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Alois Haba (21st June 1893-18th November 1973): between tradition and innovation.

Article Excerpt
In the general perspective of music history, Alois Haba is usually characterised as one of the leading protagonists of the Central European inter-war avant-garde that moved between Vienna, Berlin and Prague. In the specific context of Czech music he likewise has the reputation of an exemplary innovator but is considered to have been strongly rooted in tradition as well. Haba is known primarily as a tireless propagator of microtonal and athematic music, for which his own term was "liberated music." In this music he added more subtle quarter-, fifth- and sixth-tone intervals to the semitone system and abandoned up traditional treatment of motifs. Haba's dream of the unlimited possibilities of new music lasted roughly twenty years (1919-1939) and found expression in a series of pieces that oscillate between the diatonic and bichromatic system. He wanted to introduce the public to the new tonal systems by using newly constructed instruments, and we might see his progress in this respect as a step towards the institutionalisation of his own innovations as a composer. Finally, Haba was a tireless organiser who helped to ensure that works of new music were regularly presented in Prague concert halls. Many of Haba's pieces provoked a great deal of controversy in their time, and the listener today will certainly be able to judge his output (103 opuses) more objectively. Today we can see Haba's creative impulses against the background of a broader pattern of cultural history, in which shorter periods of destruction of existing artistic norms always give way to periods of creative synthesis.

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Alois Haba (21st June 1893 Vizovice--18th November 1973 Prague) entered Czech musical culture at a time when the "lived inheritance of folklore" had come to be recognised as something of genuine potential value for high culture. Attempts at the authentic expression of musical roots no longer meant a degrading provincialism, as had still to some extent been the case when the Czech musicologist Zdenek Nejedly (1878-1962) expressed highly critical views of the work of Leos Janacek and Vitezslav Novak. Nejedly the aesthete condemned Novak for "falsified quotation" of folk song, in the sense of its use in the structure of his works as a musical symbol at a different level. Janacek he saw as a typical regressive composer, and claimed to see in the opera Jenufa a striking similarity with the earlier romantic aesthetic of the 1860s, when the character of the work was deliberately determined by quotation from folk songs and the desire to get closer to the taste of the wider public. In fact, Nejedly was much more generous in his criticism of Novak's music, seeing it as at least a higher stage of response to folk material. Nejedly's critical opinions on the treatment of folk music have a very clear rationale, in line with the changing ideas of the time on the function of folk culture within a national programme. At this point, at the beginning of the 1920s, Nejedly distinguished between folk culture and the taste of the broader public. In his view the audience, the wider public culture, was essentially conservative, and a progressive composer ought not to pander to its tastes. Despite the trials that this might involve, he should resist the pressure of the public and develop his own individual artistic identity. Art for the people should not be an art of lower quality that made few demands on its listeners.

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When another Czech musicologist, Vladimir Helfert (1886-1945) in his book Ceska moderni hudba [Czech Modern Music] (1936) tried to define Haba's place in the evolution of precisely Musikstil der Freiheit. (This expression appeared for the first time in Haba's article Casellas Scarlattiana--Vierteltonmusik und Musikstil der Freiheit, 1929.) The phenomenon Musik der Freiheit is one that invites connection and comparison with a number of theoretical concepts of the Central European avant-garde that explicitly appeal to forms of aesthetic liberation. If Haba's liberated music is often taken to mean the possibility of free treatment of sound material, its technical side is often associated with the expressions microtonality and athematism. The second, in particular, deserves a short commentary.

In athematism Haba found a potential for free creative expression that bears some resemblance to Schonberg's technique of musical prose--a melodic idea released from the rules of the periodical structure. When Haba talks about athematism, he very often also mentions Schonberg. In 1934, on the latter's sixtieth birthday, Haba alludes to Schonberg's technique of "the strictest thematic treatment" (twelve-tone music) but in the same breath recalls the importance of Schonberg's "free athematic style" (Schonberg und die weiteren Moglichkeiten der Musikentwicklung, 1934). In his article Harmonicke zaklady dvanactitonoveho systemu [The Harmonic Foundations of the Twelve-Tone System] (1938) Haba repeats this idea when he talks about Schonberg's opera Erwartung, which is composed--with the exception of a very few thematic passages--in a free non-thematic style, without the support of the "basic form".

Many of the texts in which Haba mentions athematism are supposed to serve as explanations of his own goals as a composer. Hence they involve elaborate metaphors and surprising verbal combinations in them. Seeking to formulate the basis of the "non-thematic style", Haba often gropes for similiarities between social development, spiritual movement and the form of the work of music, and refers to values and signs that say something about the overall character of the time and its intellectual climate. In his book O psychologii tvoreni [On the Psychology of Creation] we read that, "[...] a need for change and movement quite evidently penetrates our consciousness from the musical expression of the present time. Today man is intellectually more mobile, and this mobility is also expressed in a faster modulation of sound. The more conscious the law of motion and change governing the human mind becomes, the more distinctly it manifests itself in artistic expression and especially in music. Harmonic drones have disappeared from music, because the sense of stability has progressively vanished from spiritual life. The sense of reminiscence, return to the impressions and scenes of the past has also gone. The human spirit today is concentrated on the concept of "forward", the conquest of new knowledge and the creation of new forms of living. In music this reorientation is manifest in a turning away from the concept of reprise (not repeating longer parts of musical form). Musical expression has not yet, however, emancipated itself from the repetition of details. The task of the youngest generation and next generations is to carry out this developmental rebirth fully and to construct a completely new musical style on the principle of "not repeating and thinking ahead, always forward." (6)

What exactly is Haba's athematism then? If we want to understand it better, the preceding quotation is not a sufficiently clear answer. First of all we need to say that the expression "athematism" is itself somewhat unfortunate. It would be a mistake to think of Haba's "athematism" as music without themes. The composer merely abandons traditional ways of treating motifs and themes. The definition of a musical structure as...

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