Musical Events November 29, 2010 Issue

Darkness Audible
The spectral sounds of Georg Friedrich Haas.

By Alex Ross
November 21, 2010

I
t has been a good year for weird music in New York. Works from the avant-garde end of the
spectrum, long deemed a ghastly mutation of the great classical tradition, have lately made
some headway with the public. In May, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic sold out
three performances of György Ligeti’s absurdist opera “Le Grand Macabre,” which bears about the
same relation to Puccini as Francis Bacon does to Norman Rockwell. The same orchestra played
an all-Varèse program at the Lincoln Center Festival in July, to an exuberant crowd. A few weeks
earlier, Make Music New York presented Iannis Xenakis’s percussion sextet “Persephassa” on and
around Central Park Lake, with several hundred listeners drifting about in rowboats. And last
month Gilbert’s Philharmonic delivered an explosive rendition of Magnus Lindberg’s 1985 piece
“Kraft,” which raises a din not only from conventional instruments but also from discarded auto
parts. (Edkins Auto Scrap, on Staten Island, was the chief supplier.) A few people fled the hall at
the first brightly screaming chords, but the vast majority stayed and, in a scene seldom witnessed at
Avery Fisher Hall, lingered to discuss what they had heard. Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s
president, was sitting behind me, and afterward an elderly woman approached him, wagging her
finger. “Fan-tas-tic,” she said. Perhaps audiences are finally beginning to approach twentieth-
century music with the same open-mindedness that they have long accorded twentieth-century
painting.
Haas is an esoteric Romantic, dwelling on the majesty and terror of the sublime. Photograph by

Philippe Gontier

I can’t think of another explanation for the fact that the JACK Quartet—a youthful group that has
made its reputation almost entirely with avant-garde fare—routinely fills halls for performances of
Georg Friedrich Haas’s Third String Quartet, which makes such extreme demands on players and
audience alike that at one concert in Pasadena listeners were required to sign a waiver absolving the
venue of legal responsibility. The work is subtitled “In iij. Noct.,” a reference to the Third Nocturn
of the old Roman Catholic Tenebrae service for Holy Week, which marked Christ’s sufferings and
death with the gradual extinguishing of candles. Haas, who grew up in Tschagguns, a Catholic
village in the Austrian Alps, asks for total darkness during performances of his quartet, the score
specifying that even emergency lights should be covered.

In September, I saw, or didn’t see, a JACK performance of “In iij. Noct.” at the Austrian Cultural
Forum, on East Fifty-second Street. When the blackout began, I initially felt a fear such as I’ve
never experienced in a concert hall: it was like being sealed in a tomb. No wonder the members of
JACK usually try out a brief spell of darkness with each audience, to see if anyone exhibits signs of
distress. (Indeed, one young man sheepishly got up and left.) Yet the fear subsides when the music
begins. The performers, who are positioned in the corners of the room, seem to map the space
with tones, like bats using echolocation to navigate a lightless cave. They have memorized the
score in advance, and it is an unusual document: Haas sets out eighteen musical “situations”—with
detailed instructions for improvising on pre-set motifs, chords, and string textures—and a
corresponding series of “invitations,” whereby the players signal one another that they are ready to
proceed from one passage to the next.

Often, the music borders on noise: the strings emit creaks and groans, clickety swarms of pizzicato,
shrill high notes, moaning glissandos. At other times, it attains an otherworldly beauty, as the
players spin out glowing overtone harmonies. Toward the end comes a string-quartet arrangement
of one of Carlo Gesualdo’s Responsories for the Tenebrae service (“I was like an innocent lamb led
to the slaughter . . .”). That music is four hundred years old, and yet, with its disjointed tonal
language, it sounded no less strange than the contemporary score that surrounded it. Weirdness is
in the ear of the beholder.

I
n the past decade, Haas, who is now fifty-seven and living in Basel, Switzerland, has emerged
as one of the major European composers of his generation. He is allied with the French
spectralist school, which draws musical material from a close analysis of overtones and other
properties of sound. Haas also esteems various American experimental composers, particularly
those who are concerned with microtonality, the division of the octave into more than the usual
twelve pitches. In this way, he bridges a gap between American and European musical
communities that historically have had little to say to each other. What sets him apart from many
of his European contemporaries is that he is not afraid of theatrical gestures, opulent expanses of
sound, landscapes on an almost Wagnerian scale. Not for him the studiously fragmented modernist
discourse that Ligeti once defined as “event—pause—event.” He is an esoteric Romantic, dwelling
on the majesty and terror of the sublime.
On November 12th, I went up to empac—the dazzlingly high-tech performance complex at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York—to hear Haas’s “in vain” (2000), a work for
twenty-four instruments which unfolds in a continuous seventy minutes. The performers were
from the Argento Chamber Ensemble, which, under the direction of Michel Galante, has become
an essential source of adventurous new music in New York. (The JACK’s September rendition of
“In iij. Noct.” was part of a Haas mini-festival that Galante curated.) The Rensselaer hall, which
has warmly precise acoustics, is ideal for Haas: his whispers and roars came across with extreme
clarity.

“In vain” is a narrative of oppositions, setting light against darkness, dissonance against pure
intervals, modern tuning against natural resonances. It begins with rapid, swirling patterns, like
snow in high wind. Toward the end of the opening section, Haas asks that the lights in the hall be
gradually turned down, signalling a shift into a different realm: the instruments abandon equal-
tempered tuning and follow the overtone series. (If you pinch a stretched rubber band exactly in
the middle and twang it, the tone goes up an octave; if you pinch it according to smaller fractions,
the remainder of the harmonic series results.) Horns and trombones eventually take up a cascading
theme that has an open-air, Alpine quality: Wagner, in the prelude to “Rheingold,” unfurls a
similar sequence of intervals. Piercing chords on an accordion also hint at the premodern world.

Yet Haas is no nostalgist or sentimentalist. Just when the music seems to attain a state of
primordial tranquillity, trembling sounds lead to a recurrence of the “snowstorm.” There is a huge
slowdown, as if a computer simulation were malfunctioning. From an almost total standstill, the
halo-like overtones reëmerge, with the lights again going down. Then comes one of the most
animally thrilling episodes that any composer has created since Ligeti was at the height of his
powers. As in the Third String Quartet, players cannot see the score, and so they work from
memorized modules. At the climax, all these shimmering fragments are derived from a
fundamental C, meaning that the music accumulates a glorious sheen, like a new dawn of tonality.
Repeated gong strokes add to the sense of elemental ritual. A revelation is at hand. But it all goes
awry: notes bend from their “natural” paths, the lights come back up, the frantically scurrying
figures return, and, after several herky-jerky accelerations and decelerations, the music abruptly
switches off. And you finally understand the title: a new kind of beauty seems ready to come into
the world, but in the light of day it falters, and we end up back where we started.
Haas wrote “in vain” in the wake of the rise of the right-wing Freedom Party in the 1999 Austrian
elections: the piece conveyed, in part, his despair in the face of decaying hopes for social progress.
The title also bears a trace of Biblical injunction, a warning of the wages of pride. Yet that exalting
glimpse of a nocturnal paradise of sound lingers in the mind. This modern masterwork transforms
the concert hall into a place of shuddering mystery, suggesting that the way of truth goes through
the dark. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 29, 2010, issue.

Alex Ross has been the magazine’s music critic since 1996. His latest book is “Wagnerism:
Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.”

More: Austrian Cultural Forum Avant-Garde Classical Music Composers Georg Friedrich Haas

Iannis Xenakis JACK Quartet Magnus Lindberg Make Music New York

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