Electroacoustics, Optics, and Microtonal Aesthetics in the Music of Georg Friedrich Haas

Abstract

The music of Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas (b. 1953) is often aligned with the spectralist school of composition, although the composer resists descriptions of his approach that characterize it in terms of any one technical attribute, choosing instead to construct a heterogeneous microtonal aesthetic that cuts across conventional boundaries of genre and style. Haas’s prodigious and varied output since the eighties treats instrumental sound-color and texture as central elements of musical discourse. The expressive force of pitch and timbral effects in his music has long been bound to a theatrical play with light and shadow, extended in more recent works through a use of electroacoustic technologies to implement tape-delay and additive synthesis models during live performance. The authors attend here to both of these neglected aspects of Haas’s oeuvre through a detailed analysis of excerpts from three mixed works—String Quartet no. 4 (2003), Ein Schattenspiel (2004) for solo piano, and the large ensemble piece …und… (2008–9), and through an analytical treatment of light as a metaphoric and literal aspect of composition in the large-scale orchestral pieces in vain (2000) and Hyperion (2006). These analyses are set against historical and theoretical background (with focus on the theoretical work of Wyschnegradsky) for the composer’s eclectic microtonal aesthetics, a consideration of the enjoinment of pansonic and panoptical spaces, and a reflection on the “microtonal ethics” of Haas’s approach and his recent venture into cultural politics in the work I can’t breathe for solo trumpet in memoriam Eric Garner (2015).