Alois Hába

In his prolific career, Hába composed three operas, an enormous collection of chamber music including 16 string quartets, piano, organ and choral pieces, some orchestral works and songs.

He and his family often played and sang their native Wallachian folk songs, actively participated in church singing and folk-music performances.

In 1908 he entered the teachers' training college in Kroměříž, where he began to develop an interest in Czech national music, analyzing the works of Bedřich Smetana.

Here he was interested in analysing the works of Claude Debussy, Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin, and Richard Strauss, and in harmonization of Moravian folk music.

He published his first theoretical treatise (in Czech), the small booklet Harmonické základy čtvrttónové soustavy (Harmonic Essentials of the Quarter-tone System).

The same year, Hába began to attempt the establishment of a school of microtonal music, but as the Nazis started to gain power in Germany, he came under attack and was driven out of Berlin.

His name began to appear alongside other representatives of his generation's avant-garde musicians and, thanks to him, Czechoslovakia became one of the first member countries of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

In 1927, the Czech branch factory of the German piano firm August Förster in the North Bohemian town of Jiříkov built for him a sixth-tone harmonium, patterned mostly after the design by Busoni.

After the premiere of his quarter-tone opera Matka (Mother) in 1931, introducing a practically athematic concept, Hába emerged as a leader of Czech modernist music and became internationally well known as one of the most important avantgarde composers.

Athematic constructions characteristic of his work appeared also later in the opera Přijď království tvé (Thy Kingdom Come) (1940), which is written in the sixth-tone system.

In 1933, when Josef Suk became director of the Prague Conservatory, Hába was made a full professor and established the Department of Quarter-tone and Sixth-tone Music.

During the war Hába wrote a continuation of his Theory of Harmony, completed, as already mentioned, a sixth-tone opera (which was never produced), and considered constructing a twelfth-tone harmonium.

The Prague Conservatory in general enjoyed an international reputation, and a great deal of credit for that goes to the contacts and pioneering efforts of Alois Hába.

It was with these words that Alois Hába introduced a concert of works composed by himself and his students on 13 March 1945 in the Municipal Library in Prague: Often just raising the apex of a melody by a mere half-tone, a quarter-tone or a sixth-tone, just prolonging or shortening a certain passage by a single beat, just livening up or rearranging the rhythm will be enough to achieve some satisfactory musical expressivity.

All three areas of Alois Hába’s activity – composing, teaching, and organizing – evince one of his fundamental characteristics: the courage to move into a territory where no one else had thus far dared go.