Óscar Esplá – music in context

Some artists seem to be inextricably linked to places. Henry Moore’s legacy is in Leeds, where he studied, but was not born. Barbara Hepworth’s is in Wakefield, where she was born but did not live. And what about Picasso? There is Malaga, when he was born, Barcelona where he lived, but what about Paris, where he did much of his memorable work? Nuremberg equals Durer, South Kensington is Lord Leighton, a Paris suburb is Gustave Moreau, Zaragoza is Goya, Figueres is Dali, Stockholm is Milles, perhaps. The list includes the better known juxtaposed with the less familiar, deliberately.

All the examples above are painters or sculptors. What about writers? There are many associations, but not so many museums dedicated to a life and its work. Spain, for example, has Blasco Ibañez in Valencia and Miguel Hernandez in Orihuela, sites chosen here for their geographical and contemporary relevance.

But what about composers and musicians? Again, there are associations, but only a few dedicated museums. There is Puccini in Lucca, Tartini in Piran, Beethoven in Vienna and Mozart in Salzburg, for instance. Bayreuth is more Wagner’s memorial rather than record. Perhaps the relative paucity of permanent exhibitions dedicated to non-visual artists reflects the fact that painting and sculpture occupy space, whereas writing and music occupy time. The dramatist Shakespeare is a crossover who occupies both space and time, and he has a museum of sorts, but Shakespeare is always a special case.

In Alicante, the main road linking the waterfront to the centre of town is called Avenida Óscar Esplá. I had walked the street many times before I realized it was named after a composer. He was born in Alicante and lived there as a youth, before heading off to Barcelona to study engineering. He then turned to philosophy and finally music. But as an adult in the nineteen thirties, like many other Spaniards, he fled Franco’s internationally tolerated brutality. He was a dedicated teacher and active composer, but, as the Zaragoza pianist, Pedro Carboné, pointed out in his discussion of the composer’s work at this week’s concert, even in his hometown one would be hard-pressed to identify recognition of his achievement, apart from the name of that street. After decades of neglect, a week of concerts in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall offered the chance to hear his music and perhaps to reassess the significance of this neglected composer. Pedro Carboné gave the first of these concerts, alongside an extensive discussion of the man and his work. Pedro Carboné is himself a noted exponent of Esplá’s music, having recorded volume one of Esplá’s complete piano works for Marco Polo in 1998.

The music must precede the life. The achievement must be the starting point of any discussion of the man. As Carboné explained, Óscar Esplá was a deceptively complex composer. A surface gloss of apparently conventional harmony, simple lines and miniature forms initially suggest populism. Anyone who listens, however, knows within seconds that this first impression is quite false. Óscar Esplá’s principal inspiration probably did come from folklore, the folk music of the region which is Alicante. It is known throughout Spain is the Levante region, the place where the sun rises, known for its brilliance, its light, its colour and, significantly, its contrasts, mountain to sea, near desert to tropical garden, remote campo to sophisticated cities. For those outside Spain, incidentally, Alicante is a long way from what is generally termed ‘flamenco’. That was the inspiration of Manuel de Falla in Andalusia. Now Esplá and de Falla are near contemporaries, with de Falla the senior by ten years. They both started composing in their teens, and even began their careers with similarly inspired impressionistic piano pieces.

Superficially, there is a similarity between the unexpected features of flamenco and the scale that Esplá developed to use as the basis of the folkloric Levante. What they share is the almost blues-like modification of a couple of notes in the diatonic scale, changes that confuse the ear between conventional major and minor keys, classifications that actually don’t apply unless your aural expectations are fixed in what you already know. Others at the time did similar things elsewhere. Bartok used a Bulgarian scale in his early work, Debussy his whole tones, Vaughn Williams his modes and Schoenberg his everything equally. The scale, for a composer, has a similar effect to a painter’s palette, and throughout history there have been individual painters and schools associated with particular groups of colours and their use. Music, though it is often overlooked, has the same colouristic characteristics and these, sometimes, are based on the scales used to express the musical language.

In Valencia, when we think of colour and painting, we automatically think of Sorolla. His principal museum might be in Madrid, and he may well be known outside Spain for the work he created for New York, but Sorolla’s oeuvre is of Valencia, of the same Levante coast that extends south to Alicante. At first sight, Sorolla and the style he founded may appear sweet, rather populist, trite, somewhat kitsch and sentimental. But that would be a misinterpretation.

