The composer Joan Magrané does not like half-tones in creation. Consensus is very good for what is social, he says, but in art it is a mistake. Art must be tension, it must be contrast, “if you don’t exaggerate in music, this is not perceived well”. Literature is interested in a strong style that grabs you by the neck, gets inside you, tires you out and makes you sweat. The greatest in the world for him are Mercè Rodoreda and William Faulkner, by whom he reads a book every summer; this one plays Llum d’august.
Rent a very white flat in Gràcia. And the books he has collected since arriving a year ago are in a small office where there is a keyboard, the facsimile of a Fauré score on the wall, a photo of Faulkner and another of Mahler, watching over him as if they reminded him: “There are very good and very powerful people, don’t think I don’t know what”.
On Saturday, the soprano Elena Copons and Judit Bardolet with the violin will perform in the church of Santa Maria d’Àneu their Dànae remembers – with a libretto by Helena Tornero -, which was played last week at the Grec. Magrané has international recognition and a few fetishes: Goethe, he likes the Germanic and Mediterranean combination. Marguerite Yourcenar has always been passionate about him. He studied for seven years in Paris – with stays in Rome and Madrid – and has re-read Memoirs d’Adrià more than once, and many times, Doctor Faustus, by Thomas Mann. It is more Joycian than Proustian (I read Ulysses translated by Mallafré).
And, in no order, grouped by author, he has books by Cheever, Montaigne, Blai Bonet, Ferraté and Ferrater, “Agustí Bartra is also an obsession”. There is one by J. M. Bartrina, whom he defines “as a Francesc Pujols fifty years before”; of Pere Gimferrer, whose prose impresses him – “it’s something extraordinary” -, or of Perejaume, he says it’s like reading a work of art; it connects through the landscape and through rural Catalonia, from top to bottom. Magrané’s father is from Camp de Tarragona, and his mother, from a village in the Pyrenees.
At weekends he reads in the garden of his house, in La Selva del Camp; the Renfe delays are very good for prolonging the reading on the train to Reus. In the childhood room there is everything he has read since L’ocell de foc, by Emili Teixidor, at a time when Tintin and Asterix comics were shared with friends. Even then he liked to read, play and compose. Then would arrive Perucho, The natural stories. Tuesday Magrané is 35 years old.
You have to restrain yourself so you don’t buy them every time you go out. Because, when you go down Pau Claris, you enter the Documenta, the Ona, the Laie. He also goes to the Audenis, according to him, one of the best sheet music bookstores left in Europe. He claims that publishers like Adesiara and 1984 are ruining him; and also Acantilado, for what he dedicates to music, “if they did the same in Quaderns Crema, it would be fantastic”.
He is more of a morning person, both for work and for reading, and spends his late hours answering e-mails and doing invoices. When he sets poems to music – he has done it by Ausiàs March or Rosselló-Pòrcel, among others -, he needs to find a connection in the way he phrases, which he finds difficult with Carles Riba, even though he likes it a lot. On the other hand, songs of all styles are still made from Carner, “he has an internal music that always works”. Neither read nor write on digital media, because with the computer there is zero human contact; he prefers the pencil, it costs more, he puts everything in every note.
On the dining room table is Arte sonora, by Santiago Auserón, “a bestiality”; A toast to Sant Martirià dedicated by Albert Serra; La perplexitat, by Jordi Graupera, also dedicated – “it hooks you through the style”–, and The man who had more than one life, by Puig i Ferreter, whom he considers very excessive, very repetitive, a of the great prose writers and the great forgotten, “he didn’t help himself much”. He believes that many of his books would be a success today, such as La farsa i la chimera, Els tres allucinats or Servitud, “a bomb”. He bought the twelve volumes of The Passionate Pilgrim in a Re-Read for 24 euros when they were on sale for 300 online.
In melomania, repetition is better understood than when it is read. And almost no one puts on a record, sits down and listens to it as if they were at a concert or in front of a book. But Magrané repeats readings like we listen to the same song many times, and listens to music with the same concentration as he reads.
