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 has to practice until 1971. Between 1931 and 1936 he widened his musical knowledge under the direction of Robert Gerhard, a pupil of Pedrell and Schönberg.
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 Schönberg’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 new 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.
Joaquim Homs i Oller
(1906 Barcelona - 2003)
Composer, Violoncello Player and Engineer
His work Presences for orchestra won the Prize City of Barcelona-1968. He has received many distinctions such as: Gold Medal for Artistic Merit (1981) (Barcelona City Council) and Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1993) (Ministry of Culture), the National Music Prize (1992 / 1999) and Prize of Honour for Catalan Music-1994. In 1989 he has been Member Elect of the “St. Georges Royal Catalan Academy for Fine Arts”.
The musical output of Joaquim Homs consists of more than two hundred and twenty instrumental and vocal works of all genres. Of these, three have been selected to represent Spain in the Festivals of the ISMC in Paris (1937), Varsaw (1939) and Stockholm (1956). More than one hundred works have been put together on different record labels, including fourteen CD’s dedicated solely to his works.