Impressionism is always close by, but so is expressionism in a form where the dreams are pleasant, never frightening. But there is also the simultaneous realism and experiment of Singer Sargent. The subject matter, however, remains folkloric, domestic in its Spanish outdoor form, depicting a long-suffering but apparently docile peasant contentedly living alongside comfortable middle classes and usually less than ostentatious aristocracy. Anyone who knows Spanish history will understand both the ironic and illusory nature of this apparent harmony. This art has a surface gloss, and apparent ease, but the vivid contrast of colour reflects not only the quality of Levantine light, the montane and plane, the arid and the lush, but also a potential for spontaneous combustion in the social tinderbox, where the traditional equals poverty and insecurity and the modern implies capital, exploitation and wealth for the already well shod, though, it must be admitted, this political dimension is never explicit in Sorolla’s work.

In music, colour may be sensed via harmonic contrast as well as via the scale chosen to communicate. The latter, in Óscar Esplá’s case, continually confuses major and minor, constantly prompts the listener to review the perspective, to flip between emotional states, perhaps to see two sides of every argument. It is sound that conveys a natural cubism. Pedro Carboné was keen to point out how Esplá was always trying to insert colour through the use of chromatic harmony, shifts of rhythm, divergence in the material, inserted deliberately to push the listener onto another, only sometimes parallel path with its own unique view.

But there is another element at work. Pedro Carboné repeatedly offered examples of how Esplá’s writing for the piano was holistic in that its effect has to be experienced in its totality, but also how it relies on the juxtaposition and superimposition of often trite material, in itself less than memorable. He played several examples where the left-hand figure was heard in isolation and then the right, sequentially. Separately these two musical lines provided little that was memorable and less that was individual, but played together they intermingled to invoke colour, contrast, even counterpoint. But that counterpoint is never expressed in the linear form with which we are familiar in Bach and others. It is present more in the sense of it creating a flow of repeated ideas, like a sequence of photos from an album that seem at first sight to be random but are later recognized as chosen.

At this time, the early decades of the 20th century, other composers were also experimenting with similar processes of juxtaposition. In Mahler we abruptly move from one view to another, mix the mundane with the sophisticated, but in general we do it sequentially, again like a sequence of scenes in a film with eventually a linear plot. In Ives, however, we are often presented with these different experiences superimposed to reflect the confusion of everyday life, to mirror how easily human senses can resolve apparently conflicting experience, but it remains a resolution that requires active participation by the listener. In the music of Óscar Esplá, we have the mix of the mundane and sophisticated, but we also often have them superimposed rather than sequential.

Earlier, Alicante was cited as the land of not-flamenco, but Alicante definitely is the land of the town band. Every town has one. These are not the brass bands of northern England, though they are often similarly linked to particular types of economic activity. These are symphonic bands, with woodwind as well as brass and they often march through towns in the frequent festivals. It is common to have three or four bands playing simultaneously in a procession within the hearing of a spectator, the individual pieces perhaps nothing more than the duple rhythm of the Valencian pasodoble.

But two or three at the same time conjures up the kind of musical experience that Ives was imagining when he heard a brass band walk past the string section in a different key, playing different and completely unrelated music. Here also we have an illustration of what Pedro Carboné was demonstrating with Óscar Esplá’s simple but contrasting left- and right-hand parts in his piano music. The different bands are not playing different kinds of music. They are not playing complex harmonies. The idiom of each piece is popular, even populist. But heard at the same time, two or three bands produce the kind of oral confusion of stimuli that everyday life often creates, a melee the listener’s mind must actively interpret.

Here we have, at long last, the essence of Óscar Esplá’s music. Above all it features coloristic effects of harmony and rhythm, mirroring the contrasts of the Levante region and its brilliant light. We have the popular and folkloric, but not simply as ends in themselves, or even used as deferential gestures. In Esplá’s music, these elements merge like simultaneous marching bands to reflect the complexity of everyday oral experience. But, above all, as in Sorolla’s painting, there is a sense of beauty, of impressionistic engagement with the attractive surface of life, whilst also perhaps acknowledging the unspoken tensions that pervade everything.

