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LEONARDO BALADA: HIS MUSIC

             Leonardo Balada, the Catalan composer who came to New York in 1956 to study composition, has been a powerful creative force for more than three decades. His highly personal “avant-garde” techniques in the sixties – dramatically as well as rhythmically imposing – sets his works like Guernica and María Sabina apart from composers of the time. Later, in the seventies, he was credited as a pioneer in blending the “avant-garde” with folkloric ideas mixing the new with the old – now a very fashionable trend – in works like Sinfonía en Negro-Homage to Martin Luther King (1968) and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

            His exposure to the plastic arts in New York was perhaps of greater significance to his style than the music heard around him. In Balada’s music one finds by his own admission a perplexing amalgamation of traditional Spanish culture influenced by modern concepts of geometric art, “collages” as seen in the paintings of Rauschenberg and the surrealism of Salvador Dali. Balada had collaborated with Dali several times in New York during the early ‘60s. There is a plasticity and a theatricality in his music and also a dichotomy, for while sometimes expresses the abstract, in other moments he mixes in the ethnic.

            In an interview over a generation ago Balada explained his position towards this dichotomy saying: “If I go to Andalusia and choose to wear a “Cordobés” hat, or a “cowboy” hat in Texas or no hat at all in Wall Street, I still will be recognized as “me,” provided that my personality emerges in spite of my disguise.” And his works are very personal indeed, through textural writing, blunt contrasts of ideas and dynamics, juxtaposition of opposing harmonies, mechanistic passages in layers of “staccato” writing, a rhythmic constancy and above all, a compelling sense of direction and goal in the form and drama of his music.

            A characteristic of some of Balada’s works is his interest in controversial subjects: antiwar (Guernica), freedom (Sinfonía en Negro-Homage to Martin Luther King), historic and social issues (the cantata Torquemada, the opera Zapata), environmental concerns (Music for Oboe and Orchestra), protest against death (the cantata No-res). In Spain, his childhood and adolescent years during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and after that under the dictatorship of Generalísimo Francisco Franco, had an impact on Balada’s psyche. When he came to the United States the gates of openness and freedom were open to him and with that a compelling desire for expressing in music the frustration experienced in his native country.

Jaime Mira – Troy Albany Records

Leonardo Balada

School of Music - Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA 15213 - USA

Tel.: (412)268-2372

Publisher Information

Beteca Music, exclusively distributed by Subito Music (store.subitomusic.com)

Direct Link to Subito Music listing: http://store.subitomusic.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=3_101_1128

Agent: Music Associates of America