Alois Hába

Alois Haba ( born June 21, 1893 in Wisowitz, Moravia, † November 18, 1973 in Prague) was a Czech composer and music theorist. He became world famous through his micro interval compositions where found primarily quarter-tone, but also sixth and Zwölfteltonstimmung use.

He was a student of Vítězslav Novák and Franz Schreker and was in the early 1920s to the European avant-garde. He studied in Prague, Vienna and Berlin and became a teacher at the Prague Conservatory, where he founded a department for the study of microtonal music with the help of his patron Josef Suk. The development of modern music, particularly Schoenberg and Webern he pursued with great interest. He participated among others in the famous music festivals New Music in Donaueschingen.

In his music, he expanded, inspired among others by the practice of traditional Moravian music, the tone scale at quarter -, fifth -, sixth - and twelfth-tones, including special instruments were made. This was not necessary, of course, for his string quartets, which therefore also most likely found their way to today's concert stages.

As a professor at the Prague Conservatory and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, he pulled up a number of well known students, including Gideon Klein, Karel Risinger, Jeronimas Kacinskas and Zikmund Schul. After the coup in February 1948, the doctrine of quarter-and sixth-tone composition was abolished as an independent expert, in 1951 completely deleted from the curriculum.

From 1946 to 1968, there was a string quartet that bore his name, and to which he devoted the last 12 of his 16 string quartets. The violinist Dušan Pandula fled in 1968 to Germany. In 1984 his student Peter Zelienka founded a new Hába Quartet in Frankfurt am Main.

Since 1961 he was a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic ( music section ).