Recalling Óscar Esplá’s contemporaries in Spain reveals the niche, for that is what we must accept on his behalf, into which his music fits. Manuel de Falla was steeped in Andalusia and nationalism. His music often resorts to big statements on broad canvases. He never left his folkloric inspiration behind, but he always put his audience’s ear into his work, always strove to address the popular. Frederick Mompou is more similar to Esplá in style, but perhaps not content. Like Chopin, Mompou was a grandiloquent miniaturist. His music is generally simpler than Esplá’s, deliberately and intentionally simple, it must be said, but essentially backward looking. Mompou’s world is Chopinesque, an individual romantic response to the world of experience. Its understatement is its strength, but understatement is not a characteristic of Óscar Esplá. Roberto Gerhard, like Esplá, had to leave Spain under the dictatorship. Always more interested in the atonal, even serial technique, Gerhard’s music often sounds deliberately modernistic, seeking to extend Schoenberg’s ideas and as a result becoming internalized in the individual creator’s mind rather than recalling the aural world we inhabit. Esplá’s music is often atonal, but it becomes so via techniques of juxtaposition and superimposition and therefore by musical accident, not by ideological design. Joaquin Turina is also a prime candidate for comparison. Turina’s main musical influence was found in France, but his roots were solidly in Spain’s earth. He differs from Óscar Esplá, however, in his more conventional harmonies and his use of familiar musical forms. Also, Turina rarely superimposes simultaneous material in an expressionistic or impressionistic way.

So, what is it that characterizes this music of Óscar Esplá? First and foremost, the place he knew best is depicted here, its contrasts of light, landscape, campo and city, popular and elite culture, clashing, sometimes confused aural experience that must be deciphered. There is musical impressionism in that the material is often deliberately evocative of experience, flitting from scene to scene with immediate jump cuts, often indeed superimposing images to accomplish, if nothing else, a reflection of the complexity and colour of experience. There is also conflict, but it is the implied conflict we encounter in Sorolla’s painting. It is the conflict of potential rather than current difference, where elements coexist, but at the touch of a flame could ignite. In the music of Óscar Esplá, the conflict is not ongoing, but its threat is always there. This is amplified by his musical scale’s confusion of major and minor. Through it, we are constantly reminded that things might be capable of change, that there exist different perspectives, all of which are valid.

If there is expressionism also in this music, then we might do well to carry some images of Chagall in our head. Nothing is threatening. Life in the village goes on. But the head might be green, or upside down. And the bride and groom may just be floating through the sky while the guests ignore them. It’s colourful, it’s dreamlike, but it is disorientating, sometimes disconcerting.

Above all, Óscar Esplá’s music, at least in the ears of this listener, is most reminiscent of Ravel. Now this is a name that is significant in many ways. Ravel has achieved deserved international and lasting recognition for his original music, but the corpus of his work is far from extensive. He dabbled with the sonata and string quartet, but his reputation is built on his piano and ballet music, often written in the forms that he invented to invoke particular experience or emotional states. For me, Óscar Esplá’s music, if it needs a context, is best approached via the inspiration it shares with Ravel. Esplá’s technique of juxtaposition, however, extends and amplifies these elements and perhaps renders them more vivid as a result.

So surely it is time for Óscar Esplá, the one-time engineer and philosopher who became a composer, to take his rightful place, at least alongside his contemporaries such as de Falla, Gerhard and Mompou in Spain’s musical tradition. He was an exile in Belgium. Manuel de Falla went to Argentina and Gerhard to Britain, so there is nothing unique about his exile. Just as Weinberg is appearing from the deep shadow of Shostakovich, it is surely time for Esplá to emerge from the umbra of de Falla and Turina. His music is unique and, in its own way, revolutionary.

On Tuesday 14 September 2021 in ADDA, Pedro Carboné played movements one and four from Suite Levante, Three Movements for Piano, the Sonata Española and the Berceuse from Cantos de Antaño. On Wednesday 15 September, Marisa Blanes played the first three movements from books four and five of Lírica Española, and La Tarana from Cantos de Antaño, alongside similarly evocative and contemporary works by de Falla, Ernesto Halffter and Julian Bautista.