Page 215 - Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2018. Nova glasba v “novi” Evropi med obema svetovnima vojnama ?? New Music in the “New” Europe Between the Two World Wars. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 2
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alois hába and slovene students of composition ...
them. Musical composition thus arrives at the limit of traditional means of
expression, which are intensified to their extreme point, although it rare-
ly crosses the threshold of atonality and hardly ever subordinates itself to
consistent constructivist logic. Like the majority of their contemporaries,
Slovene composers adapted constructivist procedures in a fairly original
manner, and like them did not feel the need for a consistent use of atonali-
ty. Accordingly, it was perhaps above all Josef Suk’s extremely liberal “sys-
tematic openness” that influenced the still prevailing polystylistic synthesis
with various characteristic emphases. The fact that Suk’s composition class,
unlike Hába’s optional one-year course in quarter-tone composition, took
place at the master’s level of the conservatory, which all of Osterc’s former
students with the exception of Pučnik attended for least two years, should
certainly not be overlooked. The possibility of other influences, in terms of
ideas and techniques, on the creation of individual works should certainly
also be admitted. One less known and certainly overlooked influence is the
composition by Karel Boleslav Jirák and Otakar Šín, with which Slovene
students in Prague were undoubtedly very familiar, like practically all stu-
dents of composition. Whatever label we might be tempted to give to indi-
vidual compositions by Slovene students in Prague, it would probably soon
become apparent that when describing their compositions we need to treat
individual structural elements separately, since they are usually a combina-
tion of diverse elements of compositional technique and only contribute to
a single whole when put together.
To what extent, then, when considering later works by Slovene com-
posers who studied composition in Prague, is it even possible to talk about
a “Hába School”? In what aspect of these works is this apparent? Or is this
not perhaps something that only really exists on paper, even when it comes
to the works of some of Hába’s other students, as Lubomír Spurný demon-
strates in his article Hába School – Reality or Myth?41 Be that as it may, it
would be hard to deny that a certain influence of Hába is perceptible in in-
dividual post-Prague works by Slovene students from the State Conservato-
ry in Prague, an influence that is apparent above all in the more or less con-
sistent athematism and atonality of individual compositions – as well as in
the honing of ideological views and in individual studies and other occa-
sional works using the quarter-tone system.
41 Lubomír Spurný, “Hába School - Reality or Myth?,” in Spaces of Modernism: Ljubica
Marić in Context, ed. Dejan Despić and Melita Milin (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of
Sciences and the Arts, 2010), 135–142.
213
them. Musical composition thus arrives at the limit of traditional means of
expression, which are intensified to their extreme point, although it rare-
ly crosses the threshold of atonality and hardly ever subordinates itself to
consistent constructivist logic. Like the majority of their contemporaries,
Slovene composers adapted constructivist procedures in a fairly original
manner, and like them did not feel the need for a consistent use of atonali-
ty. Accordingly, it was perhaps above all Josef Suk’s extremely liberal “sys-
tematic openness” that influenced the still prevailing polystylistic synthesis
with various characteristic emphases. The fact that Suk’s composition class,
unlike Hába’s optional one-year course in quarter-tone composition, took
place at the master’s level of the conservatory, which all of Osterc’s former
students with the exception of Pučnik attended for least two years, should
certainly not be overlooked. The possibility of other influences, in terms of
ideas and techniques, on the creation of individual works should certainly
also be admitted. One less known and certainly overlooked influence is the
composition by Karel Boleslav Jirák and Otakar Šín, with which Slovene
students in Prague were undoubtedly very familiar, like practically all stu-
dents of composition. Whatever label we might be tempted to give to indi-
vidual compositions by Slovene students in Prague, it would probably soon
become apparent that when describing their compositions we need to treat
individual structural elements separately, since they are usually a combina-
tion of diverse elements of compositional technique and only contribute to
a single whole when put together.
To what extent, then, when considering later works by Slovene com-
posers who studied composition in Prague, is it even possible to talk about
a “Hába School”? In what aspect of these works is this apparent? Or is this
not perhaps something that only really exists on paper, even when it comes
to the works of some of Hába’s other students, as Lubomír Spurný demon-
strates in his article Hába School – Reality or Myth?41 Be that as it may, it
would be hard to deny that a certain influence of Hába is perceptible in in-
dividual post-Prague works by Slovene students from the State Conservato-
ry in Prague, an influence that is apparent above all in the more or less con-
sistent athematism and atonality of individual compositions – as well as in
the honing of ideological views and in individual studies and other occa-
sional works using the quarter-tone system.
41 Lubomír Spurný, “Hába School - Reality or Myth?,” in Spaces of Modernism: Ljubica
Marić in Context, ed. Dejan Despić and Melita Milin (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of
Sciences and the Arts, 2010), 135–142.
213
