Joaquim Homs was born in 1906 in Barcelona, where he studied the cello and taught himself piano and composition. In 1931 he met the composer Robert Gerhard, whose pupil he was to be until 1938. Gerhard, who was to be his friend for many years, had studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Viena and Berlin, and initiated the young Homs into the world of the twelve-note system (although Homs was not to use it until the 1950s). Those were the years when music flourished in republican Barcelona, as is evidenced by the fact that Schoenberg stayed for several months there (facilitated by Gerhard himself), and the celebration of the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISMC) in 1936 (where Berg’s famous Violin Concerto was first performed), The Spanish Civil War (1936.39) put an end to this golden age in Catalan music and the gruelling post-war years made it extremely difficult for any new music to be heard beyond the Spanish borders. Joaquim Homs, who had studied engineering, although his musical output never suffered from this double professional life and he turned out to be a very prolific composer (his catalogue contains more than 200 works). This enormous output can be divided into three main periods: the first up to 1954, characterized by considerable eclecticism and the search for a personal language; the second period begins in 1954, with the adoption of the twelve-note system; and the third main period begins in 1967, a year marked by the death of the composer’s wife, the paiter Pietat Fornesa –an event which was to leave its mark on many of the works he composed.

Written by Jordi Masó

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Artists

Jordi Masó, piano
Montserrat Torruella, mezzo-soprano
Granollers Chamber Orchestra
Francesc Guillén, conductor
 

List of pieces

Joaquim Homs
Entre dues linies (Between Two Lines)
Concertino
Suite, Op. 1
Adagio for strings
El caminant i el mur (The Walker and the Wall)
Diptych I
Soliloquio II (Soliloquy II)