This event truculent and moving seems to be the only one which had a decisive influence in the life of Turina; successes, honors and notoriety will reach him from now on without apparent effort. Since 1912, whereas it is thirty years old, which is very young for a composer, Parisian criticism greets his op. 3. "it should be on the piano of all those which are pricked to follow the contemporary musical movement". National Price of Composition for Canto a Sevilla in 1926, he is appointed five years later professor of composition to the Academy of Madrid. In 1940, just after the Civil war, event that Turina qualified "Glorious National Rising" - he is named Commissar to the Music (from Franckism to Francoism!)

Turina forms part of these artists who have only certainties where others have concerns: "Schönberg is the apostle of insincerity through an unhealthy mental ability" he affirms. "The XXth century is prodigal of concern, neurosis, exalted polemics, final formulas which last one year as a maximum". That is what explains why his art did not vary during his life, did not follow the curve of evolution that one finds in the majority of the creators. "Why was it wanted that the external forms of its art vary?" answers Joaquin Rodrigo, "did his expressive impulse vary? It could not change because the dream invited it to the discipline and the discipline was driven and moved by the dream, and this balance needed constant fidelity to the expressive forms of his art ".

Turina, while speaking to us about his admiration for Ravel and Stravinsky, and about theoretical explorations of this last, gives us at the same time his philosophical opinion on the avant-garde: "the music, like all arts, tends to evolve, to fatally follow the stiff slope of the inaccessible. Any interruption in this way supposes a retrogradation compared to the continuous race of life, compared to the ceaseless progress of the human activities. But this painful walk, this extenuating projection must be slow, very slow. Art does not proceed by lifting impulses; a jump in darkness is always fatal ". [5]

  Such was Turina, conservative and monolithic but sincere and modest - the death of the one of his children for example, which has occurred in 1932 does not seem to leave traces in his production: the same year, he writes as carefree pieces as Garrotin y Soleares of his Homage to Tarrega op.69. All his life, his music will seem to run with abundance and facility thanks to his fabulous "métier".

Nevertheless, reality is perhaps less simplistic and the frontage of the man and the musician less smooth". Turina acknowledges us that his facility is only apparent: it needs "... above all complete isolation and to proceed with an enormous slowness. The cerebral effort is so intense [... ] that it is impossible for me to support more than two working hours of composition each day. - the two hours produce a maximum of fourteen or fifteen measures that I frequently destroy the following day. It is necessary at every moment to control the work with the piano, measure by measure, chord by chord; to erase without pity all that is not completely well; never be in a hurry to finish. I can certify that each piece of music which is written is the result of a suffering " [6] .

  His friendship with Falla is extremely narrow. Almost contemporary and originating in the same geographical and cultural area, they meet in Madrid in 1905, are found in Paris two years later in the same Kléber hotel, close to the "Etoile". Their admiration is reciprocal. Falla dedicates its Four Spanish Pieces for piano to Turina :  

Manuel de Falla, gaditan,
With its higher consideration,
Dedicates this drivel
To Turina, sevillian (...)

They addressed as tu, which is rather rare at that time in Spain  [7] and are their mutual interpreters: Turina in particular, holds the part of piano at the final creation of the Amor Brujo in 1916 in Madrid and directs the creation of the first version of the Three Cornered Hat the following year.

This friendship will last all their life. Falla dies in 1946 and Turina on January 14, 1949 in Madrid.

The great adventure of Spanish music

Since the Albénizian meeting - shock , Turina thus writes another music. A curious alloy of the severe Schola for the form and Andalusia for the bottom, - one would be tempted to say. But which Andalusia?

Because he must then revive his childhood and his adolescence full with musical images that his traditional formation had conscientiously evacuated and in which the guitar and the song are the protagonists impossible to circumvent. Curious destiny that of an Andalusian musician who must build "his" Andalusia in Paris! " [ I am ] a pure Sevillian which knew Seville only when he had left " he says us. And he adds: "This is mathematical, because it is as necessary for an artist to expatriate for knowing well his country, as for the painter moving back of some steps in order to embrace the totality of its picture". But it is precisely thanks to this physical distance and with the effort of memorizing, therefore of Recreation which it requires that real Spain will be able to metamorphose itself in this "interior Spain" without which there would be no Spanish art worthy of this name. Moreover, - did it not have initially to travel through the Russia of Glinka and of Rimsky-Korsakov and through the France of Debussy and to return from there purified, elutriated its provincialisms, for finally being able to open out and reach the status of the " Universal Andalusianism" of Falla, Turina (and Federico Garcia Lorca)? In all the work of Turina, one perceives an intense process of dramatic gestation to reconcile these two desires of andalousism and universality [8] .

. We are there in the very heart of the debate : what is more disproportionate, more irreconcilable than an art where all the men could recognize themselves and a small zone of the south of Spain, in one century when this late stagnates still as a whole in its cultural and artistic provincialism? The fear which haunts all the Spanish creators is that of the local color, of picturesque of which general public and a lot of intellectuals cannot get rid. Falla was the only one which tried to get rid of this label by giving up too conspicuous Andalusia for Castile of the Gold Century (El Retablo, the Concerto for Harpsichord, etc.). Turina paid his fidelity to the exhortations of Albéniz by shutting in in a kind of typical ghetto, colored, too familiar, and which makes screen with his purely musical qualities. All his work is victim of this myopia of the public; see for example the splendid sonata Sanlucar de Barrameda for piano, ignored in its feverish rigor and too often apprehended at the first degree only for its color.

