
Art, as history teaches us, has always reflected political and social situations through its various disciplines. In particular, the music of the 20th century—so varied and controversial—revealed its most radical edges through the evolution of its artistic movements over the decades.
Now imagine a country like Spain, under the full grip of Franco’s regime: economically isolated and so deeply rooted in popular traditions that folklore remains the only constant in its cultural life. Of course, we think of figures like Falla, Albéniz, and Granados, but in a Western world that had already embraced the languages of Stravinsky and Ravel, the stances of the Second Viennese School, and was opening itself to the avant-garde of Darmstadt—how did Spain respond to all this?
It didn’t, or at least it seemed not to. While the poets of the Generation of ’27 were bringing the country closer to new cultural horizons, it would be the composers of ’51 who became the first to actively promote the new music spreading across Europe1.
The Spanish avant-garde rapidly absorbed compositional techniques developed decades earlier, reworked them, and made them its own—but it didn’t stop there. It couldn’t. These were the years of electronic experimentation, serialism, and structuralism.
Luis de Pablo is, indeed, the child of all this: always culturally restless, bound to both literature and music. The Bilbao-born composer discovered Bartók, Leibowitz, and Messiaen thanks to Maurice Ohana’s brother, a family friend who frequently traveled from France to nearby Spain and brought him scores, writings, and notes. De Pablo was deeply struck. He left his country, travelled across Europe and South America, and forged friendships with Boulez, Ligeti, Berio, Stockhausen, and Maderna. He translated the biographies of Schoenberg and Webern into Spanish and authored several essays on the aesthetics of contemporary music.
His constant search and tendency to move beyond conventional compositional methods gradually distanced him from the musical traditions of his homeland. Perhaps for this very reason, De Pablo came to write for solo guitar—a symbolic instrument of Spanish folklore—quite late. Another contributing factor was the lack of skilled guitarists in the Iberian Peninsula: finding performers willing to work on this repertoire seemed like an unattainable goal.
While his fellow Spaniards Tomás Marco and Antón García Abril were already contributing to the creation of a new guitar repertoire—Marco in 1965 with Albayalde, and García Abril in 1976 with the Concierto Aguediano—De Pablo used the instrument only in ensemble works such as Módulos 3, Libro de imágenes, and in the theatrical piece El viajero indiscreto. It wasn’t until 1991 that his friend Gabriel Estarellas, a refined interpreter attentive to musical developments in Spain over recent decades, managed to convince the composer from Bilbao. The result was Fabula, a tribute to the Generation of ’27, which had offered so much to Spanish artists throughout the 20th century.
The work is based on a poem by Gerardo Diego that pays homage to Góngora, three hundred years after his death. Rich in metaphors, stylistic innovations, and irony, Fábula de Equis y Zeda is a parody of mythological tales as shaped by literary tradition. De Pablo “decodes” Diego’s verses, as if each movement were the musical transposition of the poem: polyphonic writing becomes a tool for dialogue, with the various voices imagined as the characters of the fábula itself.
The writing style that defines De Pablo—built from small, fast-developing elements and rich in articulations—here gives way to a more homogeneous discourse, with broad phrases and interconnected voices. The work opens with “…y sobre el piano olvida el color verde”, which immediately has a powerful impact: two voices in rhythmic opposition alternate a melody that offers no space to breathe. On the one hand, a mechanical and regular phrase unfolds; on the other, “…a puro arpegio de oro venerable” reveals De Pablo’s lyrical dimension, freed from rhythmic constraints.
“…te expondré el caso de la mandolina” reignites the drama: an energetic movement full of tempo changes. The pizzicato technique appears for the first time at the beginning of the piece, leading from a delicate central song to a final section with a dense polyphonic texture. The last part shares its title with the opening movement and may be understood as a timbral and dynamic synthesis of the three previous sections: slow tempos followed by strong dynamics and accents, rapid rhythms shaped around broad melodic gestures.
Commissioned in 2013 by the Festival de la Guitarra de Sevilla and premiered by American guitarist Adam Levin in October of that year, Turris Eburnea is De Pablo’s second work for solo guitar. Though far shorter than the nearly 20-minute Fabula, the six-minute piece encapsulates an intense harmonic and dynamic effort. The religious title reflects a period of research during which the composer rediscovered devotional songs to the Virgin still sung in the Basque Country. This led him to favor textures shaped by timbral exploration rather than predetermined metric structures.
Turris Eburnea can be considered an exercise in which the performer explores the instrument’s versatility; the two dynamically contrasting voices are emblematic of this approach. The pizzicato technique reappears—as in “…te expondré el caso de la mandolina”—highlighting two repeated notes that quote the same interval presented at the outset.
In a Spain so distant from 1951, to speak of Luis de Pablo as a cultural institution is no overstatement. His works should be acknowledged as integral to the guitar repertoire. It is now up to performers to promote a different vision of Spanish music—one that harmonizes with the classical repertoire while shedding folkloric clichés. The hope is to strike a balance between the legacy of the past and the extraordinary contribution of a brilliant mind like Luis de Pablo, who helped guide a nation through a profound cultural rebirth.
Originally published on Guitart n. 92
- Coined by Cristóbal Halffter, the so-called Generation of ’51 refers to a group of composers who would go on to become some of the most prominent figures in 20th-century Spanish music. Tomás Marco, Antón García Abril, Ramón Barce, and Luis de Pablo, along with a small number of young composers, formed the Nueva Música group with the aim of analyzing and supporting the most innovative ideas that had emerged up to that point. ↩︎