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Georg Friedrich Haas |
Georg Friedrich Haas (*1953)
Arditti Quartet SWR Experimentalstudio
Sophie-Mayuko Vetter, piano SWR Experimentalstudio
Arditti Quartet SWR Experimentalstudio
GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS Georg Friedrich Haas is regarded as today’s foremost proponent of microtonal composition. That judgement is in itself correct but only goes so far, as though this composer were merely interested in problems of a technical nature and one among many subscribers to a well-established approach to exploring and engaging with music’s raw material. But it is precisely these three works – Ein Schattenspiel, the String Quartets Nos. 4 and 7 – that show that Haas is actually less immersed in his musical material. Instead, he concentrates on the communicative aspects of music and composition, so as to greatly unsettle and even shock the listener’s perception. Of course, microtonality and composition that makes use of the overtone series and overtone chords presents a challenge to the listener accustomed to a more conventional, traditional harmony. But Haas’ composition focusses more on the physical experience of this kind of music. It would not be completely inaccurate to speak of a musical aesthetic that seeks to bombard the senses into submission, where the pulsing beats inherent in the overtones and microtonality amalgamate to a roar and thunder roll of noise. And to take the idea of overwhelming the senses one step further, this music acts like a drug and induces a state of oblivion. Haas enlists an important additional element: live electronics, a compositional device that has habitually been connected to the idea of spatialising sound by freeing it from its locus of provenance, using loudspeakers dispersed throughout the performance space. Haas, however, has very different methods and solutions in mind. The loudspeakers in these works are placed directly next to the performers, not distributed around the hall, in order to delay and realign the sounds that are produced. “You see, my son, space here becomes time” Gurnemanz expounds to Parsifal. And as though Haas is harking back to the very same idea articulated by Richard Wagner in his final music drama of 1882, the live electronics serve him in a similar purpose. In Ein Schattenspiel (“A Shadow Play”, 2004), the solo instrument is transformed by the live electronics into an über-instrument, or acoustic partner, that functions as a sound shadow of the performer. The premise of the work is an instrumental or imaginary theatre. The acoustic shadow is provided by the live electronics that replicate everything played by the soloist with three parameters altered: each phrase is delayed, slightly speeded up and transposed one quarter tone higher. Thus, a peculiar sort of race is initiated between the original sound and its unhinged shadow, which in turn becomes a contest with the musical medium itself – time. As Georg Friedrich Haas himself notes in his commentary on the piece: “The performer continually comes face to face with the new version of what he or she has just played. The live electronics confront him with his own history. In the end, however, he will be overtaken by his past.” This is not meant merely in a narrative or in a metaphorical way. Haas is genuinely expressing a concept of historicism. It is fitting therefore that in Ein Schattenspiel, he uses the harmonic quarter tone systems developed in the first half of the twentieth century by the Russian pioneer of microtonal composition, Ivan Wyschnegradsky. In his String Quartet No. 4 (2003), written one year before Ein Schattenspiel, Haas also uses live electronics to create a time delay. Simultaneously, however, we have the effect that the ensemble is doubled in size: the string quartet is transformed into an octet. And in further contrast to the piano piece which is meticulously notated, the string quartet allows (or perhaps demands from) the players much greater freedom in certain passages. Putting this into practice requires the four performers to be precisely aware of one another so as to avoid a logjam in the dense mass of sound. Haas has in the past made similarly acute demands of his performers: his String Quartet No. 3 “In iij. Noct.” (2001) takes place in complete darkness and lasts for almost one hour. Such an extreme challenge for performer and listener alike results in a completely altered perception of time and space. As in Ein Schattenspiel, this is not about time as an abstract dimension but rather the idea of a (sound) history, as the composer himself acknowledges in the work commentary where he draws special attention to his use of live electronics: “It is not so much the transformation of sound that interests me but rather the possibility to record and reproduce what has been played; the confrontation of the performers with their own immediate past – a past that is somewhat temporally and spatially out of sync, a past with which a dialogue is established.” Whereas the solo piano piece is for the most part defined by its microtonal harmony and the architectural layering of its overtone chords, the String Quartet No. 4 is interrupted, about halfway through, by a new creative component that has hitherto played less of a prominent role in Haas’ works: melody. Clearly delineated in the soundscape, the viola plays a melodic line. The other three string players join in as if in song and towards the end the same thing is repeated. This irruption of lyricism into the music is even more pronounced in the String Quartet No. 7, which was completed in 2011. As before, around halfway through the piece, the cello begins a long and lyrical phrase that is taken up by the first violin in the final section. It should not come as surprise to learn that Haas was simultaneously working on a staged work, Bluthaus, composed to a libretto by the Austrian playwright Händl Klaus, where lyricism plays an essential role. Like Ein Schattenspiel, however, the String Quartet No. 7 with its four instrumental protagonists is in essence an imagined piece of theatre, but one where a distorting mirror is held up to the musical drama. With a similar process of delay and realignment, as in the two previous works, the live electronics establish not so much a background soundscape but more an acoustic stage on and within which the instrumental performance can take place. Live electronics dominate from the outset, preparing this stage of sound for the Parodos – in classical Greek theatre, the chorus’ first entrance – of the four string players. As well as overtone chords, trills and glissandi sliding in both directions are the playing techniques most frequently called for in this work. These techniques tend to create a surface of noise, an impression magnified by the time-delayed overlay of the live electronic sound expanse. The lyricism of the cello and first violin emerge all the more clearly out of this expanse, and in their instrumental song, the soloists rather than simply controlling their instruments, become instead actors or protagonists in an imaginary, plotless drama. At the work’s conclusion they – along with their audience – are literally overwhelmed by the roar of pulsing beats and “sound clusters”, as Haas describes them in the score. The last pure, instrumental sounds are then overpowered by a crescendo generated by the live electronics. By reaching the conclusion of this shared narrative between soloists and live electronics, something occurs that is beyond what we are used to or what we already know from our musical tradition. The floor disappears from under our feet and we find ourselves in unknown, uncharted territory. This is only possible if we give ourselves up to the music; it cannot be forced. No, this is not a “string quartet” work in the traditional sense – rather, it is a performance where a quartet of string players happen to be playing. Bernd Künzig
Lirismo y materialidad del microtono […]
Lyricism and Materiality of the Microtone […] |
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