Alarm Will Sound: Haas

Program Notes

Georg Friedrich Haas
in vain (2000)

Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain is a reflection on the inevitability of cycles of authoritarianism, and the ever-present need to push back. It has been called a modern masterpiece by Alex Ross and one of the first masterpieces of the 21st century by Sir Simon Rattle.

Haas grew up in a Nazi family and subscribed to the National Socialist ideology in his youth. But he turned away from this outlook in his twenties and came to see his compositions as a way to work through his “huge feeling of guilt” at his Nazi roots. Haas believed that the Austrian people had collectively turned away as well. So, when the right-wing populist Freedom Party surged back in Austria’s 1999 election Haas was deeply disturbed, seeing the moment as a “return to a situation believed to have been overcome.”

in vain is Haas’s reflection on this situation: music in which peace is repeatedly achieved, only to unravel again and again. The work begins with a maelstrom of descending notes and dissonant, unsettled harmonies which eventually settle into a static and dark place. The darkness here is not merely musical—the opening’s dissonant harmonies freezing into slowly diverging unisons—but also literal: this is the first of two sections of the work performed in darkness. Haas uses darkness to catalyze novel kinds of listening and playing. With the players unable to see their music, the conductor, or one another, Haas had to develop unconventional ways for musicians to play together.

As light returns, the music seems to have overcome the opening’s chaotic dissonances to achieve peace: silences separated by pure, otherworldly harmonies. These harmonies are in just intonation, created not out of the rational equal-tempered notes of the piano keyboard, but the pure, resonant intervals of the overtone series. Just intonation harmonies are at once alien—at odds with what we hear in most music—and also strangely familiar, because they are rooted in the fundamental nature of sound.

In in vain, Haas uses just intonation to express peace and purity achieved when the maelstrom is tamed. But this peace is unstable. The just-tuned harmonies inexorably descend, like a slow-motion version of the swirling descents of the opening. And tensions arise. Players swell against one another, bend pitches away from the pure harmonies, or separate entirely into conflicting chords. Even when rising melodic lines struggle against it, the descent continues. (Haas uses the ‘Shepard Tones’ technique to create the illusion of an infinite, never-ending descent.)

Gradually but inevitably, the “situation believed to be overcome” always returns. Haas describes this returning maelstrom, like the Freedom Party’s rise in 1999, “not as a triumphal reprise, but rather as the return of an oppressive, catastrophic condition.”

— Alan Pierson