Maurice Ohana and Hispanic Primitivism

A Spanish Universalist
Maurice Ohana and the Discourse of Primitivism
Jessica Trevitt
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment
Of the requirements of the degree of
Bachelor of Music
University of Melbourne
2011
i
THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
School of Music
Parkville
I certify that the dissertation presented by me for the degree of Bachelor of Music comprises only my
original work except where due acknowledgement is made in the text to all other material used. With
thanks to Dr. Michael Christoforidis and Dr Elizabeth Kertesz for their assistance in preparing this
dissertation.
Signature:
_________________________________________________________
Name in Full:
_________________________________________________________
Date:
_________________________________________________________
ii
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
2. Chapter One: Maurice Ohana’s formative years ......................................... 4
3. Chapter Two: Primitivisms ....................................................................... 11
4. Chapter Three: Ohana and the concept of Hispanic Primitivism:

A view through three works of his formative period ................................ 27
5. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 40
6. Bibliography ............................................................................................. 42
iii
List of Figures
1. Figure 1: Goya, “Enterrar y Callar” The Disaster of War (1810) .................................. 23
2. Figure 2: Ohana, Enterrar y Callar, bars 1-2 ................................................................. 24
3. Figure 3: Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 4th Movt, bars 121-150 ................................... 26
4. Figure 4: Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 4th Movt bars 1-5 ............................................. 27
5. Figure 5: Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 2nd Movt, bars 7-23 ........................................ 22
6. Figure 6: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 123-7 ............................................................... 30
7. Figure 7: Ohana, Llanto, 3rd Movt, bars 1-8 ................................................................... 31
8. Figure 8: Ohana, Llanto, 4th Movt, bars 120-5 ............................................................... 32
11. Figure 11: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 157-163 ......................................................... 34
12. Figure 12: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 195-9 ............................................................. 35
13. Figure 13a: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 201-4 ........................................................... 36
14. Figure 13b: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 205-6 ........................................................... 37
15. Figure 14: Ohana, Llanto, 2nd Movt, bars 95-101 .......................................................... 38
iv
Introduction
Maurice Ohana emerged from an eclectic background: as Caroline Rae states, “the Spanish and
African influences of his youth and early adulthood provided the raw material which was tempered by
his French training, education and environment”.1 He was one of a long line of musicians who moved
from Spain to Paris for their music careers in the first half of the twentieth century, including Isaac
Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla, but unlike these composers, he is not easily
attributed a national identity. This dissertation will explore Ohana’s cultural identity and in particular
how his early aesthetic ideas related to Hispanic cultural discourses between the two world wars.
Born of Andalusian and British heritage in French Morocco, Ohana studied in the French Basque
Country before beginning his career as a composer in Paris in the 1930s. His mature output is
generally dated from the 1950s, and while this latter period was full of experiments with diverse
influences and mediums, in his formative period he was exploring his Hispanic roots, and his works
were deeply connected to the cultural, social and political history of Spain. This aspect of his musical
aesthetic has been addressed both as a primary source of inspiration by one of Ohana’s students Odile
Marcel,2 and as one of several important factors underlying his aesthetic ideas by musicologist
Caroline Rae3 and another student of Ohana’s, Félix Ibarrondo.4
Ohana’s position within the discourse of primitivism is crucial to understanding his aesthetic. This
complex concept will be discussed further in chapter two. It was a discourse through which artists
strove to critique Western culture by using elements of non-Western musics for their associations with
a more basic and instinctive way of life. Although there is more literature on primitivism within the
plastic arts, most notably by Robert Goldwater and Colin Rhodes,5 recent scholarship has recognised
the need to address it within the field of music, particularly in Nancy Berman’s PhD thesis.6 The
discourse of primitivism in music has also received attention through studies of Spanish modernism of
the 1910s and 1920s, including those by Michael Christoforidis and Carol Hess.7 These show that the
so-called primitive works of Igor Stravinsky and Falla inspired younger composers active in the 1930s
with their particular concept of primitivism, combining the Western pre-Romantic and primitive
gypsy traditions of Spain.
1
Caroline Rae, The Music of Maurice Ohana (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), 1.
2
Odile Marcel, ‘ “L’Ibérisme” de Maurice Ohana’, Revue Musicale 351-352 (1982): 11-26.
3
Rae, Music.
4
Félix Ibarrondo, ‘Sources d’avenir’, Revue Musicale 391-393 (1986): 19-26.
5
Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Colin
Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994).
6
Nancy Berman, ‘Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 1910-1925’ (PhD Thesis, McGill University,
2001), 4.
7
Michael Christoforidis, ‘Manuel de Falla, Flamenco and Spanish Identity’, Western Music and Race, ed. Julie
Brown (Cambridge: CUP, 2007) and Carol Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898-1936
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2
Ohana himself has been studied in relation to primitivism by his student Edith Canat de Chizy and
musicologist Agnès Charles.8 They highlight his belief that music is a product of the universe, and can
be used as a form of communication across cultural barriers if we allow it to develop naturally from
this source. He saw developments in form and harmony as only complicating the writing process and
preventing this communication from happening. According to Ohana, so-called primitive societies,
who live simply in comparison to Western society, still allow natural sources to drive their music and
as a result can still engage musically with an “a-cultural” range of emotion.9
However, changing ideas within the discourse of primitivism during the 1930s have not been
addressed in Ohana scholarship. A brief survey of important contemporary music journals such as
Modern Music and Revue Musicale demonstrates how central the ideas of primitivism were to a
particular circle of the avant-garde, particularly for writers Henry Cowell, Joseph Estève, Carlos
Chavez and Alfred Einstein.10 Yet it also reveals a shift from employing elements of non-Western
musics as a critique of Western culture to perceiving these musics as absolutely equal to the latter and
as part of a universal musical language. The meaning and relevance of terms such as “universalism”
and “internationalism” were debated,11 and the term “Neo-primitivism” was coined by Henry Cowell
in 1933 in an attempt to define these new ideas within an aesthetic concept.12 These discussions were
being paralleled in the philosophical discourse of humanism, which was calling for a post-national
society.13 It is at this time that Ohana was studying music at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, and it is
thus a relevant context in which to explore the development of his ideas. There is no evidence to
confirm that he had read or heard about discussions on universalism or neo-primitivism, however it is
reasonable to assume that he was aware of them, as they were published widely in literature of the
time, and there are many parallels with his own aesthetic ideas.
Another aspect not yet addressed by scholars is the specifically Spanish construction of primitivism in
Ohana’s composition, especially as mediated by Falla, although it has been touched on by Beatriz
Montes in her study of the two composers in their national context.14 In this dissertation, I aim to
show that the aesthetic ideas behind Ohana’s early works can be seen as part of the discursive
trajectory of Spanish primitivism dating from the aftermath of the First World War. I will do so by
reconstructing the context within which Ohana developed his musical ideas, with an overview of his
8
Edith Canat de Chizy, Maurice Ohana (Paris: Fayard, 2005) and Agnès Charles, ‘Du sourcier au trouveur: une
étude de la musique vocale de Maurice Ohana’ (PhD Thesis, Lille, 2004).
9
Chizy, Maurice Ohana, 57 and Charles, ‘Sourcier’, 480.
10
See Modern Music Vols. 8-13 (1931-1935) and Revue Musicale Vols. 105-190 (1930-1939).
11
Joseph Estève, ‘L'Internationalisme et la Musique’, Revue Musicale 190 (1939): 170-176 and Alfred Einstein,
‘National and Universal Music’, Modern Music 14, no. 1 (1936): 3-11.
12
Henry Cowell, ‘Toward Neo-primitivism’, Modern Music 10, no. 3 (1933): 149-153.
13
See Neil Foxlee, Albert Camus’s “The New Mediterranean Culture”: A Text and its Contexts (Bern:
International Academic Publishers, 2010).
14
Beatriz Montes, ‘Manuel de Falla à Maurice Ohana: permanence de l'héritage andalou’, Manuel de Falla:
Latinité et Universalité, ed. Louis Jambou (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris Sorbonne, 1999).
3
formative years in chapter one and an exploration of the discourses of primitivism and universalism in
chapter two. Chapter three will then illustrate how some of these parameters were manifested in two
of his early keyboard works and in his first mature work, the Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.
4
Chapter One: Maurice Ohana’s Formative Years
An outline of the first thirty years of Ohana’s life aims to demonstrate how his personal relationship
with Spanish culture came to influence his musical aesthetics. While extensive biographies have
already been written by Caroline Rae and Edith de Chizy,15 here I will concentrate in particular on
those aspects that may have lead to his valuing the cultural roots of Spanish music, connecting it with
supposedly older societies and seeking to bring what he perceived as its primitive elements to the
wider European community.
Childhood and Adolescence
Born into a wealthy family in 1914, Ohana’s mixed heritage and early exposure to different cultures is
an important starting point. His father was of Andalusian-Gibraltan origin, while his mother was
Andalusian-Castillian. The family were naturalised as British through their Gibraltan line nineteen
years before the birth of Ohana, and spent several years moving back and forth between Casablanca
and London. Once they had lived in London long enough to obtain British citizenship, they settled
permanently in Morocco, where Ohana was born. He took piano lessons from age five and made his
performance debut at age eleven, but it is important to note his early contact with Western music
through his sibling Noemi, who was an accomplished pianist. Her performances introduced him to
Frédéric Chopin, Isaac Albéniz and Claude Debussy, all of whom wrote some music in an Hispanic
style mediated through Western musical traditions.16 A key point in his early contact with traditional
musics was his travels as an adolescent throughout Spain and Morocco. As well as encountering the
folk traditions of different regions of Spain, he discovered the Berber tribes of Morocco’s Atlas
mountains, in whose music he observed similar characteristics to that of the Andalusian gypsies.
Basque Country
In 1932, at age eighteen, Ohana began his formal music training at the Bayonne Conservatorium in
the city of Biarritz in the French Basque Country. This was one of the first internationally fashionable
holiday destinations, and Ohana called it a “cross-roads of the world”.17 He took lessons there from
Jehanne Paris, the principal church organist of Biarritz. He called her his most “complete” influence.
With her he discovered Gregorian chant, solfege and the music of Maurice Ravel, who wrote works in
an Hispanic style that had challenged Romantic stereotypes of Spanish exoticism.
Another of his teachers at the time, conservatorium director Joseph Ermend-Bonnal, had studied
composition under Gabriel Fauré. He had also been a student of Charles Tournemire, a Breton
composer who used folk melodies, modal harmony and local legends in his music. Like Tournemire,
15
Rae, Music and Chizy, Maurice Ohana.
16
These Western music traditions ranged from early Romantic to post-Romantic and Impressionist styles.
17
Rae, Music, 8.
5
Bonnal was deeply attached to his homeland Brittany and drew inspiration from its landscape and
from the Basque countryside, particularly in compositions such as Paysages Landais and Paysages
Euskeriens.18 The importance of folk elements in Breton composition had grown from the late
nineteenth century through the French regionalist movement,19 and in Paris, the fascination for
Spanish culture had become so strong that folk music like this was seen as a regional style of France.
The response to landscape and myth is also important in Ohana’s aesthetic as part of his identification
with southern Europe. He felt closely connected with the ocean, seeing it as a body which united
people on landmasses across the globe.20 Although he identified with both mythical and contemporary
cultures surrounding the Mediterranean sea, he was drawn more to the Atlantic coast of France, Spain
