time when the earlier fierce "irreconcilability" of "opposite" movements was a thing of the past, and this was doubly true in communist Czechoslovakia. In the suffocating atmosphere of the hegemony of the officially privileged pseudo-modern music, which fumbled about somewhere between Vitezslav Novak and Shostakovich, practically any kind of music outside this circle was the object of attention and authentic interest, and all the more so because it was not an easy matter to get recordings or printed scores and there was no danger of "saturation". In Smolka's music (as in the music of many of his contemporaries), we have generally little difficulty in identifying the influences of Post-Webernism, Minimalism, American experimental music (above all M. Feldman) and the Polish School. The latter was itself essentially a synthesising and borrowing phenomenon and especially in its later period eclectic. Added to this we find an interest in "across the board" tendencies to experiment with natural tuning and a "flexible" concept of the pitch, especially in the music of...

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