On Haas

"I trust my sensations. I try to find out how sound and colour and time and dynamics fit together. I do not have any system. I do not trust systems at all."

Georg Friedrich Haas in an interview with R. Andrew Lee
http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/11/5-questions-to-georg-friedrich-haas-composer/

Our thought flounders against this disavowal of a system: there cannot be any question of inconsistency because "consistency" is not what drives his work. We use a lot of affirmative-sounding terms to describe composition in ways which perhaps overstate its "rationality": fitting, tuning, forming, structuring, ordering, selecting etc. In this way "composition" is often seen in the way "art" (as tekhne) has always been seen: the domination of material by concepts, in short, the submission of matter to abstraction and idealisation. It is a delicious irony that electronic music is thought of as being "cold", disenchanted and mechanical and the perfect image of that would be the colourless purity of the sine wave. One could argue that for most analysis of music, especially from notated scores, a piece of music might as well be presented by sine waves given the inevitable idealisation that comes with thinking of "harmony" or "interval" rather than "material". Music is one of the few artforms where "error" is both an inevitable reality and something to be feared.

One point repeatedly made by the early spectralist writings was that music is made with sounds not with "notes" (or "pitch classes") and, I would add, with sounds that have a contour and a changing dynamic and phase profile through time and that this necessarily happens in space (the spectralists are more followers of Stockhausen than they would care to admit sometimes).

There are large scale formal procedures in his works but I believe Haas when he says he has no system, except perhaps that of mediating between just-intoned intervals and "normal" 12TET intervals. In works like "In Vain" or even more so in "Hyperion" and "Limited Approximations" there is a strong sense to me that the whole point of using "incompatible" systems of pitch organisation is to have them re-stage the conflict between consonance/resolution and dissonance/tension that drives the formal procedures of tonal music (and which also structures a piece like "Modulations" by Grisey).

A further feature of using such a discrepancy between systems in the one work is that one can then integrate  instruments with fixed pitch into textures with instruments capable of altering the pitches produced. In some ways Haas is, like Ligeti in "Ramifications", not writing strictly "microtonal" music at all (certainly not in the sense that Partch or Young are): it is detuned music, in a state of decay and friction, in ruins and made from the ruins of tradition.

The fact that nearly all the climaxes of Haas' works involve something like spiraling turbulence (a tempest of sound in space and often extreme degrees of dissonance and brutality) indicate to me that he is not after a "well-ordered" system of tones but rather more interested in disorder. One reason I adore his work so much is that despite having listened to microtonal/spectral music since the late 1980s (I think my first experience was a broadcast of Murail's "Disintegrations" from the visit Boulez made in 1988 with EIC) here was a music that not only posed a clear "immanent critique" (in the Adornian sense) of the Austro-Germanic orchestral tradition but which also had clear expressive aims: this isn't an intellectual music at all, it's pretty clear that his aim is to think in sounds, not have sounds illustrate thoughts.

In his programme note for "Hyperion" Haas writes: "In the music can be heard, among other things, overtone chords and sounds of the tempered tone system. Two pianos are tuned according to the overtone system, one on the basis of the partials of a very low A (A₀), the other on the basis of the partials of the E flat above it. The tension between fusion and friction – with which I work consciously in the majority of my pieces – is also one of the fundamental ideas in Hyperion. But whatever structures are formed disintegrate again. Unison melodies jostle against one another in different time grids and antagonistically conceived tonal systems." 

In his early essay "Mikrotonalitäten" (published in the Austrian Musical News) Haas mentions that there is no "microtonal tradition" in the same way we could say there is a dodecaphonic tradition or the "tonal tradition" that was constituted retroactively with the emergence of "atonal" practices. He points out that every composer engaged in microtonality effectively invents a tradition for themselves: accordingly he repeatedly returns to that starting point in the essay.

In this essay Haas writes, for only pragmatic, polemical reasons (this is not a treatise after all) of 4 different kinds of microtonal possibility (translations are mine):

"1: tempered divisions of the octave other than the number 12 (and intervals other than the octave can be divided equally)

2: an orientation to the proportions of the overtone series ("just intonation")

3: "splitting of sound" (Klangspaltung), that is, very small, near-unison intervals which can still be clearly distinguished - at the centre of this compositional interest is "beating"
(Schwebung)

4: microtones that emerge aleatorically from an involvement in the actions of instruments, whose pitches are not exactly determinable in advance (for example those arising from piano preparation, some percussive sounds, ad libitum detuning of strings etc)."

(G.F. Haas "Mikrotonalitäten", in Osterreichische Musikalische Zeitung, June 1999, p. 10).

