PAVANA TRISTE (HOMENAJE A ANTONIO JOSÉ)

Pavana triste (Homenaje a Antonio José) is a tribute to Antonio José Martínez Palacios, known as Antonio José, a Spanish composer of the Generation of ’27. According to some sources, Maurice Ravel said of Antonio José: "He will become the Spanish composer of our century". He was captured, imprisoned and murdered by the coup leaders who triggered the Spanish Civil War. The reasons proposed for his assassination are several: envy for his work and recognition, discomfort in the religious sectors of the city, the need for fascism to eliminate key figures of the cultural vanguard. He often wrote on musical and literary matters for the Burgos gráfico magazine, a publication despised by in clerical and reactionary sectors, especially for its famous editorial of 1935 criticizing the local ecclesiastical authorities for their cover-up of a priest’s abuse of young girls in Estépar (Burgos). On the night of October 8, 1936, Antonio José was executed and thrown into a mass grave in Estépar. The musical prime matter of this metaludio was obtained applying a five-layered affine transformation to the last nine measures of the slow movement (Pavana triste) of his guitar sonata, composed in 1933.