“In a world where ‘night’ means that daylight is replaced by artificial light,” observes Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, it becomes “difficult to understand the feeling of being utterly helpless and at the mercy of darkness. But for thousands of years this was a natural part of human experience.” This year’s composer-in-residence is fascinated by darkness and has grappled at length with the potential of making music in the dark in such works as his ensemble piece in vain and the string quartet In iij. Noct.

“In the 1990s I lived in a small house in the Fischbach Alps – at the edge of the forest, basically set apart, with only three neighboring houses within earshot…. One November night, when it was a new moon and thick fog covered the house, I had a direct, unfiltered experience of ‘darkness.’ As usual during my nighttime walks, I had turned off the light above the entrance. The neighboring houses were far away. Nothing could be seen. Absolute darkness. The astonishing thing for me was that my feet found their way with the certainty of a sleepwalker. I never veered from the center of the rocky road. It was especially impressive to cross a stream via a small bridge, with the noise continually changing in its tonal quality – depending on the angle at which I was situated with respect to the water, various frequencies were either amplified or filtered. Never before or since have I experienced the sound of a stream with such intensity. It wasn’t just a question of an aesthetic experience: above all it was a necessary component of my perception, which I needed in order to find my way through the darkness. I was subsequently shocked: I had learned that I possessed a skill of which I had been previously unaware….” 

The realm of night, which has laws – and modes of perception – all its own, has deeply inspired the art of Haas, who was born in 1953 in Graz, and you can experience the result on 13 August in a program featuring his ensemble piece “in vain.” The score calls for the lights in the concert hall to be dimmed to complete darkness. “It’s exciting to discover processes of communication that function only with the ear and not with the eye,” says Haas about this experiment, especially considering that it provides the audience with “a novel and, ideally, unusually intense listening experience. Today you can still access a sense of ‘darkness’ perhaps for a few seconds when you grope for the light switch in an unfamiliar hotel room. Or you can visit one of those restaurants where you eat in the dark. Or you can listen to one of my compositions which call for the absence of light.”