Haubenstock-Ramati was born on 27th February 1919 in Kraków and died on 3rd March 1994 in Vienna. In the years 1934-1937 he received musical education in violin, theory of music, and the basics of composition from Artur Malawski. In 1937 Haubenstock-Ramati started studying musicology and philosophy at Jagiellonian University. In the end of the 1930s the increasing risk of Nazi aggression forced the composer’s family to move to Lviv, where the artist took up studies in the Higher Musical Institute named after Mykola Lysenko. He was being educated in composing and conducting under the academic supervision of Józef Koffler, Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern, Seweryn Barbag, and Adam Sołtys. In 1941 Haubenstock-Ramati was arrested by the Soviet authorities and subsequently confined to prisons in Odessa and Tomsk. After the announcement of amnesty for Polish citizens in the Soviet Union in 1942, the composer joined General Władysław Anders’s Polish Army, where he was assigned a position of a violinist and flugelhorn player in the orchestra created within the army’s structures. However, Haubenstock-Ramati went down with typhus. When he recovered, he managed to get to Palestine through Persia and Baghdad.
Once the war ended, the composer went back to Kraków, where he met his future wife, Emilia. From 1948 on he worked as editorial assistant in Ruch Muzyczny periodical, and as the head of the musical editorial team in Polish Radio. Haubenstock-Ramati opposed the limitations of artistic freedom inflicted upon the creators by the state, which resulted in his decision to move to Israel. He settled in Tel Aviv, where he was given the task of creating and then managing the State Music Library of Israel. In the years 1954-1956 he also taught composition (including electronic music composition) at the Music Academy in Tel Aviv. In 1955, his first serious success as a composer came; it was thanks to the first performance of Recitativo ed aria (Konzert für Cembalo und Orchester) during Donaueschinger Musiktage. In 1957, Haubenstock-Ramati went on a six-month academic scholarship to Paris. The stay in France allowed him to further develop his skills in new artistic realms — he worked in Pierre Schaeffer’s studio of musique concrète — and made acquaintance with important artistic figures, such as Pierre Boulez and Alexander Calder. In the same year, during the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik in Zurich where his composition Recitativo ed aria was performed, Haubenstock-Ramati met an employee of Universal Edition, Alfred Schlee. Schlee invited Haubenstock-Ramati to Vienna and offered him a position at the publishing firm. The composer left for Austria in September 1957 and started working as a music editor at Universal Edition. In 1960 he was granted Austrian citizenship. As Alfred Schlee recollected:
Thanks to his musical and graphical talent he was particularly predestined to create new rules governing the graphic shape of scores, especially those which made reading new music easier.
In the years 1973-1989 he worked as composition professor at Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He taught Beat Furrer, Peter Ablinger, Paweł Szymański and Bronisław Kazimierz Przybylski, among others. In the years 1976-1986 he was head of the Electro-acoustics and Instrumental Music Institute created by the university. He also taught during international courses of composition and musical notation, in Darmstadt (1964, 1965), Bilthoven (1967), Buenos Aries (1968), Stockholm (1969), Tel Aviv (1967-1972), and San Francisco (1972). In 1959 Haubenstock-Ramati organised the first exhibition of graphic scores in Donaueschingen.
In 1977, Haubenstock-Ramati was awarded the Preis der Stadt Wien for extraordinary input into Austrian music, and Preis des Musikprotokolls Graz. In 1981, he was given the prestigious Große Österreichische Staatspreis für Musik. In 1990, he was president of Klangforum Wien festival.
Artistic achievements
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s first works exhibit the composer’s fascination with the achievements of the Second Vienesse School, created by Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Haubenstock-Ramati got familiar with Webern’s work as early as 1938, when he still lived in Kraków. His further musical education under the supervision of the Polish pioneer of dodecaphony, Józef Koffler, allowed Haubenstock-Ramati to take up inquisitive studies in twelve-tone composition. The composer’s first released piece was Ricercari for string trio, created in the serial technique in Kraków in 1949. 1950, that is the beginning of his stay in Israel, is considered one of the milestones in the composer’s work. Contact with non-European music resulted in the outstanding composition Bénédictions (Blessings), in which Haubenstock-Ramati used melodic models of Indian raga and Arabic makam, alongside with elements of Byznantine vocals and Jewish cantorial music. The piece is based on a twelve-tone composition, which makes Blessings, in accordance with the authors intention, a synthesis of ‘highly advances means of constructing contemporary music and the rules of Oriental aesthetics’.
Already in the early 1950s Haubenstock-Ramati was looking for new formal solutions. Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures were a crucial source of inspiration for him. The two artists have met during Haubenstock-Ramati’s scholarship in Paris. The composer acquired the sculptor’s idea of the mobile form, which he first realized in the 1958 composition Interpolation. The piece is for one, two, or three flutes and allows the performers to construct instrumental parts from short melodic structures on their own. The shape and connections between these structures have been meticulously pre-set by the composer, the performers’ task is to choose one of the many possible paths organising the passage of one’s own voice in the piece. Variability is at the core of the mobile form — that is, numerous variants of its realization. Haubenstock-Ramati employed various kinds of mobile form in his subsequent works, such as Multiple, where the variability is limited to the cast.
Haubenstock-Ramati’s search for a graphic dimension of the mobile form gave rise to many innovative solutions in musical notation. Gradually, the composer’s scores were filled with more and more graphic elements, up until the point when the visual aspect as such became a crucial element of the work. Graphic scores were a synthesis of music and painting. Both the musical passage and the form of the composition depended more and more on the performers’ ingenuity regarding the interpretation of graphic symbols. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s graphic scores clearly exhibit his fascination with abstract painting and the technique of collage. As Erhard Karkoschka wrote about his achievement in the field:
Haubenstock-Ramati’s graphical scores are among the most prominent achievements of the genre. No other composer created such a rich spectrum of kinds of mobile forms.
Roman Haubenstrock-Ramati was also inspired by literary works of James Joyce (a cycle of musical graphics Poetics I and Poetics II and the choreographic poem Ulysses, Szenen einer Wanderung), Samuel Beckett (Credentials or Think think Lucky, anti-opera Comedie) and Franz Kafka (opera America).
Bibliography:
Ewa Kowalska-Zając, Oblicza awangardy. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Łódź 2000
Bogusław Schaeffer, Roman Haubenstock Ramati [in:] Encyklopedia Muzyczna PWM, red. Elżbieta Dziębowska, Kraków 1993
author: Agnieszka Grzybowska, translated by NS July 2016