and Morocco, where nature ran wilder and inhibited the growth of large coastal holiday towns like
those of southern France. This landscape was reminiscent for him of that which had been known to
the earliest of mankind, whose approach to music Ohana sought to understand.21
Paris and Europe
The 1930s represent an important period in the transition between Ohana’s identity as a pianist and as
a composer. In 1932 he moved to Paris to study architecture, following the wishes of his father, but
transferred to the Paris Conservatorium as a piano student in 1936. Here he continued to discover new
influences from Spanish and African cultures. In his student residency he was introduced to American
jazz through concerts of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. He considered jazz a “logical
extension” of the northern African traditions he admired.22 For his studies he took lessons from Lazare
Lévy, who greatly admired Albéniz,23 and from Frank Marshall, who was the “principal disciple of
Granados”.24 He also learnt from Arthur Rubinstein, who admired the work of “Granados, Albéniz,
Villa-Lobos and, especially, Falla”,25 and who was well-known for his performances of Spanish music.
Ohana made his Parisian debut in 1936 with his programme of Hispanic composers including Albéniz
and Falla, but now with the addition of Domenico Scarlatti, whose musical language was construed at
18
Carolyn Fournier, ‘Joseph Ermend Bonnal, a French organist-composter: His Quest for Perfection’, The
Diapason Online 98 (May 2007), http://www.thediapason.com/Joseph-Ermend-Bonnal-a-French-Organist-
Composer-His-Quest-for-Perfection-Part-1--article8103 (accessed 2 June 2011).
19
Regionalism in France became prominent in the late nineteenth century, as a reaction to an over-centralised
Parisian government. An emphasis on local cultures, including the encouragement of regional sacred and secular
folk songs, was a strong part of its promotion. See Paul-André Bempéchat, ‘Toward a Breton Musical
Patrimony: Symbiosis and Synthesis of the Folkloric, the Classical and the Impressionistic’, Proceedings of the
Harvard Celtic Colloquium 22 (2002): 1-38 and Robert F. Waters, Déodat de Séverac: musical identity in fin
de siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 41-79.
20
Chizy, Maurice Ohana, 52.
21
See Maurice Ohana, ‘Géographie musicale de l’Espagne’, Revue musicale 351-352 (1982): 73-74 and Chizy,
Maurice Ohana, 54-5.
22
Rae, Music, 6.
23
Charles Timbrell, ‘Lazare Lévy’, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John
Tyrrell, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 615.
24
Tomàs Marco, Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century (London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6.
25
Max Loppert, ’Arthur Rubenstein’, New Grove Dictionary, 849.
6
the time as inseparable from his Hispanic influences.26 This would prove to be important in light of
Ohana’s later use of Neo-classicism.
From 1936 he toured Europe and North Africa as a concert pianist, and made the acquaintance of the
Andalusian flamenco singer and dancer Encarnación López Julvez, professionally known as La
Argentinita. She was acknowledged as an innovator of flamenco dance styles, and “urged (Ohana) to
look towards his Spanish roots as the source of his compositional identity”.27 As encouragement to do
so, she lent him a copy of Federico García Lorca’s poem Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935).28
In 1937 Ohana attended the Paris Exhibition and encountered a performance of Falla’s The Three
Cornered Hat. It was an experience which he pointed to as the beginning of his interest in the Spanish
composer’s use of folk song, an influence which would become the most important of Ohana’s
formative period. In the same year he entered the Schola Cantorum as a composition student under
Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, and absorbed many of the teachings of the Schola into his own composition,
including its emphasis on plainsong, Medieval and Renaissance polyphony and folk music.
These beginnings in composition were interrupted in 1940 when Ohana was mobilized to fight with
the British army. For the remainder of the war he fought in campaigns in Madagascar, Egypt and
Algeria. Despite the interruption, it became an important period for the development of his musical
style. Not only did he continue to organise his own recitals whenever possible, he said “I carried all
[of what he had learnt so far] in my bag as a soldier for five and half years, the entire duration of the
war, and as we know, wars create a lot of time to wait, and a lot of space to think about things”.29 He
carried with him five scores: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune and Three Nocturnes,
Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show and Concerto for harpsichord and five instruments and Ravel’s
Concerto for the left hand. For him these works contained an infinity of meaning, holding secrets that
would elude him no matter how much he studied them. He believed they could give insight into what
he wanted to do with his own work.30
The connections between these five works and their significance in the context of Hispanic music and
Neo-classicism are noteworthy. Ravel and Falla were heavily influenced by the traditional music of
Spain, and both used its rhythms, modes and ornaments with the purpose of evoking what was at its
essence, rather than recreating it literally.31 The particular pieces Ohana chose are also those in which
26
Gilbert Chase, The Music of Spain (Toronto: The General Publishing Company, 1959), 110-114.
27
Rae, Music, 11.
28
See Andrew Anderson, Lorca’s Late Poetry: A Critical Study (Melksham: Redwood Press, 1990).
29
30
31
Chase, Spain, 301 and Michael Christoforidis, ‘Manuel de Falla's “Siete Canciones Populares Espan͂olas”:
The composer's personal library, folksong models and the creative process’, Anuario Musical 55 (2000): 213-
235.
7
these composers used classical frameworks to construct their Hispanic ideas.32 Debussy used Spanish
folk music in some of his compositions, most notably Ibéria (1905), and he had an attitude toward it
which was similar to Ravel and Falla, believing that folk melodies must “become so natural a part of
[the] music that one barely distinguishes a demarcation line”.33 Debussy’s use of Impressionism was
an important influence on the other two, and their interest in the particular Debussy works admired by
Ohana is clear in that Falla reorchestrated his Prelude à l’après midi d’un Faune and Ravel
transcribed this same work for piano, as well as the Nocturnes.34 These connections indicate Ohana’s
developing interest in the Franco-Spanish musical discourse surrounding the use of Spanish folk
music, and also in its re-construction within a classical framework. This was the dominant stylistic
paradigm for younger Spanish composers, and some French composers, in the 1930s.
Ohana’s travels during the war widened his contact with traditional musics, including those heard in
Kenyan tribal performances. Here he was “struck profoundly” by the connection between the music
and the surrounding landscape,35 recalling the influence of Bonnal and the Basque and Breton
regionalism that was closely associated with its landscape. It was in Kenya that Ohana met the South
African poet Roy Campbell. They shared a love for the poetry of García Lorca, and discussed the
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, the text of which Ohana still had after his meeting with La
Argentinita. Campbell went on to translate the poem into English in 1946, dedicating it to Ohana with
the words “This poem resembles you”.36
In 1943 Ohana was wounded in Cairo and hospitalised. On recovery, he assisted with a military
operation in Sicily and came into contact with the French Resistance, in which there was a strong
Spanish presence from Civil war refugees. He composed Enterrar y callar37 as a homage to the
refugees, inspired by the war-time etchings of Spanish painter Francisco Goya.38
Classes with Casella
Between 1944 and 1946 Ohana was stationed in Rome where he took up a piano course with Alfredo
Casella. Although they admired each other’s playing, Casella, who had been interested in late
Romantic and Neo-classical musical idioms in the previous half-century, was by that stage an
advocate of serialism. Ohana, however, saw it as “an insupportable dogmatism”. 39 He wanted to listen
32
See Christoforidis, ‘ “Siete Canciones” ’ and Marie-Noelle Masson, ‘Ravel: Le Concerto pour la Main
Gauche ou les Enjeux d'un Neo-Classicisisme’, Musurgia 5, no. 3/4 (1998): 37-52.
33
François Lesure, ‘Debussy’, New Grove Dictionary, 104.
34
Hess, Manuel de Falla, 178 and Rollo H. Myers, Ravel: Life and Works (New York: Greenwood Press 1975),
225.
35
36
37
This was to become the first of his three Caprices.
38
See chapter three, below.
39
Chizy, Maurice Ohana, 29-30.
8
to his “own intuition” when composing,40 and this meant searching for a tradition other than the
Austro-German line from Bach to Beethoven to Schoenberg. He looked instead to that of southern
Europe, which had had such an impact on his early musical development, including the music of
Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Couperin, and contemporary composers such as Falla and Debussy. Casella
and Ohana were therefore often opposed when it came to ideas about composition. This should be
situated within the political climate from the 1930s, in which the struggle between Left and Right
parties involved the use of culture as a point of symbolic comparison and critique. In Italy and France,
musical Neo-classicism was associated with the conservative Right and Fascism, while more
experimental styles such as serialism were associated with a more liberal, progressive ideology in the
aftermath of World War II.41 Casella’s negative view of Ohana’s Neo-classical influence could thus
be explained through its political associations. It is worth noting however that it was a different
situation in Spain, as Neo-classicism was aligned with the Republicans to whom Ohana was linked
through Falla, Picasso and Lorca.42 His experience with Casella hardened Ohana’s resolve to explore
paths other than serialism, a fact demonstrated in his main composition from the time, the Sonatine
Monodique (1944), which is strongly Neo-classical in form, and uses folk elements in its harmony and
rhythm.43
Ohana’s desire to follow a southern-European tradition was challenged again by French author André
Gide, whom he met in Naples in 1945. Gide believed that Debussy was an “invertebrate”, and
Milhaud’s music was just “noise”.44 Ohana stood up to these comments on his return to Paris when he
wrote and told Gide about his love for the Préludes for piano, which have been described as the most
tonally ambiguous pieces Debussy wrote.45 For Ohana this was a revolt against his correspondent, and
it “freed (him) from submission” to the ideas of others. Without doing so he believed he “would never
have become a musician”.46 It was Gide who later told Ohana that if he were to write novels, he
would be a “French Joseph Conrad”.47 Though this is an ambiguous statement, Conrad’s novels were
largely about adventure in colonial territories, exploring the concept of a worldwide empire, and
Ohana could be compared with this in two ways. He had the desire to travel beyond widely-accepted
ideas and regions, as seen in his rejection of the Austro-German tradition and his exploration of and
affinity with exotic musical terrains. His insistence on the value of French musical ideas could also
40
41
See Jane Fulcher, The composer as intellectual: music and ideology in France 1914-1940 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 242-5 and Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1987).
42
See Alberto Albarez, El origen del neoclasicismo musical espanol: Manuel de Falla y su entorno (Malaga:
Ediciones Maestro, 2008).
43
See chapter 3, below.
44
45
Roy Howat, ‘Debussy’, New Grove Dictionary, 109.
46
47
9
have been seen as a level of cultural pride equivalent to that which must underlie colonial endeavour.
Either way, it is an interesting statement that reveals what Gide at least perceived as a certain level of
intensity in Ohana’s ideas.
The Zodiaque Group: the first expression of Ohana’s ideas
When he was demobilized in 1946, Ohana settled in Paris, left piano performance behind and
dedicated himself to composition. He was now competing with a slightly younger generation of
musicians, including Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis, to attract attention to his early works. Félix
Ibarrondo refers to these younger composers as being “concerned with new means of expression”,48
just as Ohana was seeking his own path toward renewing musical thought. To stand apart, in 1947 he
brought together like-minded composers to form “Le Groupe Zodiaque”. The creation of
compositional groups had been a common occurrence in Paris over the early twentieth century, and
was described by Rollo Myers as a result of the “ever-increasing self-consciousness of the modern
composer” who fights against the weight of tradition.49 Comparisons have often been made between
the Zodiac group and earlier groups such as La Jeune France and Les Six, as they all had in common
an anti-teutonic stance, banding together to give concerts and promote works by French composers.
However, the Zodiac group differed in that they sought to practise a complete “compositional non-
conformism”,50 that is, to create music in a form dictated by the material itself, rather than by any pre-
compositional process. This meant they were not only against the Austro-German serialist tradition,
but neither did they want to conform completely to the French Neo-classical school.
Thus the group refrained from promoting any one style of music. Instead, they advocated that which
was in touch with the most primitive links between music and humankind. Their primary motivation
became the “return to the source (of music)”.51 This ideal is reflected in the group’s name, which
refers to the Zodiac, or the division of the heavens into twelve parts and the categorisation of these
