(b Casablanca, 12 June 1914; d Paris, 13 Nov 1992). French composer of Andalusian origin. He studied with Daniel-Lesur at the Schola Cantorum, Paris (from 1937), and after the war with Casella at the Accademia di S Cecilia, Rome. In 1946 he returned to Paris, where he has taught and composed. His first major work, the oratorio Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1950), brought his name to a wide audience. His music is cosmopolitan and independent, related to French composers from Debussy to Boulez but also to the music of Spain and north Africa. He has written for diverse vocal and instrumental groupings, often including zither, guitar and percussion in his ensembles, and has exploited micro-intervals.
A composer of striking originality, given to rejecting schools, cliques, and fashions, Ohana pursued a distinguished career that is as hard to characterize as his nationality. His father had Andalusian heritage, but as the family had settled in Gibraltar, had British citizenship. Maurice was born in Morocco and brought up in Bayonne, France. He studied in Paris and Barcelona, joined the British Army in World War II and fought in Italy, staying behind to study composition with Casella. In 1947 he returned to Paris and founded a group called "Zodiaque," devoted to the ideal of artistic freedom, mainly freedom to reject the twelve-tone system that was then rapidly taking over European musical thought. His manifesto attacked serialism, "Parisian cliques," and avant-garde techniques. This made him a lifelong foe of the Pierre Boulez, the avant-garde serialist who led the dominant Parisian clique from that time and for the next half-century.
Ohana's music escapes the older Romantic tonal tradition by embracing the wildness and strange scales of Andalusian and Northern African music. His music calls for fluid, florid, almost bel canto singing and remarkably subtle new tone colorations (instrumental and vocal). He often seeks the stillness of Eastern-inspired meditation, but often uses hard-edged, Stravinskian rhythms. His music often has a sense of half-forgotten, archaic rituals. He used electronic music on occasion, and divided the octave into intervals smaller than the usual half-step. Among his most notable compositions were Syllabare pour Phèdre, Signes, Sibylle, Silenciare, Stream, Neumes, Promethée, and Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias. (He was fond of the letter "S" in his titles because it is spelled with a reverse "sigma," the Greek letter representing summation or infinity.) ~ Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide
Ohana's output includes the choral worksOffice des Oracles and Avoaha (1992), three string quartets (1963, 1980, 1989), and two suites for ten-string guitar: Si le jour paraît... (1963)[1] and Cadran lunaire (1981-2)[2], as well as a Tiento for six-string guitar (1957).[3] He also wrote an opera entitled Syllabaire pour Phèdre.
He is also known for his extensive use of microtonality; for example, third- and quarter-tones in pieces like Le Tombeau de Debussy and Si le jour paraît.... He was influenced by the use of microintervals in the cante jondo. [4]
Ohana has but rarely composed for large symphony orchestra : Synaxis (1966), Livre des Prodiges (1979) and T'Harân-Ngô (1973-1974). He composed two cello concertos, one piano concerto and a guitar concerto (1950-58; dedicated to Narciso Yepes).[5][6]
^ Jedrzejewsky, Franck. 2003. Dictionnaire des musiques microtonales("Dictionnary of microtonal music"), Paris, L'Harmattan, ISBN 2-7475-5576-3; Bayer Francis. 1981. De Schönberg à Cage : Essai sur la notion d'espace dans la musique contemporaine, Paris, Klincksieck, ISBN 2-252-02329-5
^ Halbreich, Harry. 1997. An Andalusian from Paris to New Orleans, liner notes of CD-release 1C1039 on Timpani Records.
Maurice Ohana: l’originalità di un linguaggio (parte prima) – Cenni biografici e riferimenti culturali by Isabella Abbonizio, «Il Fronimo» n .131, luglio 2005, pp. 31–42 (Italian)
Maurice Ohana: l’originalità di un linguaggio (parte seconda) – Un profilo estetico e l’opera per chitarra by Isabella Abbonizio, «Il Fronimo» n. 132, ottobre 2005, pp. 24–36 (Italian)
Maurice Ohana: l’originalità di un linguaggio (parte terza) – Il Tiento by Isabella Abbonizio, «Il Fronimo» n. 133, gennaio 2006, pp. 36–46 (Italian)
