Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre Álvaro Gómez Gómez The influences of Andalusian folk ...

84 Pages·2015·8.68 MB·English

Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre

Álvaro Gómez Gómez

The influences of Andalusian folk music and the Impressionist style of Debussy
on Manuel de Falla’s work Noches en Los Jardines de España

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements of the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Music)

Supervisor: Prof. Toomas Siitan

Tallinn 2015
The influences of Andalusian folk music and the Impressionist style of Debussy on Manuel de
Falla’s work Noches en Los Jardines de España
Abstract

The research focuses on the influence of the music of the folklore of southern Spain and that
of the music of Debussy in the works of Manuel de Falla, who lived for seven years in Paris (1907–
1914). The study focuses specifically on the last piece Manuel de Falla began to compose in Paris,
Noches en los Jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain).
The purpose of the study is to assess the importance of the French influence in Falla’s music,
alongside the tools he already possessed from the music of Spanish folklore. In order to achieve a
suitable reading of his music, the main purpose of the thesis is to understand whether the influence
of Debussy on Falla was sufficient to change radically his manner of composition or whether this
influence served merely to complement a style of composition based on the music of the folklore of
southern Spain.
A major part of the dissertation is devoted to an analysis of Manuel de Falla’s Noches en los
Jardines de España. Here the author tries to identify the best way to perform the piece, searching
for the most suitable tools the orchestra can use to recreate as faithfully as possible the ideas of the
colours, rhythms, textures and so on that Falla had in his mind while composing the piece.

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Table of contents
1. Introduction ..........................................................................................................................4
1.1. Aim of the research ...............................................................................................5
1.2. Background to the research....................................................................................5
1.3. Research methods..................................................................................................7

2. Manuel de Falla and Paris.....................................................................................................9
2.1. Manuel de Falla moves to Paris...........................................................................11
2.2. Two personalities of major importance:
Joaquín Turina and Claude Debussy...........................................................................13
2.2.1. Joaquín Turina and Manuel de Falla ....................................................14
2.2.2. Claude Debussy and Manuel de Falla ..................................................16

3. The influences of flamenco singing and Debussy’s music in Manuel de Falla’s
Noches en los Jardines de España .........................................................................................20
3.1. The influence of flamenco singing in
Noches en los Jardines de España .........................................................................................27
3.1.1. Harmony ...............................................................................................31
3.1.2. Melody and sonority ............................................................................33
3.1.3. Rhythm .................................................................................................48
3.2. The influence of Debussy’s music in
Noches en los Jardines de España ............................................................................51
3.2.1. Harmony ...............................................................................................52
3.2.2. Melody .................................................................................................58
3.2.3. Texture ..................................................................................................64

4. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................74

Bibliography ..........................................................................................................................78

Töö lühikokkuvõte .................................................................................................................81