parts under the four elemental symbols of earth, water, sun and air. The reference to the “archetypal
beliefs” and “primary forces of nature” reflected in the mythological origins of the Zodiac was a
reflection of the group’s interest in primitive and traditional musics.52
Joining Ohana initially were French composers Alain Bermat and Pierre de la Forest-Divonne, both
students of Daniel Lezur. It wasn’t until 1948 that they were joined by Polish composer Stanislaw
Skrowaczewski, student of Nadia Boulanger, and Argentinian composer, poet, painter and disciple of
48
Ibarrondo, ‘Sources’, 19 and Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (London: University of California Press,
1984).
49
Rollo H. Myers, ‘Music in France in the Post-War Decade’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association
81st Session (1954-5): 100.
50
Caroline Rae, ‘Maurice Ohana: Iconoclast or Individualist?’ The Musical Times 132, no. 1776 (1991): 70.
51
52
Caroline Rae, ‘Henri Dutilleux et Maurice Ohana: Victims of an Exclusion Zone?’, Tempo 212 (2000): 25.
10
Falla, Sergio de Castro.53 They held seven chamber and orchestral concerts between October 1947 and
March 1950, for which the reviews were very positive,54 including radio broadcasts and performances
in such prominent music venues as the Salle Gaveau. After disbanding in 1950, Bermat was the only
member apart from Ohana to continue with composition. Castro dedicated himself to painting, and
Skrowaczewski to conducting. Divonne stopped composing as he believed Ohana would write the
music he wanted to hear.55
In the end it wasn’t the Zodiac group which helped Ohana find recognition. In fact in the late 1940s
he still lacked confidence in his aesthetics, conscious that he “risked bring rejected [as a composer],
sometimes violently so”, because “they began to call (him) Rachmaninov...in a definitely negative
sense”.56 This implied that he was a living fossil, composing with out-dated technique. However, in
1949 he was commissioned by the Paris Conservatorium to create a work for choir and orchestra in a
“very Spanish style”,57 and this was to become the Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Premiered on
22 May 1950 in the amphitheatre Richelieu at the Sorbonne, it is seen as the work which launched
Ohana’s career,58 and it made him realise he “was right to advocate a return to a sensual music,
resolutely full of emotion”.59 The encouragement was the basis of his continued aesthetic
development.
This overview of Ohana’s formative years has highlighted his interest in traditional and primitive
musics. His personal experiences revealed the similarities between African tribal music and traditional
Spanish music, the beginnings perhaps of his valuing their primitive, or common origins. The
influence of Hispanic and French composers gave him the tools to evoke folk musics, and to construct
them within Neo-classical frameworks. Although he was influenced by Neo-classicism, his ideas as
advocated through the Zodiac Group reveal how he did not seek to conform to any one set of ideas.
Challenges from older artists helped him gather strength in his own aesthetic as it developed, and the
Llanto was the first work that revealed it fully-formed. The importance of his Spanish roots cannot be
overestimated in this development process, as they facilitated his engagement with La Argentinita and
Roy Campbell. The influence of Neo-classicism was just as important, as it revealed how he related to
the Hispanic and primitive musical discourses of the time. Before examining his works and his
aesthetic outlook more closely, it is necessary to understand these discourses in their social and
cultural context.
53
54
For example, Chizy cites a review of their opening concert which praised the Sonatine Monodique as
“remarkable in every way”, and Ohana as having “talent and originality” (Chizy, Maurice Ohana, 27).
55
56
Rae, Music, 30-1.
57
58
Christine Prost, ‘Catalogue Raisonné’, Revue Musicale 391-393 (1986): 186.
59
11
Chapter Two: Primitivisms
In discussing primitivism, it is important to note that it never constituted a clearly defined aesthetic
movement in music, but rather is a concept that has been constructed differently over the course of
time. Between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, it was more prevalent as a discourse in
the plastic arts and literature, however, concurrent with the movements of Nationalism and Neo-
classicism in twentieth-century music, it became a critical idea for many composers. Although it was
viewed differently when informed by different cultures, for the purposes of this dissertation its
construction within Hispanic culture is most important, and will be addressed at the end of this
chapter.
Exoticism, Primitivism and Neo-classicism
The beginnings of the discourse of primitivism are difficult to isolate, however, the tendency toward
comparison and critique between Western and non-Western cultures is at the root of the aesthetic.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the term “Noble Savage” in his 1762 Le Contrat Social. He outlined
the simplicity of the societies in which primitive people live, enabling them to be in touch with our
pure state of nature as human beings. This idea was tainted when European explorers brought back
stories of cannibalism, creating the term “Ignoble Savage”.60 Both concepts referred to a figure that
was “antithetical” in relation to Western society, which had become fraught with rules, systems and
social obligations.
With the publication of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (1859), such cultures were accepted as
being an earlier step in the evolutionary chain, the latest development of which was European man.61
Thus they were seen as genetically incapable of creating something of aesthetic beauty. This was still
the case in the early twentieth century, and a good example can be found in D. C. Parker’s 1917
‘Exoticism in Music in Retrospect’. While cataloguing the various aspects of foreign cultures that a
composer could use to add “local colour” to his music, Parker mentions native Moroccan music as a
style “not without its merits...in spite of the fact that it is performed in unison with barbaric percussion
accompaniment”.62 The implication is that a barbaric, or primitive, style of drumming is
counterproductive in music as an aesthetic “medium of expression”.
Elements of non-Western musical style were nevertheless appropriated by some composers as a way
of evoking the unfamiliar. This was one of the concepts that underpinned musical exoticism. Rather
than being a means of comparing and critiquing one’s own society, the “evocation of a place, people
or social milieu that is (or is perceived to be) profoundly different from accepted local norms in its
60
See Berman, Primitivism, 10.
61
See Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism (London: Duke University Press, 2007).
62
D. C. Parker, ‘Exoticism in Music in Retrospect’, Musical Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1916): 151.
12
attitudes, customs and morals” was used to “expand and refresh” what one already knew.63 In central
Europe, the indigenous cultures of Spain, Northern Africa and Russia were used in this way. For
example, Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) used melodies and rhythms from Spanish dance and vocal
music to highlight local colour.64 A similar use of Arabian and Asian sources is found in Nicolai
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888).65 This work also has nationalist and imperialist overtones,
which demonstrates how the employment of folk sources at the time also underpinned Romantic
musical nationalism.
The concept of primitivism is entwined with that of exoticism, but its motivations go beyond the use
of non-Western music as exotic effect or local colour. An early example of this tendency is Ravel’s
Rhapsodie Espagnole (1907), in which particular rhythms, modal inflections, timbres and ornaments
recognised as Spanish became structurally significant.66 Discourses around primitivism began
widening in the 1920s when ethnological study was separated from that of aesthetics and it could thus
be accepted that, rather than being too early in the evolutionary chain to be able to produce something
of beauty, primitive peoples had a sense of aesthetics just as do modern people.67 The relative
simplicity in which primitive peoples lived was construed as positive, being a state of reduced
distraction which better enabled them to “find and express reality” in their art.68 Composers with
primitivist tendencies then inserted non-Western musical elements into their works as a way of
critiquing the fact that artists of their own society were unable to do this.69
An important step in the musical development of primitivism was Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
(1913).This was due to his unique approach to folk sources, and his use of those associated with
primitive religious rites. He not only limited his direct borrowings of folk melodies, maintaining that
there was only one in this work,70 but he was conscious of using them appropriately in accordance
with their ethnological character. To this end, it was believed that he “deliberately sought out material
that, in seasonal and ceremonial character, seemed appropriate to the implications of the scenario”.71
This was thus an approach to folk materials that sought to understand their essence as well as to use
their musical elements. The complexity of rhythm and tonality inspired by national folk music had
also been taken a step further here with the use of melodic fragments, polyrhythms and polytonalities
63
Ralph Locke, Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59.
64
Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51-2.
65
Steven Griffiths, A Critical Study of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov, 1844-1890 (London: Garland Publishing,
1989), 246-7.
66
Danièle Pistone, ‘Manuel de Falla et le cosmopolitisme musical parisien’, Manuel de Falla: Latinité et
Universalité, ed. Louis Jambou (Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris Sorbonne, 1999 ),76.
67
Goldwater, Primitivism, 39.
68
Goldwater, Primitivism, 63.
69
Berman, Primitivism, 71.
70
Pieter Van de Toorn, Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987), 12.
71
Van de Toorn, Stravinsky, 13.
13
constructed from these Russian music sources.72 With this musical construction of Primitivism
underscoring a theatrical evocation of pre-historic ritual, Stravinsky introduced to Europe a form of
exoticism which resonated beyond national boundaries. Alex Ross described the work as using
“rhythms...global in reach, and at the time...global in their impact”. He quotes, for example, Debussy
as calling it “a negro music”.73
Following the Rite, the concept of primitivism became an important aspect of musical thought,
particularly as part of the Nationalist and Neo-classical movements. Scott Messing’s Neo-classicism
in Music highlights its link with Nationalism using the opposition between French and German
musics. He explains that these countries were led musically by Stravinsky and Schoenberg
respectively, and thus Stravinsky’s Rite was representative of the French, or at least anti-teutonic,
repertoire, as much as it was representative of the primitivist aesthetic. Its primitivist elements of
“simplicity... spontaneity...(and) objectivity”, were construed as anti-romantic and anti-Germanic, and
therefore as a form of “strident nationalism”.74
Messing also linked the appeal of the pure and simple in primitivist music with the “purity, concision
and naivety” of Neo-classical music.75 The latter was a reaction to the sweeping emotional gestures of
the late romanticism of Wagner, Mahler and Strauss, just as the former was a reaction to the needless
distractions of modern society. Messing uses the late music of Satie as a Neo-classicist example,
describing his style as “realist” and “nude”.76 This comment is suggestive of returning to basic, or
primitive, principles.
The popularity of American jazz and ragtime was also related to the concept of primitivism. It was
equated with the anti-Germanic, or anti-traditionalist stance of Stravinsky in that there was “an
underlying quality of impudence in quite natural and legitimate revolt against Nobility and Beauty”.77
In 1924 The New York Times even described the new style as “a return to the humming, hand-
clapping, or tom-tom beating of savages”.78
The use of Negro musical influences also became symbolic of an American nationalism. Works such
as George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Virgil Thomas’ Four Saints in Three Acts made use of
African-American performers and certain musical idioms to portray the folk and urban cultures of
72
See Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A biography of the works through Mavra
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
73
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Harper Perennial, 2007), 99.
74
Scott Messing, Neo-classicism in Music: from the genesis of the concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky
polemic (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1998), 111.
75
Messing, Neo-classicism, 111.
76
Messing, Neo-classicism, 91.
77
Mark Tucker, ‘Jazz’, New Grove Dictionary, 904.
78
Tucker, ‘Jazz’, 909 and Sydney Finkelstein, Composer and Nation: the heritage in folk music (New York:
International Publishers, 1989), 301-2.
14
America that were different from those brought over from Europe.79 The spontaneity and realism of
which Messing spoke was reflected again in one comment on American nationalism as “restoring
colour back to the lifeless pallor of a European musical body ravaged by the bloodless scourge of
(Germanic?) modernist dissonance”.80
Second-Wave Primitivism: Post-Nationalism or Universalism
In 1930s Europe, however, earlier notions of musical nationalism were waning, giving way to what
can be called Universalism. In his 1939 article “Internationalism and Music”, Estève called it a loss
of “clarity and equilibrium” following the Depression, which was only encouraged by a rapidly
