Les jolis coins

Article published in issue no. 33 of Excelentia magazine. Madrid, November–December 2023


In a notebook of handwritten notes entitled Paintings and scenes throughout my life, in which he recorded his memories up until 1907, Joaquín Turina writes, under the section corresponding to 1903: "... in the gallery of said theater [the Teatro Real] I met Manuel de Falla, who at the time was writing a little zarzuela [Los amores de la Inés] for Loreto Prado and Chicote, and planning La vida breve".

Later, in the section corresponding to 1907, he notes: "Manuel de Falla. The illustrious composer from Cádiz arrived in Paris to continue his studies, lodging at the Hotel Kléber [the same in which Turina was staying]. Soon he came into contact with Claude Debussy, who, besides giving him some advice, drew him somewhat toward the activities of the Conservatoire, then a rival of the Schola [the Schola Cantorum, where Turina studied under the strict tutelage of Vincent d'Indy, among others]. We usually went together every Sunday to the Colonne Orchestra concerts".

And a few paragraphs later he adds: "Assisted by little notebooks written in an incredible hand, d'Indy taught us the architectural form of Music, proceeding through chronological analysis and on the basis of a Franco-German aesthetic rooted in Bach and Beethoven, forming a long curve that reached its limit in César Franck. And I say limit, because the new Impressionist tendency held little sway at the Schola. This method of analysis contained enormous force, producing in the student such a sensation of solidity and constructive power that one ought never to forget or cast it aside.".

These passages, along with other observations too numerous to reproduce here, are enormously revealing of the circumstances under which Turina and Falla were trained in what was, at that time, without a doubt the most musically vibrant and important city in Europe. While the former devoted himself at the Schola Cantorum to a hyper-academic training with particular emphasis on César Franck's cyclical principles, Falla, under the guidance of Debussy and Dukas, preferred the new Impressionist current, closer to the Conservatoire. Conflicting tendencies: the former emphasizing constructive rigor, the latter exploring a new world of harmonic innovations and timbral subtleties. Be that as it may, this aesthetic difference was no obstacle to the two composers developing, from their meeting in the gallery of the Teatro Real until Falla's death in 1946 (Turina outlived him by three years, until 1949), a close friendship greatly strengthened by their long stay in the French capital, which lasted until just a few months before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
A curious proof of this is the dedication that Falla wrote on the cover of the edition of his Cuatro piezas españolas, which he presented to Turina on January 8, 1909, freshly printed by the Parisian publisher Durand & Fils:

Manuel Falla el gaditano, con sus más altos respetos, dedica este mamotreto a Turina el sevillano. Ya sabes tú bien, Joaquín, que estas cuatro piececillas no son más que impresioncillas sin pies, cabeza ni fin. Y en ellas, por consiguiente, no hay de la musique, ni plan, ni même des jolis coins, como dice Don Vicente.

The Cádiz-born Manuel Falla, with his highest respects, dedicates this big old tome to Turina, the Sevillian. You know well, Joaquín, that these four little pieces are nothing but little impressions, without feet, head, or end. And in them, consequently, there is neither musique, nor plan, nor even jolis coins", as Don Vicente would say.

In the face of such a display of affection and wit, Turina could not but reciprocate, which he did a few months later, on June 9 of that same year, on the cover of a copy of his Quintet, Op. 1, published only a few days earlier by the French publisher Rouart, Lerolle & Cie, which, in fair reciprocity, he gifted to his friend Manuel:

Joaquinete el sevillano le dedica este Quintette al señor de alto copete Manuel Falla el gaditano. Ya sabes tú bien, Maolino, que estas obras formalistas las aguanta un scholista pero nunca un ravelino. Y en ellas, por consiguiente, no encontrarás ni glissandos, ni armonías de contrabando, como es moda en esa gente. (Y añade: 1ª variación en el tono)

Joaquinete, the Sevillian, dedicates this Quintette to the man of lofty brow, the Cádiz-born Manuel Falla. You know well, Maolino, that these formalist works can be endured by a scholist but never by a Ravelian. And in them, consequently, you will find neither glissandi, nor contraband harmonies, as are the fashion in that crowd. (And he adds: 1st variation in the key).

