Dimitrios Katharopoulos – Temporal semantics and extended listening in Georg Frie-

drich Haas’ Ein Schattenspiel (2004)

Georg Friedrich Haas is considered to be one of the pioneering composers of microto-

nality. His primary interest lies among other factors in the expansion of the auditing experience
of the performers, which to some extend influences his overall compositional thinking. For this
reason, electronic instruments and multimedia have generally been disregarded in his œuvre.
Yet, in his composition Ein Schattenspiel (2004) for piano and live electronics he applies the
concept of the expanded auditing experience between the musicians to the unconventional en-
semble consisting of the pianist and the electronic part. The pitch and overtone collision within
the equal temperament and its “fake correctness” (Farthofer 2007; Ford 2015; Grünzweig 2019)
according to Haas, as well as the relation emerging from constantly confronting the performer
with their past create the premise to a unique piece in Haas’ compositional outcome.
This paper first demonstrates the main characteristics of Haas’ music and the systematic
use of microtonality (Hasegawa 2015; Ford 2015) and the ways he applies them in Ein Schatten-
spiel, and then proceeds to the analysis of the piece both in compositional terms and in terms
of semantics, by applying a model introduced by Philippe Lalitte (2006) for analysing “mixed
music”. The joined analysis of compositional and semiotic aspects sheds new light to a piece
that deviates from Haas’ compositional and aesthetic point of view, without rejecting the main
interests and characteristics of his artistic approach. The main purpose of the present paper is
to investigate the relations created between the two parts as well as to semiotically analyse both
the piece as a whole and its elements as individual units merged together into a unified total.