increasing capacity to communicate and travel internationally. He explained that as “the earth is
becoming smaller, the people who are mixing together are more numerous, and their desire to
introduce one to another is becoming bigger and more indiscrete”. The complexities of an
increasingly international world were reflected in a chaotic state of music which was bringing
together “the most contradictory of conceptions”.81 Perhaps because of this contradictory nature of
styles, according to some contemporary perspectives international connections did not necessarily
mean there could be an international style of music. Alfred Einstein’s 1936 article “National and
Universal Music” rejected the idea that there could be an international music equivalent to the
constructed language Esperanto, but admitted “universal” music was possible whenever a “new music”
was created in which the composer “transcends his nation to fashion the world after his own image”.82
Thus the concept of a Post-Nationalism was closely tied with the search for a “new” style of music.
This search for the new was often related to a particular attitude toward primitive musical elements. In
1931 Arthur Lourié’s article “The Crisis in Form”, published in New York’s Modern Music, looked
toward a movement which would create genuinely new ideas “through the interpretation (not
imitation) of that music of the past which seemed most to conform to the present”.83 Boris de
Schloezer speculated on Stravinsky’s influence on this in 1932, believing that his objective and formal
use of primitive elements, something which was deemed as a truly new system,84 could only be
surpassed by going “in exactly the opposite direction”, that is by relating them to a subjective reality.85
In other words, instead of simply appropriating parts of indigenous styles, an understanding of the
structural elements and the ideas behind them could bring about a new and subjective use of the
idioms.
79
Lisa Barg, ‘Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three
Acts’, American Music 18, no. 2 (2000): 121-161.
80
Barg, Black Voices, 125.
81
Estève, ‘L'Internationalisme’, 175.
82
Einstein, ‘National and Universal Music’, 11.
83
Arthur Lourié, ‘The Crisis in Form’, Modern Music 8 (1931): 4-5.
84
Henri Prunières, ‘Les Tendances actuelles de la musique’, Revue Musicale 162 (1936): 30-38.
85
Boris de Schloezer, ‘The Enigma of Stravinsky’, Modern Music 10, no. 1 (1935): 17.
15
Henry Cowell’s 1931 study of the Sones, a musical genre of Cuba, is a good example of what he, at
least, was imagining as this new style of music. He explains how “primitive” elements taken from
traditional Cuban music form the basis of the Sones, but that certain composers’ “wide musical
experience” allows influence from Italian and Spanish melody and harmony, thus “synthesising” the
two extremes. He calls the result “cultivated”, but ultimately based very strongly on the non-Western,
or the non-cultivated.86 It was a style of music that he believed was truly universal.
Cowell’s study on the Sones was a prelude to his article published in 1933, “Towards Neo-
primitivism”, which was something of a manifesto.87 It pointed out that composers who had displayed
primitivist tendencies were further complicating music rather than simplifying it, and that the
increased knowledge of the aesthetic ability and techniques of non-Western cultures which had been
acquired during the 1920s should instead be used to create a “Neo-primitivist” movement. This would
focus on those “materials common to the music of all the people of the world, to build a new music
particularly related to our own century”.88
He undermined the stereotypical view of primitive musics, as the “uncontrolled expression of wild,
unbridled, savage feeling”, by looking at the “highly developed” techniques which must in some cases
“demand strict adherence”.89 He discussed elements including the priority given to melody and
rhythm, the use of free polyphony in place of major, minor or modal harmonies, rhythmic
complexities including “syncopations, poly-rhythms and cross-rhythms”90 and a wide range of sound
techniques including vocal slides, tone clusters and percussive chords. He pointed toward seven
composers from Russia and America who came closer to this Neo-primitive style than any in Europe,
only three of whom, Alexander Mossolov, Dmitri Shostakovich and Hans Eisler, are well-known
today.91
Cowell’s ability to draw parallels between primitive music and that of the West comes no doubt from
his earlier groundbreaking manifesto, New Musical Resources.92 In it he sought a theoretical
explanation for the sounds venturing outside the classic harmonic structure, believing that composers
must use these with purpose rather than simply for effect.93 He demonstrated the influence of the
overtone series on “musical materials of all ages”, created “in many different manners”,94 and argued
that the human ear had become slowly acquainted with them, accepting each new one, so that the
86
Henry Cowell, ‘The Sones of Cuba’, Modern Music 8 (1931): 45-47.
87
Cowell, ‘Towards Neo-primitivism’, 150-152.
88
Cowell, ‘Towards Neo-primitivism’, 149.
89
90
91
The others included Vladimir Vogel of Russia, and Ferenc Szabo and Imre Weisshaus of Hungary (Cowell,
‘Towards Neo-primitivism’, 153)
92
Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1996). Written in 1919 and
first published in 1930.
93
This point can be related to the use of elements from primitive cultures simply as exotic effect.
94
16
points between consonance and dissonance depend upon the listener and his times. This allowed for
the acknowledgement of those sounds created by peoples outside the Western tradition as sounds that
make up the ever-expanding palette of human creation.
This concept overlapped with ideas of other composers of the 1930s. André Jolivet and Olivier
Messiaen, for example, created the compositional group La Jeune France with the purpose of
communicating through music to a wider circle of people by “laying greater stress on the deeper
human and spiritual values”.95 In particular, along with Edgard Varèse and Alejo Carpentier, Jolivet
took an interest in pagan mythology and its primitive rites, and used musical elements from these
cultural practices.96
The musical concepts of primitivism and universalism in the 1930s can also be linked with the
philosophical concept of Mediterranean humanism. This was a belief in the collective of nations
which border the Mediterranean as having a strength and intelligence originating in the culture of
Ancient Greece. It emerged as a political opposition to Fascist parties in Germany, Italy and Spain,
and to colonial endeavours in North Africa. It was strongly associated with Albert Camus, who in the
1930s was a member of the Algerian Communist Party and General Secretary of the Maison de la
Culture, or community arts centre of Algiers. At the 1937 opening of the centre, Camus gave a lecture
on Mediterranean culture, in which he expounded his ideas on humanism.97 He discussed the current
trend of “internationalism”, which he saw as resisting the abstract creation of nations. He called
instead for a collective culture based not on national identity, but on geographical identity. In the
Mediterranean culture, this was the shared coastline and the sun that shone stronger there than further
north. He aligned the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini with that of the Roman Empire, contrasting it
with the “essential genius of Greece” and a society and exchange of ideas that were “diffuse and
turbulent” rather than “classical and well-ordered”. He emphasised the link between the East and the
West which occurred only in this corner of Europe, and he pointed to the Spanish Civil War, which at
that point had been raging for a year, as a demonstration of the fight for collectivism. The lecture is
understood to have revealed Camus’ “colonial mentality” as expressed later in The Outsider (1942)
and The Plague (1947).98
This context is relevant to a study of Maurice Ohana, whose aesthetic ideas had much in common
with those of Camus. In 1948 Ohana wrote a musical score for an adaption of The Plague,99
demonstrating his interest, as Rae notes, in works which “present a discourse on the problems of the
95
Myers, Music in France, 95.
96
See Theo Hirsbrunner, ‘Le retour de la magie dans la musique: La constellation Varèse—Jolivet—Messiaen’,
Dissonance 79 (2003): 4-9 and Rae, Music, 31-2.
97
Foxlee, Albert Camus, 37-49.
98
Foxlee, Albert Camus, 51.
99
Adaption by Claudine Chonez. Ohana’s work was premièred on French radio in 1949, but remained
unpublished and the instruments unknown (see Rae, Music, 266).
17
human condition”.100 The ideals of a Mediterranean culture were also consistent with the ideas behind
the establishment of the Zodiac Group in 1947, which consisted of five members united by their
backgrounds or interest in southern Europe. They aimed to stand up against Teutonic culture and to
return to a more instinctive, a less “well-ordered”, approach to music.101
Thus the concepts of Neo-primitivism and Mediterranean humanism provide a social and political
context for understanding the developing ideas and early music of Maurice Ohana, as he too was
searching for what was universal in music and for that which had existed in its primitive origins. His
rejection of rigid national traditions, or his combination of traditions, was an attempt to create a
“universal” music. It is important to note, however, that in his formative period he was doing so in a
specifically Spanish context.
Hispanic Primitivisms
Hispanic constructions of primitivism have much in common with the concept of universalism. The
precedents to Hispanic primitivism can be traced back to the use of folk music as an exotic flavour in
central European music in the nineteenth century. This primarily consisted of the appropriation of
individual melodic lines and rhythmic figures, such as can be seen in Bizet’s Carmen.102 Over the turn
of the century, the use and synthesis of a more diverse range of sources resulted in an abstraction of
such material, maintaining the Spanish flavour but creating rhythmic complexes and original melodies
to portray it. The beginnings of this “post-exoticism” can be seen in works such as Emmanuel
Chabrier’s Espan͂a (1883), Debussy’s Ibéria (1905) and Albeniz’s Iberia (1909).103
These works engaged with the primitive construction of Spanish flamenco dance which was prevalent
at the time. There had been a particular fascination with this since the Universal Exposition in Paris in
1889, where gypsy performances had been staged in the central theatre.104 Their dances were
associated with a primitive culture because they were perceived as being “authentic”, originating in
Moorish and Pre-Roman civilisations, and were performed by gypsies who lived in “deeply dug
grottoes”.105 As well as these flamenco concerts there had been the bullfighting spectacles, of which
there was daily coverage in the press.106 Both traditions had come to represent Spanish culture, and
were conflated from the outset with perceived primitive ways of life.
100
Rae, Music, 33.
101
Rae, Dutilleux, 24.
102
McClary, Georges Bizet, 51-2.
103
See Chase, Spain, 297 and Michael Christoforidis, ‘ “Invasion of the Barbarians”: Spanish Composers and
Challenges to exoticism in belle-époque Paris’, Context: A Journal of Music Research 29-30 (2005): 112-113.
104
Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester
Press, 2005), 261.
105
Fauser, Musical Encounters, 263-4.
106
Fauser, Musical Encounters, n261.
18
At the turn of the century, the Spanish cultural presence in Paris was so strong that its music was seen
as equivalent to a type of regional French music.107 Paris was the “true cultural metropolis of Spain”
to the extent that Spanish composers were working there to discover their own national style.108
However, as has been noted, this style was romanticised and set within an exotic construction.
Perhaps in reaction to this, composers such as Ravel and Falla sought to portray the “real” Spain, that
which expressed its “dry and bare earth” and “the anguish of their superstitious souls”.109 Such a
description, although romanticised in itself, suggests a cultural identity that was indeed conscious of
and which strove to express its primitive roots.
Another important influence in the developing primitive construction of Spanish culture was
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Falla was at the première in 1913, and was inspired to take its primitivist
aesthetic into his interpretation of Spanish flamenco over the next decade. This is evident in his works
including the “Polo” from the Seven Spanish Folksongs (1914), El Amor Brujo (1915 and revised
1925), The Three-Cornered Hat (1919) and Fantasia Baetica (1919). In contrast to the prevailing
exotic stereotype, Falla posited the roots of flamenco in Byzantine church music, Moorish music and
Indian music, as introduced to Europe by gypsies 500 years earlier.110
There are commentators who deny the possibility or significance of these early influences on the
creation of flamenco,111 emphasising instead the contribution of Andalusian gypsy communities from
the fifteenth century. It was generally agreed that as a “persecuted subculture... (they) developed a
song repertory of a special character, the essence of which, rooted in poverty, expressed the plight of
their existence”.112 This was more specifically seen as the beginnings of Cante Jondo, or “Deep Song”,
a particularly emotional genre of Flamenco. Other genres evolved as musical and performative styles
over the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, by which time there was a hybridisation of
flamenco genres with more popular musical styles, such as the aflamencado song called the Cuplé.113
Along with flamenco and the bullfight, this came to represent exotic stereotypes of Spanishness. At
the turn of the century there was an intellectual backlash against these in the form of a movement
known as Antiflamenquismo,114 and Falla’s primitivist interpretation of flamenco was a reaction to this.
