[citation needed] His mother Rosario Escriche Erradón was of Catalan heritage and gave her children their first music lessons.

[1] He was also advised by Manuel de Falla, whom he met through composer-critic Adolfo Salazar,[1][a] and whose music then owed much to Igor Stravinsky's neoclassical style.

[10][b] Halffter also met artists like Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca at the Residencia de Estudiantes, and he set the poems of Rafael Alberti to music in Marinero en tierra (1925).

[14] In the last, he praised Joaquín Rodrigo's Zarabanda lejana y Villancico [es] as "the exquisite product of a refined musician".

[14] He cofounded the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas in 1936 and was also Head of the Department of Music at the Undersecretary of Propaganda in the Second Spanish Republic.

[18] He was among many Spanish Republican exiles who did so,[18] including Falla,[citation needed] Salazar, Rosa García Ascot, Jesús Bal y Gay, and María Teresa Prieto.

[20] Halffter may have participated in the 1954 and 1957 Festivales de Música in Caracas, perhaps placing him in the company of Roque Cordero and René Leibowitz.

[citation needed] They are typified by their mild polytonality, asymmetric rhythms, and clear melodic writing after Falla,[22] and their neoclassical style has been compared to the musical idiom of Domenico Scarlatti.

[citation needed][d] Halffter began to use twelve-tone technique, as the first composer to do so in Mexico,[26] in Tres hojas de album (1953).