Because if, by far, all these musics resembles themselves and appear copied on the folklore, a more subtle examination shows faults, shifts in which the art of the authentic creator can insert, even if the differences may seem unimportant to the profane. Important differences between Albéniz, Falla and Turina also come from the source to which they are inspired. It is necessary to distinguish in the labyrinth from the Andalusian folklore three roots which are, according to Turina himself

1) "Very old songs and autochtone dances

2) "Cante Jondo, clearly Gipsy, resulting from old the caÒa, exorbitant, tragic, with complaints which resound like cries. Its extreme difficulty makes that currently, it is reduced to the seguiriya gitana.

3) "the soleares, granadinas.and rondeÒas are halfway and their inflections and the ornaments of the falsetas of the guitar prove obviously that there are here Arab elements at the same time as Andalusian authentic formulas" [9] . 

These two last roots actually are extremely gotten mixed up, says usTurina, "as two trees planted so close one of the other that their branches intersect [10] .

Schematically, Falla proceeds rather of Cante Grande and of the Gipsy sensitivity ("he feels like the Gipsies and at the same time, he is a mystic" whereas Turina is carried, towards Cante Chico - which results from a hybridization - by his balanced temperament.

But it should well be seen that the quotation of topics of the folklore "in a pure state" is extremely rare in the music of AlbÈniz, Falla and Turina. What has interested these musicians in the Spanish guitar and the song, in addition to the national connotation, it is a certain direction of the release of the uses, constraints and rules into force everywhere in Europe and which were already felt like a yoke for creation. They see a means there of reaching "by modernity" their desire of universality, because exoticism fertilizes then the audacity and supports innovative attractions of avant - garde. Several of these "liberations", were defined by Falla in his writings; others, more or less unconscious, appear to us with the time: those of the rhythm, the melody, the timbre, the harmony, the scales and the form

The rythm  

It is especially the concept of rhythmic pedal (beloved by Messiaen) like those of Habaneras and Boleros (whose Ravel did remember), some on not very ordinary metres, in all cases for the "traditional" Western ears of that time. A typical pedal is that of Soleá with various rhythmic values:

Turina, Sevillana

The use of the rhythmic pedal uses to be of obsessing type and involves a a little hypnotic emotional state: Falla, in the Dance of Terror (Zambra), Pantomime (false Habanera at 7/8). Turina especially uses the hemiolic duality 2 + 2 + 2 = 3 + 3, punctually, as an enrichment of the rhythm of reference by the juxtaposition of the dual rhythm which opposes it and exacerbates it at the same time. In works for guitar, it is often within the same melody line; sometimes the graphic notation indicates it clearly (Soleares last page, Rafaga page 5 last range, Sonata page 10, last staff, etc.) but very often the hemiola is subjacent and is occulted by the apparent simplicity of the music; the Spanish music in general and that of Turina in particular swarm with such traps! With the piano, it is almost always in the opposition of the hands (Polo of Generalife from op. 55); one can also see an attempt in Ráfaga at the "dolcissimo".

The melody

  Voluntary restriction of the ambitus of the melody (the sixth, maximum the seventh) and "incantatory" melisms around a note opposite to the German song and bel canto where the intervals felt like expressive and dramatic are, on the contrary, broad. The slow movement of Sonata op. 61 is a good example. Nevertheless, the micro - intervals of the Andalusian song are not integrated at that time, probably because of the instrumental problems. A typically guitaristic data is the frequent displacement of the melody center of interest : melody in the basses "with the thumb" and accompaniment in the acute register which fight effectively against the tyranny of the "soprano" like driver which reigns without division since at least Caccini.

After Scarlatti and Padre Soler, the guitaristic rasgueado continues to fascinate the Spanish musicians for its extraordinary capacity of rhythmic and harmonic punctuation and also for it color [11] It is notable to see the fear and the mistrust of the traditional guitarists in his connection. This tradition however exists at least since Bermudo (1555) and opens out with the Baroque to fall then into the official oblivion from Carulli to Tarrega, if one excludes the folklorists like Arcas and Parga [12] .It will return to Turina, non - guitarist, the merit to be the first to integrate it in a work of erudite construction: the Sevillana op 29.

Harmony

The writing by contrary movement was one of the fundamental pillars of the tonal writing. The writing in parallel intervals which is already in the air at this time, is already since a long time ago one of the typical features of the flamenco guitar. Turina will very often use it in all its work (less systematically however than Villa - Lobos) in the form of seventh, of ninth or more complex chords (cf Oracion del Torero), sometimes opposed to small counterpoints which enrich them (Fandanguillo op. 36, page; 4, ranges 4 and 5) The flamenco guitarist will also use freely of not prepared and unsolved dissonances, and of false relations that the Spanish School will assimilate with enthusiasm and greediness [13] ..

Tarantas

Echelles

The mode of Andalusian E, Cuarto Tono of the baroque guitarists is a scale which can appear terribly banal to us but who at the moment when one feels in Europe breathlessness of the tonality, allured the Spanish musicians at least as much by his breaking load that by its indigenous color. It is maybe not useless to point out that this mode, which is not immutable, is written without key alterations, often admits G # and sometimes D #, but its true "leading note" is "at the underside" i.e. a half - tone above of the tonic.

exemple of Andalusian cadence (Francisco Guerau, Poema Harmónico, Madrid, 1694)

This mode constitutes the Achilles' heel of the system: his easy employment and its abuse leads quickly to the espagnolade that Turina stigmatizes: "... it is not a sufficient condition, by employing the Andalusian cadenza, to give to the music the typical character and sensitivity "

Form