Homs, Joaquim

Joaquim Homs was Born in Barcelona on 21st August 1906. He completed his secondary school and his studies in cello in 1922. Until 1929 he taught himself composition while at the same time qualifying as an engineer, a profession which he was to practise until 1971. Between 1931 to 1936 he widened his musical knowledge under the direction of Robert Gerhard, a pupil of Pedrell and Schoenberg.
Homs was drawn, from the very beginning by the necessity of solving the problem provocked by the tonality crisis. Curiously enough, he reached a solution that brought him closer to Schoenberg’s dodecaphonism. In Homs’evolution it is hard to identify great aesthetic changes, one could rather talk about a logical and coherent process in the adoption of news ideas. However, a very fine and subtle change can be observed in the pieces he composed since 1967 and 1970, where the painful period of losing his wife and his master and friend Robert Gerhard gave a nostalgic and dramatic tone to his music, hard to perceive in earlier productions. In like manner, the colouring received a touch of greater luminosity and the melodic line a greater contemplative accent.
The musical output of Joaquim Homs consists of more than two hundred and fifty instrumental and vocal works of all genres. Of these, three have been selected to represent Spain in the Festivals of the ISCM in Paris (1937), Warsaw (1939) and Stockholm (1956).
He has received many distinctions such as: Gold Medal for Artistic Merit-1981, Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts-1993, the Prize of Honour for Catalan Music-1994 and the National Music Prize-1992 & 1999. Since 1989 he has been Member Elect of the St. Georges Royal Catalan Academy for Fine Arts. More than eighty works have been put together on  different record labels, including seven CD’s dedicated solely to his works.
He died in 2003.

(More information in www.joaquimhoms.org)