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1. Introduction

It is difficult to know the extent to which an experience outside one’s homeland can change
an individual’s personality; what is very evident in the case of Manuel de Falla, however, is that his
music saw a change of direction during the seven years he was in Paris (from 1907 to 1914) as a
result of his contact with the musical culture of his neighbouring country. During his sojourn in
Paris Falla improved his compositional skills and gained international acknowledgement as a
composer as he worked on some of his most important works, including Cuatro Canciones
Españolas, Trois Mélodies, Siete Canciones Populares Españolas and Noches en los Jardines de
España.
For an orchestral conductor it is very important to understand the context in which a
particular work is written, including the wider environment in which the composer is working, so as
to be able better to grasp his musical intentions and to find the right tools with which to transmit as
closely and effectively as possible the message that the composer wishes to convey in his music.
Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Conductors often have to prepare concerts very fast,
concentrating on the music from inside at the risk of overlooking such important aspects as an
awareness of the context in which the work was written, both that of the composer himself and of
the wider environment in which he was writing. Often, when working with an unfamiliar piece from
inside, musicians may struggle to grasp the meaning of a work or the significance of a particular
passage. In such a situation an awareness of the broader context in which the work was composed
can often shed light on such issues, clarifying them and perhaps significantly altering performance
decisions and thus the effect of the music in concert.
Noches en los Jardines de España (Nights in the Garden of Spain) is the last work Manuel
de Falla started to compose in his Paris period, and we might assume that a major factor in the piece
will be the influence of Debussy’s music. Such an assumption, however, besides being very
superficial, fails to provide a key to understanding and interpreting the music correctly. This
research attempts to ascertain more precisely what Falla had in mind while he was composing this
masterpiece and thus to understand more clearly the musical ideas he wished to transmit in it. On a
practical level, this will enable conductors to find the right tools with which to help the orchestra to
approach as closely as possible in performance the musical sensations that Falla intended to convey
in the piece.
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1.1. Aim of the research
The aim of this research is to assess the importance of Paris to Falla’s music and to
demonstrate how he combined the French influence with the tools he already possessed from the
music of flamenco singing. The study focuses specifically on Falla’s work Noches en los Jardines
de España: as an orchestral conductor, such a study is a valuable aid to obtaining insights into the
music that will enable the piece to be performed as faithfully as possible to the composer’s original
intentions. In order to achieve this aim, the thesis will be divided into two sections.
The first of these provides a general picture of the relevant background to Falla’s decision to
move to Paris in 1907, taking as its focus on one hand the artistic environment in the French capital
at the time and, on the other, the personal and artistic situation of Manuel de Falla. A sojourn in a
city that is not one’s own and the relationships with the people one finds there people there do much
to define the personality of any individual, and this is one of the many factors that may influence
the music of a composer in a particular period of his life. I will therefore examine the most
important influences to which Falla was exposed in Paris, personified by the principal proponents of
the two musical styles present in the city at the time. On one hand the influence of Joaquín Turina,
one of the most representative followers of the Schola Cantorum led by the French composer
Vincent d’Indy, a Spanish composer living in Paris at the same time as Falla; on the other hand,
Claude Debussy, the most important representative of the music of French Impressionism.
The second section then demonstrates how the confluence between two different strands –
on one hand the influence of the music of Claude Debussy, and on the other the flamenco singing
tradition from the music of Spanish folklore that was already part of the composer’s heritage before
he arrived in Paris – combined to create Falla’s style at that moment in his career. To this end
Noches en los Jardines de España, the last piece Falla began to compose in France, will be analysed
in some detail as the most complete example of this combination of styles in his music.