As an artistic and intellectual reorientation to vindicate the cultural worth of flamenco, he and García
107
Bempéchat, ‘Toward a Breton Musical Patrimony’, 1-38. Also see note 19, page 5.
108
Pistone, ‘Manuel de Falla’, 75-6.
109
René Chalupt, ‘L’Espagne dans la musique française’, Revue Musicale, 123, no. 81-88 (1933): 86.
110
Christoforidis, ‘Manuel de Falla’, 232.
111
Bernard Leblon, Gypsies and Flamenco – The emergence of the art of flamenco in Andalusia (Hertfordshire:
University of Hertfordshire Press, 1995), 84-91.
112
Ole Kongsted, ‘Flamenco’, New Grove Dictionary, 920.
113
114
Adrian Shubert, Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish bullfight (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 1-2 and Sandra Alvarez, Tauromachie et Flamenco: Polémiques et Clichés (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 2007), 157.
19
Lorca organised the Cante Jondo competition in 1922 to advocate the genre as an “Andalusian
Primitive Song”. García Lorca defined their interpretation of Flamenco in the following way:
The name Deep Song is given to a group of Andalusian songs whose genuine, perfect prototype is the
gypsy siguiriya. The siguiriya gave rise to other songs still sung by the people: polos, martinetes,
carceleras, and soleares...The essential difference between Deep Song and flamenco is that the origins
of the former must be sought in the primitive musical systems of India, in the very first manifestations
of song, while flamenco, a mere consequence of Deep Song, did not acquire its definitive form until the
eighteenth century. 115
Alongside the concept of primitivism, it is important to note the Neo-classical influence in Falla’s
work from this period. Following Felipe Pedrell, Falla used elements of pre-Romantic art music
because, like folk music, it was deemed to be representative of the Spanish people. However, because
its sources are specifically Spanish, it has been called an Hispanic Neo-classicism.116 It was evident in
his El amor brujo, described by flamenco critic Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum as “a series of
dramatic extremeses, seventeenth-century style vignettes strung together through cante and baile”.117
It was consolidated however in his Master Peter’s Puppet Show (1923) and his Concerto for
harpsichord and five instruments (1926). These works maintain primitivist and folk elements, at times
related to flamenco.118 However, they also reproduce sixteenth- and seventeenth-century songs, as
well as the work of Scarlatti in the eighteenth-century, both directly and abstractly. They make use of
classical form and phrasing, employing counterpoint and typical rhythmic patterns such as the
hemiola, and use a sparse instrumentation.119 Falla’s attempt to bring together disparate elements of a
culture in these works, combining primitive and classical sources, was framed as an Hispanic
universalist agenda.
The influence of Stravinsky and Falla was widespread both within Europe and internationally; they
were the instigators of a fusion between traditional Hispanic and modern music. Catalan composer
Roberto Gerhard, a disciple of Pedrell, Falla and Schoenberg, and described as “the most significant
figure of the generation after Falla”, was committed to internationalising his native folk music.120
Rodolfo Halffter took a diverse education from Schoenberg, Debussy and Falla and then moved to
Mexico, where his combination of serial and Spanish Neo-classical musical traits had a significant
115
Christopher Maurer, ed. In Search of Duende: Prose and Poetry of Federico García Lorca (New York: New
Directions Publications, 2010), 3.
116
Christoforidis, ‘ “Siete Canciones” ’, 229.
117
Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum, Antonia Mercé, La Argentina - Flamenco and the Spanish Avant Garde
(London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 77 and Hess, Manuel de Falla, 54.
118
For example, the first movement of the Concerto opens with the repetition of a single note and of short
phrases. For a list of primitivist musical elements see Christoforidis, ‘Manuel de Falla’, 233.
119
120
Marco, Spanish Music, 104-5.
20
impact.121 Both of these composers had been exiled from Spain following the Civil War, an
experience which would have heightened the importance for them of bringing Spanish culture to an
international stage. Ernesto Halffter’s Sinfonietta (1925), a landmark work of Hispanic Neo-
classicism, was stylistically indebted to the music of Stravinsky, Falla and Scarlatti.122 There was also
a significant influence of Falla and Stravinsky on native Latin American composers, including Carlos
Chávez, Juan José Castro and Alberto Ginastera. These composers brought the roots of various
Hispanic and South American traditions together within a modern context or technique, seeking to
create something which was at once new and meaningful.123
The connection between Maurice Ohana’s Spanish roots and his music was therefore not just a result
of his personal background, but something which was conditioned by the milieu from which he
emerged. The primitive construction of Spanish culture, and in particular of flamenco and associated
dance styles, had been well established since the nineteenth century. Native Hispanic composers were
conscious of the stereotypes that had been created, and they sought to mitigate the level of exoticism
in their international projection by highlighting instead the essence of their national traditions. They
combined these with Spanish elements of the pre-Romantic era and their aesthetic orientation was
shaped by the Nationalist/Universalist agenda of Falla. Ohana, being of the same generation as
Gerhard and Halffter, identified strongly with this. A study of three of his works will explore how
these ideas shaped his early compositional output.
121
Marco, Spanish Music, 106-7.
122
Marco, Spanish Music, 105-6
123
This construction also had a marked impact on a younger generation of Parisian and New York-based
composers including Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland and Paul Bowles.
21
Chapter Three: Ohana and the concept of Hispanic Primitivism: a view through three works of
his formative period
Having examined the early biography of Maurice Ohana and the broader context of primitivism, an
exploration of their relevance to his early works can now be attempted. By examining Enterrar y
Callar, the Sonatine Monodique and more extensively the Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, I will
endeavour to outline how primitivism, more specifically Hispanic primitivism, and Neo-classicism
shaped elements of Ohana’s early style.
Cante Jondo
Critical to this examination is a musical understanding of the Spanish flamenco tradition, as it is at the
heart of Ohana’s idea of primitivism at the time. As discussed in the previous chapter, the origins of
the form are a subject of debate. It is important to note that Ohana followed Falla and García Lorca in
believing that the roots of flamenco were to be found in the “primitive musical systems of India, that
is in the first manifestations of song”, and that they were influenced by African, Arabic and Byzantine
musical traditions.124
Cante Jondo, otherwise known as palos,125 are a collection of song forms within the musical style of
Flamenco. They are sung, often with guitar accompaniment. They begin with the heavily ornamented
exclamatory opening by the vocalist called the salida.126 The interaction between vocalist and guitarist
is central. The guitar part has a percussive element but also uses complex arpeggiations and fiorituras,
as well as a variety of strumming patterns and melodies. Thus it drives the rhythm but also provides
counterpoint to the singer.127 Other musical characteristics include modal harmony, melody of a
restricted tessitura, often with microtonal inflections, alternating binary-ternary metres, crossrhythms
and the repetition of single notes. Ornamentation is heavy, most often including appoggiaturas and
accatiaturas on the major or minor 2nd.128
The connection between flamenco, more specifically Cante Jondo, and the concept of primitivism
hinges not only on the potential primitive origins of the musical style, but on the textual emphasis on
the themes of life, death and fate.129 Ohana believed that music was primarily a means of
communication,130 and he employed primitive sources because they could express fundamental ideas
directly, rather than through an imposed system. For him, Cante Jondo palos achieved this immediate
124
125
José Manuel Gamboa, et. al., Cante por Cante (Madrid: Discolibro didáctico de Flamenco, 2002 ), 17.
126
Gamboa, Cante por Cante, 6.
127
Maurer, In Search of duende, 28-29.
128
Gamboa, Cante por Cante, 8-17 and Montes, ‘Manuel de Falla’, 476-7.
129
Bennett Thomas Zussman, ‘The Siguiriyas Song Form in Flamenco Guitar: a Historical and Comparative
Study’ (Masters Thesis, San José State University, 1995), 33.
130
Charles, ‘Sourciers’, 479.
22
expression, as they were “the most elevated and the most authentic music of our sound world”.131
They were also associated with the primitivist’s deification of the child, who will communicate purely
with non-verbal sound before learning the complex systems of language.132 Ohana reflected on this in
his description of Cante Jondo as “rediscovering the cry with which men communicated before the
invention of the word”.133 It is manifested literally in flamenco when non-verbal cries are employed,
such as the opening salida and the extended ornaments drawing out particularly expressive phrases.
Music as communication was also closely connected with the idea of the duende. Spanish for
“demon”, García Lorca used this term to refer to the state in which a flamenco performer can best
communicate emotions. He saw it as a “power” that emanates from “the most ancient culture”, and
that can inhabit a performer, inspiring them towards “spontaneous creation”.134 It is important to note
that, in search of its own duende, García Lorca’s prose and poetry is mediated by Neo-classical
allusions, evoking the Italian Renaissance and Spanish Baroque styles.135 Thus, like Falla and Ohana,
he too admitted Neo-classicism into his construction of primitivism.
Although there have been debates over the extent to which flamenco is used in Ohana’s work,136 given
his belief in its primitive origins and its emotional and communicative potential, it is at the crux of his
attempt to connect with our primitive nature. According to Rae, flamenco influences appear in every
published work up until 1950, however the following exploration will focus only on the significance
of the Saeta in Enterrar y Callar, the Bulería, Debla, Siguiriya and Soleá in the Sonatine Monodique
and the pervasive use of the Siguiriya and the broader traditions of Cante Jondo palos in the Llanto. It
will also seek to demonstrate how constructions of Hispanic primitivism and Neo-classicism informed
aspects of Ohana’s works.
Enterrar y Callar
In seeking to create music that appeals to a broader, universal community, the concept of primitivism
is concerned with expressing a contemporary sensibility. For Ohana, this was important: in an
interview in 1971 he stated that “an artist of a certain era must report on his time” because these sorts
of reflections could carry more weight than a journalistic or historical piece.137 This belief was at the
heart of his desire to create music that resonated with a wider audience.
131
Montes, ‘Manuel de Falla’, 481.
132
See Goldwater, Primitivism.
133
François-Bernard Mache, ‘Maurice Ohana – novembre 1971’, Revue Musicale 314-315 (1978): 111.
134
Maurer, In Search of Duende, 57.
135
Such allusions are achieved by imitating the musical rhythm, visual perspective or imagery associated with
the paintings, engravings and dance forms of these styles. See Christopher Maurer, ‘Poetry’, A Companion to
Federico García Lorca (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007), 18.
136
Frederic Deval, De Federico García Lorca à Maurice Ohana (Madrid: Actes Sud, 1992), 96-8.
137
23
In his formative period, he strove to depict the disillusionment of war. This was important to him as a
result of his experience of service in World War II, but the Spanish Civil War and the impact of
Franco’s regime on the culture and identity of Spain was also a significant influence.138 He had a great
respect for the Spanish painter Goya whose etchings “The Disasters of War”, in his opinion “say more
(about the Spanish occupation)...than many pages of historical works”.139
It was one of these etchings that inspired his Enterrar y Callar, composed in 1944. Spanish for “To
Bury Them and Say Nothing”, this work for solo piano borrowed its title and its character from
Goya’s piece which has been described by Caroline Rae as “a monstrous pile of mutilated corpses
overlooked by two figures in hopeless despair” (see Figure 1).140
The despair inherent in utter chaos and disillusion was something that both artists strove to express.
Goya did it through images so stark that they pointed uninhibitedly at the potential for lack of
humanity in international conflict. In his depictions of the Franco-Spanish war of the early nineteenth
century, he proved himself “neither pro-Spanish nor pro-French”, but simply “against war”.141
Figure 1 Goya, “Enterrar y Callar” The Disaster of War (1810)
Ohana created an unsettled atmosphere in Enterrar y Callar by basing it on musical elements which
were at once recognisable but distorted. This is evident in his use of the Andalusian Saeta, a palo of
Cante Jondo, with a sarabande rhythm. Spanish for ‘arrow’, the Saeta is for solo voice, and is used in
138
Rae, Music, 12-13. For general impact of the Civil War on Spanish composers, see Marco, Spanish Music, 9.
139
140
Rae, Music, 36.
141
Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 292.
24
Andalusian religious processions during Holy Week. Nina Danino describes it as a “sung lament” to
the “emblem of sorrow”, and it is manifested in the Enterrar in outbursts of sound amidst a slow and
sombre rhythm. The latter is derived from the sarabande, which originated in a Spanish dance and was
popular in guitar works of the seventeenth century.142 While it was usually a dotted rhythm in 3/4 with
