Kebyart consecrates itself by premiering the brand new sound journey by Georg Friedrich Haas | Culture | EUROtoday

Listening to the music of the Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas (Graz, 72 years previous) is much like climbing an Escher staircase: one is for certain to maneuver ahead, however at all times returns to the start line. The musicologist Bernhard Günther defined it with a revealing analogy: in standard music, melodies, the twelve-sound scale with its tones and semitones, and metric regularity perform as railings and handrails that enable us to climb a staircase with out wanting on the steps. Any alteration of these proportions—just like the compelled perspective of Bernini’s Scala Regia or the misleading geometry of Odessa’s Potemkin Staircase—is sufficient to trigger concern.

Haas goes a lot additional: removes all these handles. Its primary device is microtonality, the division of the twelve sounds of the tempered scale into smaller intervals, one thing like going from centimeters to millimeters and from millimeters to micrometers. But what distinguishes Haas from different microtonal composers is the astonishing naturalness with which he integrates that method into the harmonic spectrum, liberating sound from the cultural jail of the piano keyboard and letting the music breathe as nature itself does. Added to this are the beats, that bodily vibration that’s perceived when two notes are virtually in tune however not utterly in unison: a pulsation that’s felt within the physique earlier than within the ear and that turns every of his works right into a bodily and sonic journey.

This is how these attending Auditorium 400 of the Reina Sofía Museum felt on March 23, on the finish of the ninety-minute continuous live performance by the Catalan saxophone quartet Kebyart. To shut, the 4 instrumentalists addressed the saxophone quartet (2014) by Haas, written for the standard soprano, contralto, tenor and baritone ensemble. But all of them ended up enjoying a baritone saxophone and cascading a terrifying spectral multiphonic sound, an historical didyeridú sound or, if a extra graphic description is most well-liked, the scream of a prehistoric monster. And then Escher’s staircase grew to become literal: whereas the sound appeared to descend endlessly, the musicians slowly left the room by means of totally different exits, till leaving the viewers alone with the residual vibration. The impact precipitated a standing ovation within the virtually full room.

But that work by Haas doesn’t finish like that, if we persist with the rating revealed by Universal Edition. “It is a new ending that Haas has not yet written and that he proposed to us to adopt when we worked with him,” Robert Seara, tenor saxophone of the group, clarified to this newspaper. In reality, this live performance is a part of the composer’s residency on the National Center for Musical Diffusion (CNDM), though a well being downside that forces him to journey in a wheelchair has prevented him from being current in Madrid. The collection started in November with the efficiency of his most well-known work, In useless, for an ensemble of twenty-four devices (2000), and has continued in Classroom 400, in January and February, together with his String Quartet No. 11 (2019) y Tria ex one (2001).

Other compositions of his are scheduled in April and May, corresponding to Anachronism (2013),“…connected out of free desire…” (1994) y Tribute to Bridget Riley (2019). But the primary milestone of the residency has been the world premiere of his Saxophone quartet no. 2. In reminiscence of James Cecil Williams (2026), commissioned by the CNDM. And this premiere has coincided with the presentation of Kebyart within the Series 20/21 cycle. If the Catalan group closed its efficiency with the twelve minutes of the primary quartet from 2014, the place Haas focuses primarily on the ostinato and timbral decomposition, on this new Quartet no. 2, which was the middle of this system, confirms the evolution in direction of the emotional that was already indicated by that new ending of the earlier one with the 4 baritone saxophones leaving the room.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In this new composition, Haas depends on the aforementioned beats and provides a spatial distribution of the performers in two duos positioned at each ends of the room, enveloping the viewers in surprising sound frictions. Each of the members of Kebyart defined a piece from this system in an entertaining and easy method; Víctor Serra, commenting on Haas’s premiere, highlighted the combination of pleasure and problem that it had meant for the quartet, because it required the usage of 9 totally different saxophones – three of the instrumentalists used two and considered one of them used three.

The work is devoted to his father-in-law, James Cecil Williams, father of his present spouse, the artist and performer African American Mollena Williams, who died final summer time. Williams was a saxophonist who performed in Times Square and who was psychologically damaged as a Marine within the Vietnam War.

The forty minutes of the piece deal with with sonic virtuosity the chances of the 2 saxophone duos of their a number of combos of tessituras. But essentially the most attention-grabbing factor is Haas’s skill to hypnotize the listener by alternating passages that appear to relate the lifetime of his father-in-law – in a single you hear a sort of deconstructed blues – with the friction brought on by the microtonal beats and the spectral multiphonics, which twist as if to evoke the psychological destruction brought on by all wars. Something that’s totally related nowadays of the United States and Israel offensive in opposition to Iran and that agrees with the political inspiration of a very good a part of its catalog (keep in mind that In useless was born out of shock on the resurgence of the intense proper in Austria).

After a short pause for the wonderful Kebyart musicians to catch their breath, the music of Hèctor Parra (Barcelona, ​​49 years previous) acted as a hinge in direction of the primary Haas quartet. Striated fragments (2004) is one other unique piece for saxophone quartet the place texture serves as sound inspiration and, extra particularly, the ultra-black work of Pierre Soulages, through which gentle emanates from striations, scratches and grooves on the black oil paint. Parra interprets these components into sound by means of harmonics, multiphonics and modifications in strain within the air, ranging from very darkish and large sound densities. The ensemble supplied a masterful efficiency of this composition, which they included on their debut album in 2017.

And it was an important success to start out the night with the engaging association of Intermissionby the American Caroline Shaw (Greenville, 43 years previous), a 2011 composition initially for string quartet, though popularized in a model for small orchestra. This is heard in a sequence from the third episode of the fourth season of Mozart within the Junglethe place Shaw herself performs herself. The work was born from an audition in Princeton of the Brentano Quartet enjoying the transition from minuet to trio within the Quartet in F main op. 77/2 by Haydn. Shortly thereafter, Shaw grew to become the youngest lady to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Partita for Eight Voices, one other instance of his skill to transform conventional constructions into one thing new by means of prolonged strategies.

The association for saxophone quartet by Intermission It was carried out by Xabier Casal, from the Fukio Quartet, though it has been retouched by the members of Kebyart. And all these typical string instrument strategies that Shaw deploys virtually stream higher with saxophones, bringing the piece nearer to the sound of the twenty first century. The members of the Catalan ensemble demonstrated this with a masterful use of the subtone to interchange the “airy” sound of the string and the slap tongue for the dry blow of the pizzicatos, however above all due to the reference to the human voice that the saxophone has.