“In iij. Noct.” (2001)

Conditions are extreme. We are in total darkness. (The composer asks that even emergency lighting be turned off.) For those of us in the audience, the experience of listening in the dark may be one we choose from time to time at home—but not at a concert venue, in the company of strangers, with musicians performing live. Boundaries between private and public are being shifted. For the musicians, playing in the dark means relying only on memory (from rehearsals, from the score) and on whatever aural cues come from colleagues. For the composer, a piece to be performed in darkness has to be made in a special way. The performers cannot be expected to learn a complex score by heart, and so the work will have to be defined more loosely. Also, the performers will not be able to signal to each other visually, or recognize when their partners are poised to enter. They are on their own. They have to play as an ensemble—this is, after all, a string quartet—but they come together from out of their separate darknesses, making their ways, like the blind, solely in response to what they hear and remember.

Blindness is one metaphor for these circumstances. Another is night. The composer’s first opera, composed in 1996 and based on the life and poetry of Hölderlin, was called Night, and he spoke of it in terms that seem to apply to the blackout in which we find ourselves here: “For me the concept of night is not connected with any Romantic ideas but with hopelessness and the loss of a grip on reality, with the plunging of the soul into darkness, and with the loss of utopias. I am constantly asking myself what right I have to withdraw into my quiet little house to compose…while all around me things are happening which are different in scale yet not in principle from what has been happening in, for example, Bosnia or Rwanda.” (2010 equivalents for these place names are not hard to find.)

Composed in 2001, “In iij. Noct.” is the composer’s third string quartet, referring in its title to the tenebrae services celebrated in Catholic and some other churches on the three last nights before Easter. Each of these services begins with a sequence of three “nocturns,” the title’s allusion being to the third nocturn of the service for Holy Thursday, Gesualdo’s music for which is briefly quoted as one of the phases through which the music passes. Other phases include chords in which the four players sound overtones of the same fundamental, chords in tritones ascribed to the post-Scriabin composer Ivan Vishnegradsky, extremely high notes, glissando, trills, wandering overtone chords, duets, and clouds of pizzicatos. A player may at any point interrupt the phase in progress to issue an “invitation” to move into another, an invitation coded as a musical sound, of course; this the other players may accept or not. When agreement has been reached, the next phase develops. The seventeen phases outlined in the score may be replayed any number of times between the given beginning (very soft, very fast finger-thumps on the strings) and end (overtone chords on D, again extremely quiet, sounding like frost on glass), except that the Gesualdo quotation is to appear only once, about three-quarters of the way through. The composer further asks that “melodies reminiscent of Webern should shine through from time to time.”

“In iij. Noct.” should, he suggests, play for at least thirty-five minutes and may be “significantly longer.”

GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS (b. 1953)

Born in 1953 in Graz, Austria’s second largest city, Haas is among the most remarkable composers of his generation. His fascination with quarter-tones and other marginal, outsider sonorities was quickened by his contact with the spectral music that was coming out of Paris in the eighties—music in which natural overtone spectra provided models for building sounds. At the same time, in revisiting media and sometimes specific works of the past, he has considered how diverse, strange, and alluring their shadows may be.

He studied at the conservatory in his home town with Gösta Neuwirth and Ivan Eröd, and began teaching there before graduating. Two years of postgraduate study with Friedrich Cerha in Vienna followed (1981-3); he also attended courses at Darmstadt and at the computer studio IRCAM in Paris. He published very little until he was into his forties, but during the last decade and a half he has produced a prodigious quantity of music, including two full-length operas, ten big orchestral scores, and five string quartets. Among institutions commissioning him have been the Salzburg Festival (Who when I cry out hears me... for percussion and ensemble, 1999), the Salzburg Mozarteum (Seven Soundspaces, written in 2005 for the same forces as Mozart’s Requiem and designed to be interleaved among that work’s unfinished movements), the Cleveland Orchestra (Poème, 2005), and the Paris Opera (Melancholia, 2006-7). Since 2005 he has taught at the music academy in Basel, Switzerland, where he now lives.

Recordings, of which there are not too many, include a coupling on Edition Zeitklang of his first two quartets from the Kairos Quartet and a performance on the Kairos label (no relation) of his ensemble piece in vain.

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.