1.2. Background to the research
Manuel de Falla is without doubt one of the most important Spanish composers of the 20th
century. During the seven years he lived in Paris he sampled the culture of the early 20th century in
what was at the time one of the most important cultural centres in Europe. The results of those years
are visible in the work Noches en los Jardines de España, which is, according to some
musicologists as for example Mariano Pérez Gutiérrez or Yvan Nommick, his most impressionistic
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piece. The work, described by Falla as „Symphonic Impressions“, was begun in Paris in 1909 and
completed in 1915, after his return to it in Spain. Focusing particularly on this piece will enable us
to assess clearly the real influence of French music – and of Debussy, in particular – on Falla’s
music by the end of his Paris years.
The use of the term „Impressions“ in Falla’s own description of the work is itself striking. Is
Falla’s use of the term meant to suggest some affinity with the music of the Impressionist
composers? Though the answer to this question must remain uncertain, it is interesting to note that
Claude Debussy himself, the icon of the musical movement known as Impressionism, disliked the
use of the term „Impressionist“ to describe his own music. What is quite clear, however, is that
when listening to Noches en los Jardines de España the sonorities of both Debussy’s music and
flamenco singing are both recognisable. As performers, there are therefore two ways of reading the
music that will achieve two different results in performance in this particular piece. We can focus
our interpretation on trying to bring out the sonorities of the Andalusian folk music, with a more
aggressive way of playing in imitation of the gypsy way of making music and the sounds of the
guitar, the flamenco singers or the percussive way of dancing; alternatively, on the other hand, we
can take a softer approach, trying to bring out the different orchestral colours and giving less
importance to the accentuation and the aggressive rhythms, thereby approaching more closely the
impressionistic style of the music of Claude Debussy.
It is interesting to compare two performances featuring the pianist and conductor Daniel
Barenboim in his two different roles. (My intention at this point is merely to give these as examples;
they will not be analysed further in the body of the text.) In the first example Barenboim is
conducting the Paris Orchestra and the piano soloist is Marta Algerich.1 Here the conductor has in
his hands a French orchestra, and he adopts a softer approach to the piece. In the second example,
with Daniel Barenboim as the piano soloist with Plácido Domingo conducting the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra,2 we can perceive how Barenboim and Domingo adopt a more aggressive
performance style, exaggerating the accents and the changes in dynamics more strongly and giving
greater importance to the rhythmical sense of the piece. A comparison of the playing of the wind
instruments and the piano soloist, in particular, in the two versions reveals clearly how the second
version adopts a more aggressive style.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYCiyNbDmRM
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MS332sS7cA
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1.3. Research methods
The principal methods of investigation are based on the documents and literature I have had
the opportunity to work with; these are available in the Manuel de Falla Foundation and Archive,
which has been located in Granada (Spain) since 1991. The Manuel de Falla Archive is a public
institution which preserves the library and documental legacy of the composer. The archive consists
of a collection of historical documents and an extensive reference library concerning the
composer’s life and times. The Spanish composer was closely associated with the most important
figures of his time, and documentary evidence of these relationships is preserved in the archive.
In order to obtain essential information specifically related to my area of research, my
research methods involved the following:
• An analysis of the different articles, letters, scores, and unpublished works available in the
Manuel de Falla Archive that relate to my research topic, with the aim of discovering the factors
that influenced and changed the compositional style of the Spanish composer change and thus to
find the best way of interpreting his work Noches en los Jardines de España. It is important here to
mention the works that appear in the bibliography. First of all, Manuel de Falla. His Life and Music
by Nancy Lee Harper, who uses a large amount of unpublished sources from the Manuel de Falla
Archive in Granada. Harper’s book uses letters and unpublished material that I use as well in my
research, but with a different goal. The focus of my research and my use of these resources is to
obtain information which will help the performer play Falla’s music in the way the composer
wished. Also important here is to mention the Doctoral dissertation by Elizabeth Anne Seitz, the
title of which is Manuel de Falla’s years in Paris, 1907–1914. The focus of that work is analytical –
an analysis of the music of Manuel de Falla during his stay in Paris, but without any kind of
conclusion with regard to performance, which marks a very big difference from the focus of the
present research work.
There are two works from the unpublished sources listed in the bibliography of this thesis which
add very important information about Manuel de Falla’s life in Paris and which have not, as far as I
am aware, been used in any previous research: Falla y París and Tesoro Sacro Musical. Revista de
Investigación y Ensayo by Mariano Pérez Gutiérrez .
• Practical experience of conducting Manuel de Falla’s music, including El Amor Brujo, La
Vida Breve, El Sombrero de Tres Picos and Noches en los Jardines de España, so as to gain my own
vision of his music as a conductor. As yet I have not conducted the piece in which is focus of this
dissertation in concert; however, the experience with the other three works has given me a clear
picture of how Noches en los Jardines de España should be performed.
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• An analysis of Noches en los Jardines de España, with the aim of identifying in this work
the influence of elements both from Andalusian folk music and from the impressionistic style of
Claude Debussy. Rather than adopting a traditional musical analysis of the score, the intention is to
identify and present certain stylistic elements that exist within the music so as to be able to realise
the piece as faithfully as possible to Falla’s original intentions in performance.
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2. Manuel de Falla and Paris

