The Roots: the necessary starting point to analyze Maurice Ohana’s music is all encapsulated in this term. Never as in this case has the synthesis of a unique sound, subtle yet explosive, light yet penetrating, been the result of lived experiences, travels, and friendships undertaken.
It seems necessary, therefore, to recount the most significant biographical points, to thoroughly examine an archive often overlooked by insiders, so as to highlight that special relationship that binds the French composer to the guitar.
Maurice Ohana was born in 1913 in Casablanca. Raised in an affluent family, he approached music from the very beginning; cante jondo, flamenco (his father’s family has Andalusian origins), jazz, Gregorian chant, African music, and French impressionism are some of the influences that would describe the great balance of sounds present in his music later on. Although it is particularly difficult to trace his family tree, Maurice Ohana is a French citizen, and in Paris, he studies and shapes his artistic career. His interest in Spanish folklore leads him to perform between ’36 and ’38 with the bailaora La Argentinita and the famous Ramón Montoya, from whom he learns all the techniques of flamenco guitar. The trio performs in several European capitals, including Paris and London.
The combination of tradition and innovation is the goal of his research, which accompanies him on journeys to Africa, Greece, and Italy (where he also meets Alfredo Casella and becomes great friends with him), undertaken after his enlistment in the British army in 1943. The visit to Andalusia allows him to thoroughly study Gypsy culture, cante, and baile. In his youth, he becomes a well-known pianist in the French capital, approaches serialism, and founds Le groupe musical Le zodiaque, a project that combines avant-garde with the anti-dictatorial political movement of the post-war period. With him are Alain Bermat, Pierre de la Foreste-Divonne, and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Concert programs often include some compositions by the young pianist, and this experience marks an important chapter in his artistic journey.
As Maurice Ohana begins to devote more time to writing, he finds in the guitar the ideal means to develop his ideas. It will be a future full of satisfactions but also rejections and missed executions. The first disappointment comes in 1950 when he meets a young Uruguayan guitarist, Abel Carlevaro, with whom he works for a long period. Maurice Ohana intends to write a Concerto for guitar and orchestra: after an initial phase of collaboration, on April 28, 1950, Carlevaro premieres the reduction for piano and guitar of the second movement. However, during the same period, the South American performer receives news of the non-renewal of the scholarship from the Uruguayan embassy. For economic reasons, he is therefore forced to move to Barcelona. After exchanges of letters and attempts to find a meeting point, given the difficulties due to distance, both artists are forced to abandon the project. Despite this setback, Ohana continues to write and does not stop: in 1955, he collaborates with another guitarist, Ramón Cueto, who premieres the Tiento (considered the peak of his works) in December 1957 at the École Normale in Paris. The piece possesses that sonic texture that will define his aesthetic for the rest of his career. The character of the dance, driven by the rhythm of the flamenco compás, follows the melisma of cante jondo and the free oral form translated onto the guitar. His music is guided by a sort of precarious stability, which combines simple melody with the polyphony of dance, without diminishing the instrument at any moment. The Tiento establishes the bond with the guitar; it is the business card that perfectly describes the direction Ohana intends to take.
It is precisely during this period of research that he returns to work on the concerto for guitar and orchestra. Confident in the work done, he writes to Andrés Segovia, showing him the project. The legendary guitarist from Linares believes the composition is “fun,” but expresses no admiration or particular enthusiasm. None of what Ohana expected. It is the meeting with Narciso Yepes that overturns the situation. The guitarist falls in love with his music immediately: from the collaboration between the two artists, the Trois Graphiques pour guitare et orchestre are born. Farruca, Siguiriya, Bulería, and Tiento alternate their metric scheme with the freedom of slow melodies. The concerto is a juxtaposition of unisons, written improvisations, and tight changes of tempo, in which the rhythmic component of the orchestra (four percussionists) reigns supreme. Not even the second movement presented years earlier by Carlevaro remains of the main idea, transformed into a Saraband for harpsichord and orchestra in 1950. However, Ohana is still not satisfied with the result achieved: in addition to writing, he dedicates himself to the study of acoustics and recognizes in the guitar an instrument limited compared to the demands of his music. He understands that the breakthrough can only be achieved through a new instrument: hence the idea of the ten-string guitar is born, and he finds in Narciso Yepes the suitable interpreter. It is the Spanish guitarist who, despite the authoritative criticisms addressed by Segovia, Lagoya, and Friederich to the instrument and the technical obstacles exposed by José Ramírez, manages to obtain from his niece Amalia and the luthier Paulino Barnabé a prototype of the ten-string guitar.