Beneath the apparent frivolity of both dedications lies an acknowledgment of the positions each composer adopted toward the two prevailing aesthetic tendencies in Paris at the time. Turina proclaimed himself a scholist, and thus attached to formalism, to which Impressionist devices such as glissandi and those ingeniously named contraband harmonies -utterly illegal within the framework of classical tonal harmony- were foreign. Falla, by contrast, described his Cuatro piezas españolas as "little impressions", ironically alluding to the obsession with balance between form -the plan- and detail -the jolis coins ("pretty corners")- with which Don Vicente (Vincent d'Indy) indoctrinated his students at the Schola.
These two dedications could furnish material for an entire thesis on the rivalry between two such important tendencies at the crucial moment of aesthetic renewal in musical composition -parallel to that in the other arts- that took place in the first two decades of the last century. And they recall (except for their friendly character) the fierce confrontation waged in Spain by the Baroque poets of the Golden Age, of which abundant testimony survives in the form of sonnets and poems of every kind, in which the culteranistas and conceptistas embroiled themselves spiritedly, with Góngora, Quevedo, and Lope de Vega leaving behind excellent samples of wit and sharpness.
But to keep from digressing, I shall limit myself to quoting a couple of verses, especially significant, from Falla's dedication: no hay de la musique, ni plan, / ni même des jolis coins...; that is: there is no music, nor plan, nor even pretty corners... as Vincent d'Indy (Don Vicente) would say when criticizing works that lacked both a sound sense of structure (plan) and of detail in execution (jolis coins).
When, at the age of 17, my musical vocation awoke -abruptly, like a sleeping beast- I devoured with genuine passion everything that fell into my hands relating to music: records, books, program notes, specialized magazines... And the place I entered with the most caution, almost with reverence, was the study in which my grandfather composed -the space he called his "magic corner", which eventually became the title of one of his last piano works, Opus 97. I spent many hours there, enjoying the privilege of handling manuscript scores and all kinds of writings, as well as photographs, letters, reviews, and newspaper articles; and among all that material shone with a light of its own the score of Manuel de Falla's Cuatro piezas españolas, on the cover of which was the aforementioned dedication. From the very first moment, I was struck by the reference to des jolis coins, which I could not then appreciate in its full measure and which at the time seemed to me to bear some hidden, almost initiatory meaning.
It would still be nearly ten years before I composed my first significant works, after many attempts during a very early stage of my training. Two remain particularly significant in my catalogue from that period: the first one, Movimiento for violin and piano (1978), was a student exercise written in just a few sessions during the Composition course taught by Carmelo Bernaola at Música en Compostela, in whose final concert it was performed by two fellow students (the American violinist Laura Klugherz and the Belgian pianist Suzanne Sieber). The second, Crucifixus, for 20 string instruments and piano, was composed in only three days in order to be ready for submission to the "Golden Harp Trophy" Composition Competition of the Spanish Confederation of Savings Banks -the most important called in Spain at that time- in which it was a finalist after the concert held at the Teatro Real in Madrid in late January 1979. In both works, and above all in the latter, the urgency of time was decisive: long gestures, drawn in a single stroke, sustained by crescendi or relaxed by diminuendi, simultaneously constituted the deep structure and its surface elaboration, to speak in Chomskyan terms.
In the autumn of that same year I began to enjoy a grant at the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, which allowed me, over the course of that academic year, to attend the Advanced Composition classes given by Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Santa Cecilia. And I emphasize the verb "attend", for little -if anything- can be traced in my music of that time or thereafter of the influence of one of the leading figures of Italian musical creation of the moment. But my stay in Rome did serve to make me discover the work of another composer, until then entirely unknown to me, whose influence was indeed decisive in my evolution, both technical and aesthetic. I am referring to Salvatore Sciarrino, whose timbral imagination impressed me deeply -from his 6 Capricci for violin (1976), the first work of his I heard, in a recording by Georg Mönch, to Il paese senza tramonto for soprano and orchestra (1977), whose Roman premiere in 1980 by the RAI orchestra I had the opportunity to attend, leaving me absolutely dazzled by the mastery of its execution. Later I became more familiar with Sciarrino's work, but his influence is already evident in the works I composed during those months of my stay in Rome (Lama sabacthani?, for string quartet, and Title to be determined, for septet) and permeates all my subsequent music, since in it the working out of the tiniest detail became an essential part of my compositional method. Yet that technique was not incompatible with my way of conceiving music in broad strokes, always understood as directed toward climactic points of tension or, conversely, of relaxation from them. I do not believe that approach differs, in essence, from that which inspires the music of the great masterpieces of History; what differs are the means by which it is achieved. The modal intervallic structures of classical polyphony, or the harmonic successions and modulations of tonality, are replaced by the concepts of tension and texture, by which contemporary musical discourse acquires a logic similar to that obtained by those earlier means.

My music seeks a balance between these two aspects, in which the internal structure of the work -its architectural support, its "deep structure", in a word- is realized with extreme care in its internal details -the "surface structure"- in every respect: melodic, harmonic, dynamic, timbral..., so that conception, construction, and execution may at all times maintain the highest possible level of quality.
Is that approach different from the one that inspires the music of the great masterpieces of History? In my view, absolutely not, since in them both concepts converge so that the final result dazzles us with both its solidity and its inventiveness. That is why efforts to explain music solely from its structural point of view, as some theorists attempt (such as Schenker and the like), seem so vacuous. Personally, I must admit that the analysis of the macrostructure of great works has not helped me much to understand them better; what has helped me -and to it I owe a great part of my working method- is the study of the small detail (how Schubert resolves a difficult modulation, or how Ravel orchestrates a particular passage, or...).
Illuminating in this sense is the anecdote cited by Charles Rosen in The Classical Style (page 43 of the Spanish edition), recalling Schönberg's biting remark when he was shown the diagram of Schenker's analysis of the "Eroica" Symphony: "Where are my favorite passages?" he asked, upon seeing the skeletal outline before him. "Ah, here they are, these little notes!"
What Schönberg sought in Schenker's diagram was nothing other than what most interested him and which the analysis could not -and did not wish to- show: the jolis coins, the pretty corners whose importance -together with that of the plan -Vincent d'Indy so insisted upon, and which Falla, ironically, claimed were absent from his Cuatro piezas españolas, when in reality they are a perfect example of precisely the opposite.

June 2023