the emphasis on the second beat, here Ohana has distorted it by slowing it down, as had been used in
European Baroque practice, and using a 6/4 time signature (see Figure 2).143 He was thus presenting
the tradition of the flamenco Saeta embedded in the context of Spanish pre-Romantic art music.
This Neo-classical framework of the Enterrar can be interpreted as a homage to Goya, whose relation
to Neo-classicism in the visual arts was one of his defining traits. His use of it was not strict because
his subject matter was too disruptive and his use of forms and shapes distorted.144 Ohana too distorted
the sarabande by modifying its meter and interrupting it with exclamations of the Saeta, and thus in
paralleling Goya he discovered a more profound conceptual basis for his Neo-classical allusions. The
inspiration of Goya had been used before in Hispanic modernist constructions of Neo-classicism,
including Pablo Picasso’s and Falla’s contributions to the landmark ballet The Three-Cornered Hat.145
A more contemporary parallel to Goya’s etching is Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which drew on
Hispanic primitive and Neo-classical influences and formed the centrepiece of the Spanish
Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition at the height of the Spanish Civil War.146
Figure 2 Ohana, Enterrar y Callar, bars 1-2147
Just as writers on Goya have noted his critique of the Catholic church through particular depictions of
the clergy,148 Ohana’s use of the Saeta could also be interpreted as a contemporary critique of the
142
Richard Hudson, ‘Sarabande’, New Grove Dictionary, 273.
143
Rae, Music, 73.
144
Hughes, Goya, 206.
145
Werner Hoffman, ‘Picasso's “Guernica” in Its Historical Context’, Artibus et Historiae 4, no. 7 (1983): 141
and Chase, Spain, 190.
146
James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 33.
147
Rae, Music, 73.
25
theatrical side to the Catholic procession. The traditional form has been described as a “vernacular
form of sacred song...sung from the streets, balconies and pavements”,149 so traditionally it allowed
for spontaneous cries directed toward the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ from people on the streets. In
Ohana’s time however, professional singers were being planted along the route rather than allowing
the “spontaneous” interpretations to be made by onlookers.150 Just as there is disillusion to be
discovered in a tradition that loses part of its meaning through artificial recreation, there is disillusion
to be discovered in a war that doesn’t justify its level of destruction. Ohana may have therefore used
this palo of Cante Jondo, which he believed to have primitive origins, as a way of commenting on the
potential for disillusion within society.
Sonatine Monodique
The concept of primitivism also informed Ohana’s attitude toward the relationship between composer
and work. Ohana believed there was “too much personalisation” in the reception of works, and that
instead the composer should “disappear completely”, that his activity should be forgotten, allowing
the work to express what the receiver would have it say.151 Such depersonalisation would help erase
any cultural labels or contexts, and facilitate Ohana’s search for music that was a-cultural and
elemental in its expression. Although he arrived at these ideas through the prism of primitivism, they
prefigure certain concepts of the impersonal, a-national aesthetic of the younger generation of post-
war serialists.152
Ohana’s 1944 composition Sonatine Monodique for solo piano is a good example of this aesthetic
idea. Described as a “game”153 and a “tongue-in-cheek, compositional study”,154 it explores the
different potentials of monodic texture by having no note sounded at the same time as another, unless
they are in unison or at the octave. He uses an amalgamation of forms, including sonata form in the
first movement and binary form in the second, then theme and variation in the third and fourth
movements.155 For example, in Figure 3 the melody at Tempo I returns fifteen bars later in a variation,
doubled at the octave, ornamented with grace notes and in counterpoint with the off-beat presentation
of another melodic idea of the movement.
148
‘I Saw it: The Invented Realities of Goya’s Disasters of War’,
http://web.grinnell.edu/faulconergallery/goya/essays/iconography.htm (accessed 25 May 2011).
149
Nina Danino, ‘Stabat Mater – A Nameless Place’, The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual
Difference, ed. Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 150.
150
Danino, ‘Stabat Mater’, 151.
151
Charles, ‘Sourciers’, 481-2.
152
Most notably Pierre Boulez. See Mark Carroll, ‘Serialism, Scientism and the Post-War World View’, Music
and Ideology in Cold War Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141-164.
153
154
Rae, Music, 74.
155
26
Figure 3 Sonatine Monodique, 4th Movt, bars 121-150.
Within these formal parameters, Ohana utilises the rhythm and character of traditional Spanish folk
songs, including the Jota, the Bulería, the Siguiriya, the Debla and the Soleá.156 They are alluded to in
the alternating binary/ternary meters in Figure 4, a dislocation of the binary/ternary rhythmic tensions
found in the typical compás, or rhythmic framework, of the Siguiriya, Debla and Soleá.157 There are
also exchanges between sections that resemble the exchange between the rhythmic guitar and the
heavily ornamented vocal parts, for example the semiquaver passage followed by a heavily
ornamented melody in Figure 5. In bar 19 of this excerpt, the repetition of a single note is also a
typical element of Cante Jondo palos.158
156
Rae, Music, 74-5.
157
Gamboa, Cante por Cante, 42-3, 52-5.
158
Montes, Manuel de Falla, 476.
27
Figure 4 Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 4th Movt bars 1-5.
Figure 5 Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 2nd Movt, bars 7-23.
The Sonatine also demonstrates Ohana’s concept of Spanish primitivism at a further level. While
primitivism strove to communicate to a universal, or international, community using primitive
elements common to all musics, Ohana strove to synthesise elements from a range of styles. In the
Sonatine, he did this by bringing together form and rhythm from both Western and folk traditions, and
conflating variegated regional sources of folk music, that is the use of both the Jota, which originates
as a dance in central Spain, certain palos of Cante Jondo which have their origins in southern Spain,
and perhaps even a reference to the northern Basque Zortzico which was typified by its quintuple
meter alternating between binary and ternary rhythms, as demonstrated in Figure 4.159 Moreover, by
grouping these diverse traditions around the one simple and ultimately meaningless harmonic
159
Denis Laborde, ‘Basque Music’, New Grove Dictionary, 847.
28
principle, Ohana was making them “co-exist with a creative thought process which fundamentally has
nothing to do with them”.160 The concept of Universalism therefore seems appropriate, because he
was concerned with bringing together disparate though culturally contiguous folk sources framed by
Neo-classical forms and an abstract harmonic principle.
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
The work which provides the most potential for exploring and understanding Ohana’s use of Hispanic
primitivism in his formative period is the Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. It is considered by his
student Edith Canat de Chizy to be the “the most profound manifestation of his Iberian identity”.161
Composed in 1950, this work was commissioned by the Paris Conservatorium to be a “large work for
chorus and orchestra” in a Spanish character.162 Ohana chose as his text the poem of the same name
by García Lorca, written as a lament for the bullfighter and poet Mejías who was gored to death in
1934. Mejías had been a well-loved character in Spain, but this was not unusual for a successful
matador, who usually held a highly respected position within the community. 163 Mejías however was
also the founder of an Andalusian flamenco dance school and a published poet, achievements that
perhaps gained him a particularly wide circle of admirers. As a result, his death had an impact on
intellectual and musical circles, in particular on fellow writers and members of the literary
“Generation of 1927”, including Rafael Alberti, Jose Bergamin, and García Lorca, and members of its
musical equivalent, the “Group of Eight”, including Rodolfo Halffter.
In the lead-up to Ohana composing this work, his encounters with L’Argentinita and Roy Campbell
were critical. While the former lent him a copy of García Lorca’s poem Llanto in 1936, it wasn’t until
discussing it with the latter in 1943 that Ohana felt compelled to use it. He didn’t change in any way
the text of the poem, and in fact he allowed his composition to be formed around it, so that
structurally it resembles a collaboration with the poet. The character of Mejías informs both the text
and the music, from the choice of mythological images to the aesthetic and stylistic construction of
flamenco. The Spanish heritage of Ohana, García Lorca (and even Mejías) ensures that every aspect
of the work is soaked with references to their cultural history, and in particular to its roots in pagan
ritual, mythology, music and contemporary constructions of Hispanic primitivism.
Ohana’s Hispanic Neo-classical influence, strongly informed by Manuel de Falla, also contributes to
the concept of universalism in this work. As with Enterrar and the Sonatine, Ohana uses pre-
Romantic Hispanic allusions in tandem with Spanish folk sources, bringing together seemingly
disparate elements of the Hispanic culture. There are clear parallels with Falla’s construction of
160
161
Chizy, Maurice Ohana, 67
162
Rae, Music, 80. The work was scored for reduced orchestra, harpsichord, female choir, baritone and narrator.
163
Shubert, Death and Money, 52.
29
Hispanic Neo-classicism in Master Peter’s Puppet Show and Concerto for harpsichord and five
instruments. For example, there is reduced instrumentation, with single woodwind and reduced strings,
and the use of instruments as soloists. The influence of plainchant has also been suggested in the
repeated line of the first movement, “A las cinco de la tarde”, coinciding with the part of the
Trujaman character in Master Peter, and with the second movement of the Concerto.164 Originally the
Llanto was subtitled as an Oratorio,165 although this is missing from the modern orchestral score.
Musically the parallels with this form are loose, although they do include the combination of choir,
instrumental ensemble and soloists, and the alternation of recitative sections and aria-like solos in the
baritone. The subtitle was more likely informed by the quasi-religious context of the poem,
interpreting the bullfight as a ritual sacrifice. This will be explored further below. In general, although
Neo-classical sources inform the Spanish character of this work, unlike Enterrar and the Sonatine, its
structural freedom transcends the Neo-classical formal parameters of the early pieces.
Falla’s use of traditional Spanish sources also informed Ohana’s use of the flamenco tradition in his
Llanto. Falla didn’t always believe in literally recreating popular styles; instead, he would at times use
their musical parameters eclectically, alluding to their “sounds and the rhythm in their very
essence...so that the music is not caricatured”.166 Ohana found in this approach “a confirmation of the
possibilities of his musical thought”,167 and thus like Falla his adaption of flamenco elements is not a
literal one.
However, of all Ohana’s Hispanic works, the Llanto uses Cante Jondo elements most extensively. It is
a work that is “dramatic and serious”, as is typical of this style of flamenco.168 This is reflected in his
stated desire to “return to a sensual music, resolutely full of emotion”.169 His choice of text is critical:
Lorca’s poem relates not only the journey of Mejias as he is gored, taken to hospital, dies and is
separated body from spirit, but it relates the emotional journey of a friend, played by the baritone and
the narrator, as he deals with the event afterwards. In the first movement the friend takes in the news,
and in the second he begins to mourn Mejías’ memory. In the third movement he wonders how he can
ever get over the event, but in the fourth he worries that the memory will disappear completely.170 It is
thus the universal experience of grieving that Ohana is setting to music.
On a musical level, there are comparisons to make with certain Cante Jondo palos in its form, melody,
harmony, rhythm, instrumentation and ornamentation. The form of each individual movement is
164
Rae, Music, 77 and see Christoforidis, Michael’. Aspects of the Creative Process in Manuel de Falla’s El
retablo de Maese Pedro and Concerto’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1997).
165
Deval, De Federico García Lorca, 70.
166
167
168
Zussman, ‘Siguiriyas’, 33.
169
170
Anderson, Lorca's Late Poetry, 171-232.
30
allowed to construct itself around the text, however across the work as a whole, formal elements of
various palos can be traced.171 The Seguiriya, Soleá and Bulería usually begin with a guitar
introduction, with the singer accompanying it on long, wordless vocalisations. As had already been
the case in Falla’s Master Peter and the Concerto, the harpsichord fills the role of the guitar
throughout the work,172 often playing alone with the singer or narrator, inserting chords and
ornamentation. It can be seen clearly in Figure 6 when the harpsichord provides chordal
accompaniment to the baritone. While the Llanto has an orchestral introduction leading into the
singer’s salida, the harpsichord is the only instrument not marked ‘piano’, so it still dominates the
texture, evoking the gesture of the traditional guitar introduction.
Figure 6 Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 123-7.
After the opening salida, the aforementioned palos of Cante Jondo would then proceed with a clear
beginning and climax, followed by a lessening of emotional expression. In the Llanto, the first and
