Luis de Pablo, born in 1930 in Bilbao, Spain, began his musical studies at a young age but went on to study law at the Complutense University of Madrid, graduating in 1952. Interested in modern forms of art and with a musical background, de Pablo completed his training through a personal and intense study of the major scores of the twentieth century while practicing as a lawyer at Iberia, the Spanish airline. He also taught himself composition. De Pablo abandoned law at the end of the 1950s to pursue music. In 1958, he founded Grupo Nueva Música with Ramón Barcé. Cristóbal Halffter also played in this band.

In the 1960s, while still composing, de Pablo led the promotion of modern music in his country. He spoke at conferences, published analyses of the music of Anton Webern, and translated Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt’s biography of Arnold Schoenberg as well as the major writings of Webern, which were unpublished in Spanish. He also founded the Tiempo y Música concerts in 1959, where Le Marteau sans maître and the three piano sonatas of Pierre Boulez, as well as Zeitmasse by Karlheinz Stockhausen, premiered in Spain. He created the first studio for electronic music in Spain with the group Alea in 1965. He also organized concerts featuring young composers from 1960 to 1963, as well as the First Madrid Biennial of Contemporary Music in 1964.

Through his work and his music, de Pablo confronted the cultural isolation Spain was plunged into by Francoism. He introduced serialism to a country where music had been frozen in the folk aesthetics of Felipe Pedrell and Manuel de Falla since the civil war. De Pablo introduced young Spanish music to the international scene, including in the concert halls of Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, and Paris.

De Pablo went to Darmstadt at the beginning of the 1960s, where he met Boulez, Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and György Ligeti. He then went to Paris to attend the lectures of Max Deutsch, a former student of Schoenberg. De Pablo’s music reflects the tendencies of a whole generation trying to renew serialism through aleatory forms.

He organized the “Pamplona Encounters” in 1972, a music, theatre, cinema, and visual arts festival. This was the apotheosis of de Pablo’s work as an advocate of Art Nouveau in Spain. However, this event provoked his critics. Francoists accused de Pablo of giving too much importance to “left-wing art,” while Basque separatists in Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) claimed he was a supporter of the regime. ETA planted two bombs at the beginning of the festival and abducted one of the festival’s patrons a year later. The event was cancelled and de Pablo was forced into exile, first in the United States, where he taught at the University of Buffalo, and then in Canada, where he was Professor at the University of Ottawa and Université de Montreal. Only after Franco’s death did he return to Spain.

His work as conference speaker, concert organizer, adviser,¹ teacher, and member of the jury in numerous international competitions and his involvement with various academies² have not stopped him from producing an impressive body of work, with more than 210 opuses. Rewarded with countless prizes and awards,³ international commissions, and monographic concerts, de Pablo is regarded by many as part of the vanguard of modern Spanish music.

His music is founded on respect toward all art forms. However removed they may be from one another, de Pablo excels in revealing their similarities while retaining their differences. Among his pieces, we find homages to Tomás Luis de Victoria, Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven, Schoenberg, Federico Mompou, Iranian music, Japanese Noh music, the Melanesian flute, the Epigrams of Martial, and the texts of Vicente Aleixandre, Fernando Pessoa, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Luis de Góngora, Giacomo Leopardi, and Aztec writers. De Pablo’s canon is the work of an explorer studying the world’s cultures.

Inventive, fantastical, poetic, he was a leader of the modern Spanish school and one of the most striking personalities in music. To cite de Pablo himself, “It seems most important to me not to stop being a connoisseur; I freely confess that I would rather be considered a hedonist than an analyst.”

<sup>1. Director of the Lille Festival (1982), Director for the diffusion of contemporary music at the Spanish Ministry of Culture (1983), member of the committee for the Opéra-Bastille project (1984), etc. ↩
2. Academies of Granada, San Fernando in Madrid, Belgium, Santa Cecilia in Rome, Jakiunde: Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. ↩
3. Among them, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, Spain’s Premio Nacional de Música, doctor honoris causa from the Complutense University of Madrid, Prix Arthur Honegger from the Fondation de France, Music Composition Prize from the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation, Guerrero Foundation Music Prize, Tomás Luis de Victoria Award. ↩</sup>