FRONDOSO MISTERIO. MUSIC AND CINEMA ACCORDING TO LUIS DE PABLO
The leading figure in the so-called Generation of 51—the group of composers who revitalised the Spanish creative musical scene by linking it to Central European avant-garde trends—, Luis de Pablo is not just one of the people who introduced serialism and later post-serial trends into Spain, but has also carried out productive work as a lecturer, translator of benchmark texts and profesor in contemporary techniques at the Madrid Conservatory. He has also played a momentous role as a musical manager and concert organiser through ALEA, the name given both to the first Spanish laboratory of electronic music and to a kind of philharmonic society promoted by Juan Huarte, that was active in the mid-1960s, thanks to which not only scores by Webern, Schönberg, Alban Berg, Varèse or Charles Ives could be heard in Spain for the first time, but also by living artists such as Stockhausen (who visited Madrid with his group and gave two sessions), Berio, Boulez, Nono or Steve Reich, as well as commissioning works by Spanish composers ranging from Cristóbal Halffter to Arturo Tamayo. Together with Eduardo Polonio and Horacio Vaggione, Luis de Pablo created a electro-acoustic improvisation group, carried out important work hosting a radio programmes where he popularised all kinds of non-European music in Spain and in 1972 promoted and organised the Pamplona Festival, the most important interdisciplinary event ever held in Spain, where there were performances ranging from John Cage and David Tudor to Indonesian shadow theatre and they carried out activities ranging from screenings of films by Buñuel (banned at the time) to phonetic poetry sessions. Furthermore, as a composer, Luis de Pablo has created a catalogue that is getting on for about 150 works in all genes and formats, that includes five operas, numerous orchestral and chamber pieces for a wide variety of ensembles and about ten concert compositions for different soloists: Frondoso misterio (Luxuriant mystery, a title that refers to a poem by Juan Gil Albert about death) is precisely the name of his splendid Concerto for cello and orchestra./p>
Closely linked to the producer Elias Querejeta, for whom he has created nearly all his work as a film composer, Luis de Pablo has developed a highly characteristic and personal style, employing an economy of resources in a sound, effective manner. He began his film work with soundtracks in a quasi-abstract formalist modernist style, whose most extreme example was to be Operación H (Néstor Basterretxea, 1963), in which the improvisation and later de-naturalisation of sound places it on the fringes of electro-acoustic music, that is in sharp parallel with the deliberately de-personalised treatment of the images. Films as unforgettable as El espíritu de la colmena (Victor Erice, 1973) or A un dios desconocido (Jaime Chávarri, 1977) owe a vital part of their unique attractive quality to the highly personal stamp that Luis de Pablo has put on his music: if in Erice’s film the iciness of the Castilian steppe is evoked through a flute solo that never quite becomes tonal, in others, like De cuerpo presente (Antton Ezeiza, 1967), the music plays with an unusual variety of references, that range from the Schönberg of the Wind Quintet to the Stravinsky of the Suites for small orchestra, de-naturalising the originals until they verge on the unrecognisable without their clarity becoming diluted and without providing any literal references: the overture and the epilogue in this elaborate parody of film noir (in which the main character even quotes Bécquer’s Rima XI) pay homage to no less than the passacaglia in Federico Chueca’s La Gran Vía, stripped down to its rhythmic framework and worked on in such a dense, dissonant polytonal composition that it perfectly achieves its purpose of bringing us face-to-face with a familiar yet perverted and distant world, that at the same time as it suggests it should be viewed ironically, still creates an indefinable sense of unease./p>
The use of ostinato and reiterative sequences as a favoured device, both (partially) in this soundtrack and in others, gives an unusual power to certain films in which, as in La caza (Carlos Saura, 1966) or in Pascual Duarte (Ricardo Franco, 1976), the sound material has a special kind of rhythmic-harmonic incisiveness, that is perfectly in keeping with a politically stifling world that in both cases provides a backdrop for the vicisitudes of certain characters whose suppressed violence might explode when least expected with inevitable ferocity; however Luis de Pablo has also been able to create soundtracks as carefree as the one in Reina Zanahoria (Gonzalo Suárez, 1977) and its humorous play on variations on a popular French song, while in films like Jaime Chávarri’s aforementioned masterpiece, the return of a single motif on different keyboards (harpsichord, piano, organ…) refer in a particularly moving way to a time that is both past and present; the time of an absence that is also the time of a suppression of the memory of the tragedy and of the survival of this dark passion that for so many decades could not be expressed. With their unique radicalism and concision, the best works on film by this great renovator of musical language now occupy an exceptional place in the list of the most important cinema made in this country./p>
The fact that ZINEBI in its 52nd year is presenting this universal citizen of Bilbao with the Mikeldi of Honour for his achievements and work and is paying him a well-earned tribute on his eightieth birthday is an act of strict justice that a festival with such a committed varied history could not possibly pass over./p>
Jose Luis Téllez.
Film critic
