Un hito de la modernidad musical española: el primer Apunt para piano de Roberto Gerhard

Abstract

Roberto Gerhard’s first Apunt for piano (1921) occupies a key place in Spanish music history for being the first piece written by a Spanish composer in which tonality is abandoned. Over the past decades, a great number of scholars have related Gerhard’s 2 Apunts to Schoenberg’s early atonal music, particularly the Six Little Piano Pieces op. 19 (1911). This article specifies Schoenberg’s influence on Gerhard’s first Apunt and situates the piece in Catalan and Franco-Spanish musical modernism, an aspect paradoxically overlooked in studies so far. The author demonstrates the close relationship of the piece to the compositional style of Frederic Mompou as well as to the prominence of octatonic structures in it. Gerhard’s heterodox use of folk music from Tarragona in the first Apunt and his concurrent negation of musical Catalanisme (Catalan nationalism) are contextualized within the contemporary aesthetic debates about musical nationalism.