Editing Roberto Gerhard (section)

=== Stylistic evolution ===
For twenty years – first in Barcelona and then in exile in England – Gerhard cultivated, and enormously enriched, a modern tonal idiom with a pronounced Spanish-folkloric orientation that descended on the one hand from Pedrell and Falla, and on the other from such contemporary masters as [[Béla Bartók|Bartók]] and [[Igor Stravinsky|Stravinsky]]. This was the idiom whose major achievements included the ballets ''Soirées de Barcelone'' and ''Don Quixote'', the Violin Concerto and the opera ''[[The Duenna (opera)|The Duenna]]''.

Gerhard often said that he stood by the ''sound'' of his music: 'in music the sense is in the sound'.<ref>Composer's Note to the published score of ''Libra'', Oxford University Press 1970; other programme notes have the same statement in varying words and word-orders</ref> Yet dazzling as their scoring is, his last works are in no sense a mere succession of sonic events. Their forms are meticulously organized and several make use of his special development of serialism where a twelve-tone pitch series, governing intervallic relations, interacts with a twelvefold ''time'' series governing the music's duration and proportions.<ref>{{cite book|last=Gerhard|first=Roberto|year=1960|title=Functions of the series in twelve-note composition}} Originally a talk given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Reprinted in {{Cite book|title=Gerhard on Music – Selected Writings|year=2000|publisher=Taylor & Francis |isbn=9781315200583|editor-last=Bowen|editor-first=Meirion|oclc=1003950418}}{{page needed|date=September 2019}}</ref>