second movements equate with the main part of the song, leading to the moment of climax which is
the narrator alone in the third movement; Ohana allows the intensity of the poetry to speak for itself,
and the extended musical silence after the complexity of the second movement is as startling as a
climactic chord. Throughout these sections of the palos, audience interjections, known as jaleos, may
171
For a general outline of Cante Jondo palos, see Gamboa, Cante por Cante, 6-7.
172
See Christoforidis, ‘Aspects of the Creative Process’.
31
be heard as encouragement to the performers, just as the crowd will cry out during a bullfight.173 The
chorus’ repeated refrain of “A las cinco de la tarde” may be read as an echo of this tradition of
audience participation. The relaxation of emotion then occurs in the fourth movement, with a quiet
variation of the main theme, as can be seen in the clarinet part of Figure 7.
Figure 7 Ohana, Llanto, 3rd Movt, bars 1-8.
The closing of these palos is traditionally achieved with thematic variation or a personal refrain
attached to the traditional lyrics. It could be argued that here the orchestral conclusion following the
narrator’s final words fulfils both these roles. The main theme comes in again, but in a full-orchestral,
grandiose style, played in the trumpet and accompanied only by extended chords (see Figure 8). It
takes Lorca’s text, which ends quietly with the image of a “sad breeze in the olive trees”, and adds
Ohana’s personal musical refrain, which is one of strength, achievement and arrival rather than of
quiet reflection.
Melodically and harmonically, the Llanto is constructed based on what is known as the Andalusian
scale. This is a conflation of the Phrygian mode and the Arabian Hijaz mode, as demonstrated by
Spanish folklorist Josep Criville i Bargallo.174 It can be seen within the thematic figures on which the
piece is built. The main theme, which is introduced by the trumpet in bars 18-24 (see Figure 9,
continuing in Figure 10), is based on the Phrygian scale on B, but with an added tritone. It has been
suggested by Christine Prost that the tritone is also evocative of the Andalusian scale, as a variation
on the descending pattern of A-G-F-E, a distinctive cadential formula employed in many palos.175 See
for example in Figure 9 the tritone between the F in the trumpet solo against the B in the strings,
resolving down to a Major third. In Figure 10, the extended ornament of the sextuplet plays around
the tritone interval again.
173
For jaleos, see Angela Arranz Del Barrio, El Baile Flamenco, (Madrid: Librerías Deportivas Esteban Sanz,
1998), 82 and for audience interjections during a bullfight, see Shubert, Death and Money, 126.
174
Josep Crivelli Bargallo, ‘Les Cuatro Piezas Espagnolas de Manuel de Falla’, Manuel de Falla: latinité et
universalité, ed. Louis Jambou (Paris: Presses de l'Université́ de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999): 385.
175
Rae, Music, 100 n33.
32
Figure 8 Ohana, Llanto, 4th Movt, bars 120-5.
33
34
Modal harmonies are also suggested in the repeated “A las cinco de la tarde” by emphasising the flat
7th and the major and minor 2nd intervals, which essentially replace the 5th as the dominant. This can
be seen in Figure 11 where the choir highlights the C sharp, with major 2nd inflections above and
below this pitch, above the B in the bass.
35
Rhythmically, the allusion to Cante Jondo palos is not always explicit, however passages of the
Llanto evoke the compás of the Siguiriya. This has 12 beats, often at a slow tempo, with the cycle of
accents 2-2-3-3-2, and a frequent use of crossrhythms.176 This is clearest in the first movement where
the repeated phrase “A las cinco de la tarde” outlines the 12-beat phrases, and is sung in 6/8 while the
instrumental accompaniment is in 3/4 (see Figure 11). The rhythmic inflection of the Siguiriya is
emphasised by strumming and percussive effects on the guitar, known as golpe, or by heel tapping or
hand clapping, and these are recreated most often in the Llanto in the percussion section. Traditionally
they are employed as techniques in which the metrical cycle is accented, or to provide a counter
rhythm, as is the case in the timbales in Figure 12.177
Given Ohana’s views on the primitive origins of Cante Jondo, his extensive use of it in this work
creates a solid link between the Llanto and Hispanic primitivism. Equally important in creating this
link is the background of the bullfighting tradition, and the ways in which Ohana alludes to it
musically. Anderson has written a detailed analysis of the connections between Lorca’s text and
various interpretations of bullfighting and its origins; most important for the present discussion is the
primitive, or “Neolithic” theory, which was at its height amongst Spanish intellectuals at the time
García Lorca was writing in the early 1930s.178 It has no doubt informed his choice of images, which
are largely taken from mythology and the rite of sacrifice. This primitive interpretation of the bullfight
176
Gamboa, Cante por Cante, 54-5.
177
Zussman, ‘Siguiriyas’, 44.
178
Timothy Mitchell, ‘Bullfighting: The Ritual Origin of Scholarly Myths’, Journal of American Folklore 99,
no. 394 (1996): 395 and Anderson, Late Poetry, 158-171. Anderson explains that in pagan religion the moon
was worshipped as the goddess who overlooks the changing of the seasons, a cycle which was integral to the
growth of crops and thus to the survival of mankind. The death and rebirth of her son was critical to the cycle
beginning again. The practice of ritual sacrifice came about to ensure that the son was killed and the seasons
continued to change, and as the moon goddess was often pictured as a cow, and the son therefore as a bull, so
came about the practice of ritual bull slaughter. Although there is no direct link between modern bullfighting,
which emerged in the eighteenth century, and this ritual that disappeared thirteen centuries earlier, the essential
idea of an animal slaughtered by a single man in a priestly position with crowds watching on, is enough of a
parallel to have created this theory of origin.
36
is then reflected in Ohana’s musical setting. Ritualistic elements are strong throughout the work,
perhaps even with passing references to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in their use of repetition and
cross-rhythms during passages of the first and second movements. As Anderson points out, García
Lorca doesn’t actually state that Mejias has died,179 but Ohana suggests this by creating a frenzy of
primitivist ritual music that builds to a climax and suddenly dissipates (see Figure 13a and Figure
13b).
Figure 13a Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 201-4.
179
Anderson, Late Poetry, 182.
37
Figure 13b Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 205-6.
38
Figure 14 Ohana, Llanto, 2nd Movt, bars 95-101.
Ohana’s choice of instrumentation and rhythm also show an awareness of how death and fate are
played out in the bullfighting tradition. The trumpet traditionally accompanies the call of the
Presidente of the bullring for the spectacle to proceed to the following stage, and a similar level of
significance is accorded the instrument in the Llanto by giving it the main theme. This occurs
throughout the work in different variations, as discussed above. Beneath much of the work there is
also a strong marching rhythm, for example in Figure 14 it occurs in the harpsichord, strings,
percussion and trumpet. This can be read as a musical representation of the marching repetition in the
text, such as the constant “A las cinco de la tarde” of the first movement. The repetition of the words
“At five o’clock in the afternoon” is significant in itself, as this was the appointed time for a bullfight
to commence,180 and Anderson suggests that these lines bring to mind the tolling of a bell and the
unrelenting march of time toward Mejias’ death.181 It is also a reference to the religious parallels with
the bullfight, in that the dirge-like theme accompanying the wooden sculpted image of Christ in the
Holy Week procession would be played on trumpet and drum. In this capacity, it equates the figure of
Mejías with the idea of sacrifice. As in the Enterrar, where the Saeta was used to highlight the
disruption of war, Ohana again seems to reference Spanish religious traditions to comment on a
contemporary situation.
Ohana may also have been commenting on the contemporary situation of Spain by lamenting not only
the loss or sacrifice of Mejías, but of García Lorca. In 1937 Camus had referred to the civil war as a
180
Shubert, Death and Money, 10.
181
Anderson, Late Poetry, 174.
39
demonstration of the fight for collectivism,182 and as one of those believed to have been shot by anti-
communist death squads, García Lorca represented part of what had been lost in that fight. With the
declaration of Spain as a pariah state in 1946 due to its links with pre-war fascism,183 this struggle
against the political Right was still in progress when Ohana was commissioned to write his Spanish
work. Thus he could very well have been using the opportunity to express his sorrow at the
contemporary situation. In conversation with Frédéric Deval, Nicolas Zourabichvili said that in Spain
death “is looked straight in the eye”, and the Llanto’s focus on death is part of what makes it so
Spanish. Yet he maintains that Ohana has managed to be “tragic without being hopeless”, to deal with
death but to make life appear stronger.184 This is true in that Ohana was lamenting the passing of
Mejías and García Lorca at the same time as he was celebrating their contribution to Spanish culture
and voicing the tensions of the country they represented in their work.
182
Foxlee, Albert Camus, 42.
183
Francisco Salvadó, Twentieth-century Spain: politics and society in Spain, 1898-1998 (New York: Palgrave,
1999), 138.
184
Deval, De Federico García Lorca, 99-100.
40
Conclusion
This exploration of the Llanto shows how flamenco music and the bullfight are each used to build the
musical and textual context of Hispanic primitivism. Beyond these there is a gestural context in which
visual elements of the traditions are recreated, for example the trumpet motioning the entrance of the
flamenco singer, as well as the progression of the matador to the next stage of the spectacle and the
religious procession to mourn the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Together the traditions of flamenco and the
bullfight create a particularly strong Spanish context because both are believed to have come from
primitive sources, and tended over time to become two inseparable parts of the national identity.185
In this final chapter I have shown that like the Llanto por Ignácio Sánchez Mejías, Enterrar y Callar
and the Sonatine Monodique were inseparable from traditional Spanish influences in their adaption
and manipulation of the Saeta and of elements of the Jota, Bulería, Debla and Soleá. In comparison
however, they were much more rigid in their incorporation of pre-Romantic forms and influences. For
example, the Enterrar gained its power from its link with Neo-classicist Goya and the Sonatine from
its exploration of monody through constructions such as the theme and variations. In a sense they
were technical exercises in the combination of diverse Spanish traditions, while the Llanto,
representing a fuller and more sophisticated response to Ohana’s cultural and historical context, was
the aesthetic fulfilment of his early ideas.
It could be argued that the Llanto is primitivist, in that Ohana was striving to use a connection with
primitive origins as a way of revitalising contemporary music. His position within the discourse,
however, can then be related more specifically to ideas of Hispanic identity and of Mediterranean
humanism. In the 1920s it was Falla’s combination of Hispanic religious and folk traditions which
earned for his work the description “universal”,186 and which inspired a particular Spanish trajectory
within Neo-primitivist discourses of the 1930s. Ohana’s combination of the harmonies and rhythm of
Cante Jondo with Hispanic pre-Romantic sources can also be situated within this Hispanic universalist
tradition. In the 1930s and 1940s it was Camus' post-nationalist, Leftist position which stood up
against fascist and colonial dominance and highlighted him as a Mediterranean humanist, and so too
can Ohana's ideals of universalism be situated within this discourse. His political positioning can be
demonstrated in the Llanto through its interpretation as a lament for García Lorca as well as for
Mejías. It could also be argued that the transition from a more rigid Neo-classical framework in the
Enterrar and Sonatine to a more open structure in the Llanto was a reflection of Mediterranean
humanist ideas in the contrast between the ordered classicism of the Latinate culture and the
turbulence of the Greek. Thus, although Ohana was composing in the 1940s, his aesthetic ideas reach
back to musical and philosophical trajectories of the 1930s.
185
Alvarez, Tauromachie, 19.
186
Hess, Manuel de Falla, 245.
41
There is still much to explore in Ohana scholarship. The framework of Spanish primitivism could be
applied to a study of his later compositional period, bringing further insight into how this aesthetic
construction was manifested in the second half of the twentieth century. Given the wider influences
which Ohana gathered after the 1950s,187 study in this regard may foster an understanding of other
musical primitivisms of the time. There is also room for further exploration of his formative period as
situated within the wider political and philosophical discourses of the day. This may yield not only a
new perspective on Ohana as a composer, but it could also provide a new approach to concepts of
musical primitivism in the 1930s and 1940s.
187
This included Debussyan harmony, Japanese and Chinese theatre and a wide range of Classical and primitive
mythologies (For example see Rae, Music, 110-112).
42
Bibliography
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Maurice Ohana and Hispanic Primitivism