As Haas immediately goes on to point out that he is not attempting a "taxonomy" or "anthology" of microtonal practices but is, rather, indicating the background against which his own practice (derived I believe from the conflicts between these four possibilities) emerges. He says he is a composer not a theorist ("nicht Musikwissenschaftler"), the sketch he makes of microtonal possibilities he agrees is superficial and lacking: he is essentially a pragmatist rather than a purist, interested in what works for him as opening up a world to explore.

If we look at the practice of someone like Partch for instance (subject of a discussion in the  Haas paper I'm working with here) most of his practice is geared towards a kind of "purity", an almost literally pastoral sense of microtonality, gesturing towards a lost Eden reconstituted in the simplified textures and ode-like forms of the music itself. Partch and other followers of Pythagoras end up by effectively throwing out all music based on what comes to seem (if one has read too much of Partch) the "perversions" of 12TET and the tonal practice that it made possible. In order to imagine this new music new instruments become necessary.

Haas I believe is much more interested in the energies released from the conflicts of systems, in conflict with the traditions "normal" instruments are permeated by and working with the frictions that arise from that conflict: he is the opposite of a purist which is perhaps why people with no knowledge of microtonality respond to his work. Haas is clearly fascinated by the sensations produced by beating and tends to engineer these not from pure frequency rations, nor empirically, but from the varied discrepancies produced by making overtone chords on 12TET fundamentals and placing them against a 12TET ground.

We could argue that his actual practice forms a fifth kind of microtonal practice: microtones are used primarily not in order to produce a new system of harmony but instead are groped towards, in changing ways, searching for new sounds amongst the wreckage of the tonal and atonal traditions, amongst the ruins of instrumental practice.

Hence the importance of the gesture of "retuning" in his work: "In Vain" has lengthy sections that sound like the musicians are retuning towards some  kind of organisation of pitch other than that provided by accordion and piano (the harp in this work is tuned in just intonation on C). Hence, in addition, the importance of citation or evocation of historical materials in his work as well: the "horn calls" that feature in many of his works are not just clear references to Mahler, Bruckner and Wagner they are evoking the origin of such calls in untempered "primitive" instruments and the origin of them in the nature of the instruments themselves. This is a microtonal practice where the common C-major triad in 12TET of all things has a place as much as harmonies derived from the extreme upper reaches of the overtone series, where instrumental practices are modified in order to produce pitch materials that had no place in the systems of thought that gave rise to the instruments themselves. Working without 12TET pitches entirely means giving up certain registers of some instruments or even giving up on whole fields of instrumental sound tout court. A "compromised" or "inconsistent" language is for him the only one possible without going down the route of either Partchian "carpentry" or purely electronic work (in this respect "Und" for ensemble and electronics is an unusual piece and perhaps its somewhat didactic character comes from this - the failed "unison" melody at the close of the work is all the more powerful because of this perhaps?).

In its groping, experimental and open fashion, there is also a politics implied by his work (something which is often resonant with the means of visual presentation of the works in concert): given that the 12TET system and the "common practice" that was made possible by that system is still everywhere around us, still rings in our ears if we are unfortunate enough to encounter the auto-tuned pop that is everywhere, still makes overtone relations governed by higher primes sound "alien" or "foreign" then working with both together, rubbing up against one another is the truest form of microtonal practice? An internally consistent and logical microtonality (say that of Partch and his followers) seems utopian and idealist from this standpoint and, in a certain sense, assumes that habit can simply be done away with.

The mixed practice Haas uses in "In Vain" or "Hyperion" or "Limited Approximations" has the advantage of still allowing things like tonal triads in various forms of intonation to rub up against themselves, estranging thereby all systems of pitch organisation, rendering them all somehow "unreal".

This "estrangement" is clearly what his practice is motivated by, rather than theoretical consistency: this is why I would class him with the composers of the "second modernity" outlined by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (who of course does not include Haas in his list of such composers for no doubt polemical reasons). The fact that a piece like "In Vain" regularly requires the lights to go out and so disables the role of the conductor, requires players to play from memory is not mere theatrics. In the Austrian context, inspired as it was by the rise of the right wing in Austria (a movement that still made gestures towards "the natural" and, like all right wing movements, thinks of the state as an artwork) questions of harmony, tuning, mood and power that are implied by the concept of "Stimmung" are not at all innocent. In short, the social/political ramifications of "tuning" (what it means for things to fit together or not) are not innocent to a composer from the land of Hitler and Bruckner. This is not an "extra-musical" issue: there is no such thing as an "extra-musical" issue, a musical work does not finish at the double bar line, to the extent that it is a musical work it is in dialogue automatically with the totality of music. The concept of the "extra-musical" is a convenient fiction that allows the thinking of music as if it were an ideality (or made by sine waves) untouched by the very history that in fact permeates it all the way down to the smallest particles: it is a historically situated, socially mediated set of actions, ideas and practices by humans. No amount of wonder at overtone ratios can deracinate musical works from their historical situation, nor break the nexus (which goes back to the Greeks) between music and the political.