Alois Hába

Alois Hába (21 June 1893 – 18 November 1973) was a Czech composer, music theorist and teacher. He belongs to the important discoverers in modern classical music, and major composers of microtonal music, especially using the quarter-tone scale, though he used others such as sixth-tones (e.g., in the 5th, 10th and 11th String Quartets), fifth-tones (Sixteenth String Quartet), and twelfth-tones. From the other mictrotonal conceptions, he discussed a "three-quarter tone" system (see three-quarter tone flat and the neutral second) in his theoretical works but he used scales in this tuning in sections of some of his compositions. In his prolific career, Hába composed three operas, an enormous collection of chamber music including 16 string quartets, piano, organ and choral pieces, some orchestral works and songs. He also had special keyboard and woodwind instruments constructed that were capable of playing quarter-tone scales.

Alois Hába was born in the small town of Vizovice in Moravian Wallachia, into a family of 10 children. When he was five years old it was discovered that he had absolute pitch. He and his family often played and sang their native Wallachian folk songs, actively participated in church singing and folk-music performances. In school, Alois became very interested in the musical aspects of the Czech language, above all in pitch, rhythm, accent, dynamics, and timbre of the speech. In 1908 he entered the teacher's training college in Kroměříž, where he began to develop an interest in Czech national music, analyzing the works of Bedřich Smetana. Already at that time he found out from his textbooks that the European system of music was not the only one in the world and that even some European music had in the past used different scales than the ones used in his time. He therefore started to develop his own point of view in this issue. After finishing his studies, he got a job as teacher in Bílovice, a small town near the Hungarian (now Slovak) border. Simultaneously, he continued his own musical studies and in 1913 wrote his first compositions, displaying an unwillingness to "follow the rules", which he maintained all his life. Hába was dissatisfied by small-town life, and in 1914, he moved to Prague and became a pupil of neoromantic composer Vítězslav Novák. Here he was interested in analysing the works of Claude Debussy, Max Reger, Alexander Scriabin, and Richard Strauss, and in harmonization of Moravian folk music.

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