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A Spanish Universalist

Maurice Ohana and the Discourse of Primitivism

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment

Of the requirements of the degree of

2. Chapter One: Maurice Ohana’s formative years ......................................... 4

3. Chapter Two: Primitivisms ....................................................................... 11

4. Chapter Three: Ohana and the concept of Hispanic Primitivism:

1. Figure 1: Goya, “Enterrar y Callar” The Disaster of War (1810) .................................. 23

2. Figure 2: Ohana, Enterrar y Callar, bars 1-2 ................................................................. 24

3. Figure 3: Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 4th Movt, bars 121-150 ................................... 26

4. Figure 4: Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 4th Movt bars 1-5 ............................................. 27

5. Figure 5: Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 2nd Movt, bars 7-23 ........................................ 22

6. Figure 6: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 123-7 ............................................................... 30

7. Figure 7: Ohana, Llanto, 3rd Movt, bars 1-8 ................................................................... 31

8. Figure 8: Ohana, Llanto, 4th Movt, bars 120-5 ............................................................... 32

9. Figure 9: Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 17-19 ............................................................... 33

Childhood and Adolescence

Paris and Europe

Classes with Casella

The Zodiaque Group: the first expression of Ohana’s ideas

Exoticism, Primitivism and Neo-classicism

Second-Wave Primitivism: Post-Nationalism or Universalism

Figure 1 Goya, “Enterrar y Callar” The Disaster of War (1810)

Figure 2 Ohana, Enterrar y Callar, bars 1-2147

Figure 5 Ohana, Sonatine Monodique, 2nd Movt, bars 7-23.

Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Figure 6 Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 123-7.

Figure 7 Ohana, Llanto, 3rd Movt, bars 1-8.

Figure 11 Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 157-163.

Figure 13a Ohana, Llanto, 1st Movt, bars 201-4.

Ohana, Maurice. ‘Micro-Intervals’. In Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Rollo H. Myers, 147-50.

Bibliographies and Discographies

‘Bibliographie’. Revue Musicale 351-352 (1982): 81-83.

‘Discographie’. Revue Musicale 351-352 (1982): 77-79.

‘Bibliographie’. Revue Musicale 391-393 (1986): 227-231.

‘Discographie’. Revue Musicale 391-393 (1986): 233-236.

‘Maurice Ohana – Bibliographie’. http://www.mauriceohana.com/accueil (accessed 2 June

Prost, C hristine. ‘Catalogue Raisonné’. Revue Musicale 351-352 (1982): 27-67.

Prost, Christine. ‘Catalogue raisonné’. Revue Musicale 391-393 (1986): 183-225.

Works about Maurice Ohana

Chizy, Edith de Canat. Maurice Ohana. Paris: Fayard, 2005.

Halbreich, Harry. ‘Harmonie et timbre dans la musique instrumentale de Maurice Ohana’.

Ibarrondo, Félix. ‘Sources d’avenir’. Revue Musicale 391-393 (1986): 19-26.

Mache, François-Bernard. ‘Maurice Ohana: November 1971’. Revue Musicale 314-315

Rae, Caroline. The Music of Maurice Ohana. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

Rostand, Claude. ‘Le Zodiaque’. La Musique Française Contemporaine. Paris: Presses

Smith, Richard Langham. ‘Ohana on Ohana: An English Interview’. Contemporary Music

Manuel de Falla: Latinité et Universalité. Actes du colloque international tenu en Sorbonne,

Castro, Sergio de. ‘Falla en 1945-46’. 19-24.

Jambou, Louis. ‘Latinité et Universalité’. 25-32.

Montes, Beatriz. ‘De Manuel de Falla à Maurice Ohana: permanence de l'héritage

Pistone, Danièle. ‘Manuel de Falla et le cosmopolitisme musical parisien’. 75-82.

Christoforidis, Michael. ‘Aspects of the Creative Process in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de

Christoforidis, Michael. ‘Manuel de Falla's “Siete Canciones populares espan͂olas”: The

Roales-Nieto, Amalio. ‘Manuel de Falla et Paris (1907-1914)’. RIMF 26 (1988): 85-92.

Contemporary Music Trends: Primary Sources

Cowell, Henry. New Musical Resources. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1996.

Erlanger, Robert. ‘L'Archéologie Musicale’. Revue Musicale 106 (1930): 47.

Estève, Joseph. ‘L'Internationalisme et la Musique’. Revue Musicale 190 (1939): 170-176.

Oboussier, Robert. ‘L'Essence de la Musique’. Revue Musicale 105 (1930): 511.

Contemporary Music Trends: Secondary Sources

‘Église Sainte-Eugenie’. http://www.biarritz.ovh.org/eglises/StEugenie.html (accessed 12

Alvarez, Sandra. Tauromachie et Flamenco: Polémiques et Clichés. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007.