Robert Hasegawa: Clashing harmonic systems in Haas's 'Blumenstück' and 'in vain'

ABSTRACT

Georg Friedrich Haas has been recognized as a major second-generation “spectralist” composer, but that designation ignores the substantial influence on his music of earlier microtonal composers, especially Ivan Wyschnegradsky, a pioneer of microtonal equal temperaments, and Harry Partch, who developed a system of extended just intonation based on the overtone series. Haas’s recent works Blumenstück (2000) and in vain (2000–02) create large-scale form by dramatizing the opposition between equal temperament and just intonation.

Blumenstück is a setting of texts from “The dead Christ proclaims that there is no god,” a poetic defense of faith against atheism and the first of two poetic “flower-pieces” in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs. Haas uses the contrast between the acoustically fused pitches of the overtone series and the complex dissonances of equal temperament to illustrate the social fragmentation and alienation described in the text.

The hour-long chamber orchestra piece in vain projects the harmonic concerns of Blumenstück onto a much larger canvas. Frequently, the superposition of purely tuned overtone chords on fundamental related by tempered intervals creates tiny, beating microtonal intervals between certain overtones; Haas refers to this effect as “Klangspaltung” (tone-splitting). As in Blumenstück, Haas’s contrast of just intonation and equal temperament is not merely a question of tuning, but a stark and expressive musical representation of incompatible worlds.

 

ABOUT ROBERT HASEGAWA

Music theorist and composer Robert Hasegawa joined the faculty of McGill University in 2012, after teaching for several years at the Eastman School of Music. He completed a PhD at Harvard University, studying with David Lewin, David Cohen, Chris Hasty, and Alexander Rehding. His research interests include French ‘spectralist’ composters Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, transformational theory, contemporary music, and the history of music theory.