Manuel María de los Dolores Falla y Matheu was arguably the most important Spanish
composer of the 20th century. Born in Cádiz, Spain, on 23rd November 1876, he died in Alta Gracia,
Argentina, on 14th November 1946. He began piano lessons with his mother, Maria Jesús Matheu,
and then continued with a local teacher; by the age of ten he was attending chamber concerts in
Cádiz.
By the mid-1890s Falla, now firmly resolved to become a composer, had begun working
with Alejandro Odero, a student of Marmontel and Enrique Broca, who taught harmony and
counterpoint at the local conservatory. He would spend long intervals in Madrid studying the piano
with José Tragó, a student of Georges Mathias affiliated with the Madrid Conservatory,
where Falla eventually enrolled.
The year 1900 found him living in the capital, Madrid, with his family, whom he was
obliged to support by giving piano and harmony lessons. Despite an early failure with a zarzuela, a
Spanish musical and dramatic genre which contains both spoken and sung scenes, Falla’s first
Madrid period clarified and gave substance to his musical priorities. He was much impressed by
Louis Lucas’s treatise L’acoustique nouvelle (1854), a discussion of the natural generation of
consonance and dissonance, which gave theoretical justification to his loyalty to tonal structures. In
Madrid he also began his association with Felipe Pedrell, the Catalan composer, critic, teacher and
musicologist, who moved to the capital from Barcelona in 1902. Like Pedrell’s other students
(Granados, Albéniz, Vives, Lluís Millet and Roberto Gerhard) Falla held Pedrell in high regard.
In 1905 the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando sponsored a competition for a
Spanish opera, which Falla won with La Vida Breve. This was the first of his explorations of
Gypsy cante jondo (‘deep song’). As in subsequent works, he set himself the challenge of elevating
traditional Gypsy music to the highest level of art while preserving its primordial essence. Though
part of the prize was to have been a public performance of the winning opera, no authorisation for a
performance of La Vida Breve at a Spanish theatre ever materialised. Frustrated with the musical
institutions in Spain, in 1907 he accepted an offer to tour France as an accompanist. (Franco 2001:
371–374).

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As Falla told his biographer Alexis Roland-Manuel (1891–1966), a French composer and
critic born in Paris, „he decided very soon inside himself that he should go to study in Paris“.3 In the
summer of 1907 he was able to realise his dream, presenting himself very successfully with La Vida
Breve. This work, in which Falla tries to evoke Granada, opened to him the doors of the artistic
world in Paris. „Debussy and Dukas were very impressed by the Spanish composer’s piece and
offered him their support from the very beginning“.4
After the initial tour he decided to stay on in Paris, where would live for seven years. He
was very attracted by French music, especially by the music of Claude Debussy, with whom he was
to have a very good relationship. Proof of this is his Homenaje pour le Tombeau de Claude
Debussy, his only piece for solo guitar, composed by Falla in 1920 as a tribute to his fellow
composer and friend who had died in 1918. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, however,
Falla was obliged to return to Spain. Nevertheless, he always maintained his contact with Paris,
making frequent trips to the French capital for the premières or concerts of a number of his pieces,
and to be present at the tributes rendered to him by the musical and cultural elite of Paris.
But what had been happening in Falla’s life before 1907? When he was 9 years old he had
started to take piano lessons with Eloísa Galluzo, but at that time he felt himself more called to the
vocation of a writer than to that of a musician. This is confirmed in a letter written to his biographer
Roland-Manuel, in which he states „my vocation, despite the love I felt for some music, was
literature“.5 But with adolescence his real passion would appear. In the same letter written to Roland
Manuel in 1928 Falla wrote about his new passion, the art of composing, with which he fell in love
when he was 17 years old. „... From that moment some kind of power made me leave everything to
dedicate my life to composition. That vocation was so strong that I was even afraid because of it...“6
In 1900 Falla decided to move permanently to Madrid where, because of his family’s
financial straits, he made contact with the world of the Spanish Zarzuela. Even as a Spanish
composer, however, he was not really attracted to the genre. „The composers of Zarzuelas wanted
only to compose very fast so as to get an early performance and to be easily understood by the
public.“ (Falla 1988: 85). Only one Zarzuela composed by Manuel de Falla was performed, Los
Amores de la Inés, premièred at the Teatro Cómico de Madrid on 12 April 1902.

3 Part of a document on display in an exhibition organized by the Manuel de Falla Archive (MFA) in Granada, Spain.
4 Part of a document on display in an exhibition organized by the MFA.
5 Letter from Manuel de Falla to Roland-Manuel. December 1928. MFA 7521.
6 Letter from Manuel de Falla to Roland-Manuel. December 1928. MFA 7521.
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