What attracts him to the instrument, above all, is its ability to generate resonances that give life to a true “underground” sound. The result of his research is the addition of four strings following the low E: C, B-flat, A-flat, and G-flat. This study marks a new chapter in his career. The Trois Graphiques are thus performed for the first time on November 20, 1961, by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Anthony Bernard and broadcast on the BBC’s third radio channel. The second performance takes place in ’62 in Strasbourg, in front of an enthusiastic audience. The opposite happens in Spain, where spectators receive the concerto coldly and distantly, which helps us understand how Segovia imagined the sensations of the average listener. Ohana continues to have enormous difficulties in communicating whenever he presents his music to the guitar world. The publishing house Jobert, to which he is very attached, even refuses to publish his works, as the company’s administrator harbors a particular antipathy towards the six strings. All guitar material is only published later, by Billaudot editions. Approaching such a deeply felt popular reality and transforming its key contents has always been considered a very risky act, one that Ohana seems willing to face in order to advance his ideas, despite all the difficulties dictated by the moment.
The impressionist turn between ’62 and ’64 leads him to write Si le jour parait…, a suite of seven movements inspired by the caprices of Goya (Si amacene, nos vamos…) and describing how mystical and poetic Maurice Ohana’s work could still be. He draws musical inspiration from Debussy, knowing all the details of his music. The presentation of new harmonies, tight rhythms, hexatonic scales, and elaborate quarter-tone melodies mark the stage of the new path that the French composer is undertaking, much more introspective, focusing on the dark side of sound, almost imperceptible.
On a technical level, in this work, Ohana tackles the theme of variation, not understood as a schematic composition, but as the transformation of very specific figures, which change their role as the piece evolves. Each piece of the suite analyzes the cycle of life, from the temporal factor (Aube) to nature (Jeu des quatre vents), from the connection between reality and mythology (La chevelure de Bérénice, Enueg) to the firm relationship that binds man to his origins (Temple, Maya – Marsya). While all the pieces seem cohesive and united by a very precise conceptual thread, at the center of the suite, any reference to mythology is interrupted by 20 Avril (Planh), a work written in memory of Julián Grimau García, a Madrid communist executed on April 20, 1963, by the Francoist Civil Guard. The piece collects all the anger of the moment; with rasgueados and dissonances, Maurice Ohana wants to represent the cruelty of the fascist dictatorship. 20 Avril (Planh) is also the only piece that can be performed with a 6-string guitar; it almost seems like a gesture designed to expose the instrument and render it defenseless in the face of such a despicable act. The suite is performed for the first time by Alberto Ponce, a Spanish guitarist residing in Paris, on June 25, 1974.
Between December 19 and January 13, 1981, Maurice Ohana writes the second cycle for ten-string guitar, Cadran Lunaire. Its dedicatee, Luis Martín Diego, performs the suite on December 9, 1982, in Rome, with the support of the Academia de Bellas Artes present in the Italian capital. The four pieces follow the pattern of Si le jour parait and reveal a vertical writing, a more immediate polyphony, rich in dissonances and impetuous dynamic contrasts.
The first book of Douze études d’interprétation for piano (1982) is the tangible sign of the sonic shift his music is undergoing. It’s as if Ohana were trying to analyze the same original sounds that have defined his research, but following a different path. The need to return to the characteristics of cante jondo enhances the rhythmic component, transforms time into free form, and facilitates the flow of polyphony: this explains the continuous omission of measures at various points in the suite. Like in Candil, where a dialogue between two voices without rhythmic references is presented and structured on two staves, almost wanting to sanction further freedom. The final result tends to achieve a melisma that can approach modern language while maintaining the oral form that Gypsy tradition has passed down for centuries.
The need to return to work on the sound of popular origin seems to create a thread that links his artistic maturity to his Andalusian origins, never fully clarified. The identity of the French composer has been one in constant motion, urging him to distance himself whenever his idea started to become unidirectional. In the last period of his career, Ohana ideally entrusts his art to music, entrusting his image to the figure of myth: he wants to become an “anonymous” composer. These are the reasons that will lead him to reserve his last attentions for the guitar, dedicating his work for two six-string guitars, Anonyme XXème Siècle, to the Horreaux/Théhard duo, written and performed between 1988 and 1989.
If we were to analyze every piece that has characterized Maurice Ohana’s aesthetic, we would understand that his past reflects in his art. The influences of the 20th century “slide” into his music, but instead of destabilizing it, they confirm its authenticity: Maurice Ohana has been able to draw inspiration from the modern without abandoning himself to serialism, he has made the strength of tradition his own without stopping at simple popular melodies. With the same creativity, he gave life to entirely new sonic scenarios on the guitar. For this reason, the interpreter’s interest cannot be limited to a small part of the imposing catalog that the French composer has left for the guitar, but must mark the breaking point that abandons conventions and approaches a repertoire of inestimable value.
We thank Stéphane Sacchi, Corinne Monceau, the association Les Amis de Maurice Ohana, and Dominique Souse for kindly providing the information and images presented in the article.
Originally published in Guitart n.100
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