Georg Friedrich Haas: A Shadow Play / String Quartet No. 4 & no. 7

GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS
A shadow play · 4th and 7th string quartet

Georg Friedrich Haas is currently considered the most important representative of microtonal composition. That's basically true, but falls short, as if this composer were only interested in technical problems and were still in the advanced line of tradition of studying and exploring the musical material. Especially his three compositions A shadow play, 4. and  7nd string quartet show that Haas is less interested in immersing the material than in the communicative aspects of composing and the music, which aim to shake the listening perception as much as possible. The microtonality and the composing with overtone series and overtone chords is certainly unfamiliar for the ear used to the conventional, traditional harmonics and an extreme challenge of the listening experience. Haas' composition, on the other hand, focuses more on the physical experience of such music. It is not at all wrong to speak here of an overpowering aesthetic in which the beats generated by the microtonality and the overtones lead to noise. And this noise is not only meant in the acoustic limitation, but in the sense of its expansion and word bending towards noise. This music works like a drug and creates states of intoxication.

An additional means here is the inclusion of live electronics. First of all, this is linked to the idea of ​​spatializing the sound, i.e. detaching it from the place where it was generated by loudspeakers distributed in the room. Haas now solves this idea in a completely different way. In the pieces mentioned, the loudspeakers are located in the immediate vicinity of the performers and not distributed throughout the room. But what the live electronics make possible here is the temporal delay and shifting of the resulting sounds. "You see, my son, time becomes space here," says Richard Wagner's last musical drama Parsifal from 1882. And as if Haas would draw on it, the live electronics here serve him in the same vein.

In A shadow play (2004) uses live electronics to transform the solo instrument into a hyper-instrument or an acoustic partner that actually functions as the protagonist's acoustic shadow. The play is instrumental or imaginary theatre. This process creates an acoustic shadow in that the live electronics reproduce exactly what the soloist has to play, but with a time delay, slightly accelerated and transposed up by a quarter tone. There is a peculiar race between the original sound and its crazy shadow sound and it is also a game with the musical medium par excellence: with time. And so Georg Friedrich Haas writes in his commentary on the work: »The player of the piece sees himself confronted again and again with what he has just played. The live electronics confront him with his own history. Eventually, this story catches up with him.” And that's not just meant to be metaphorical or narrative. Here Haas really thinks in terms of a historical picture. It fits that he is in A shadow play draws on the harmonic systems of quarter-tone music by Ivan Wyschnegradsky, the Russian pioneer of microtonal composition in the first half of the 20th century.

In his 2003, a year before the piano piece 4nd string quartet, Haas uses the live electronics in a similar way with a time delay. At the same time, however, the body of sound is doubled: the string quartet becomes an octet. In contrast to the precisely notated piano piece, the 4th string quartet contains sections that can be arranged freely. In order to realize this, the four performing musicians have to listen to each other very carefully in order not to crash a compact whole. Haas has previously requested something similar: That 3rd string quartet »In iij. Noct." (2001) takes place in total darkness for almost an hour. This extreme challenge for performers and listeners allows time and space to be experienced in a completely new way. Here it goes as in A shadow play not about time as an abstract quantity, but as an idea of ​​(sound) history, as the composer emphasizes in his commentary on the use of live electronics: »I am less interested in the change in sound than in the possibility of recording what is played and to reproduce: The confrontation of the performers with their own immediate past – a past that is then also shifted a little in time and (sound) space, and to which communication is established.«

In contrast to the piano piece, which is mainly determined by the microtonal harmony and the architectural layers of the overtone chords, the im 4nd string quartet, roughly in the middle, a musical design element that played less of a role in Haas' previous works: it's the melos. The viola plays a melody part with clear accents. The three other strings join in, and so there is indeed singing here again. This is repeated towards the end.

This bursting of the vowel intensifies in the 2011 one 7nd string quartet once again. Here, too, the cello begins to sing in a long solo line around the middle. In the final section, this is taken up in the first violin. It is hardly surprising that at the time of its creation, Haas was in blood house with a stage work based on a libretto by the Austrian playwright Händl Klaus. Here is the melos Condition sine qua non. The 7nd string quartet with its four instrumental protagonists is against it, as already A shadow play, basically an imaginary theater - but definitely a mirror mirror of the concrete musical drama. Here the live electronics create with the same process of temporal delay and displacement as in the piano piece and the 4nd string quartet not simply an acoustic background, but an acoustic space in which the performance of the instrumentalists takes place. Live electronics dominate right at the beginning and prepare the acoustic space for the parodos – as in classical Greek theater – for the appearance of the four voices of the strings. Technically speaking, trills and ascending and descending glissandi predominate in this string quartet in addition to the overtone chords. These technical means of playing tend to be noisy and flat. An impression that is acoustically further reinforced by the time-delayed overlapping with the live electronic space. In this space, the melos of the instrumental part in cello and first violin emerges all the more clearly. Here the singing is indeed instrumental, the soloists are not just the handlers of their instruments, but actors, performers and protagonists of an imaginary, plotless drama. In the end, they - but not only them, but also all those listening - are literally overwhelmed by the noise of the beats and an "acoustic cluster", as Haas calls it in the voice of the live electronics. The last pure noise sounds are drowned out by the swelling noise of the live electronics. In this joint action of soloists and live electronics, something completely different emerges that no longer has anything to do with what is known and familiar in musical tradition. Here everyone loses their familiar ground and enters new territory. However, this is only possible with the emphasis on abandonment. You can't control that. No, it is no longer a string quartet in the traditional sense. Only one is playing here.

Bernd Kunzig