2024-05-29 11:43:32
Mass manufacturing facility manufacturing in China and the extremely individualistic custom of Western music are maybe incompatible worlds. Nonetheless, they will encourage one another, because the penultimate day of this 12 months’s Prague Spring pageant will present. The live performance known as 11,000 Strings will happen twice this Sunday, June 2, on the Karlín Discussion board as a consequence of nice curiosity. Each performances are already bought out.
When Peter Paul Kainrath, director of the modern music group Klangforum Wien, visited the Hailun piano manufacturing facility within the Chinese language port metropolis of Ningpo, he discovered himself in an space the place devices are examined earlier than delivery. Each bit is performed by a machine there 24 hours a day – and there are lots of of such take a look at machines in a single corridor. The expertise of the large sound of 100 devices sounding concurrently led Kainrath to the thought of a composition and on the similar time to the identify of its splendid creator.
He turned 70-year-old Georg Friedrich Haas. A local of the Austrian metropolis of Graz is likely one of the most revered modern authors of classical music. His is believed out and structurally refined, and on the similar time has an instantaneous, usually even hypnotic impact.
An essential position for Haas is performed by an modern method to tonal area and tuning. For hundreds of years, Western classical and fashionable music has operated in a system the place particular person tones are separated from one another by the identical frequency distinction, which may be expressed precisely in so-called cents, i.e. hundredths of the distinction between two tones. Music that almost all of us think about “effectively tuned” then divides the octave into twelve equal steps of 100 cents every.
From the start of the twentieth century, some composers started to innovate and increase this method. The most likely most elaborate one was created by Alois Hába, a local of Vizovice, who’s also known as the founding father of so-called microtonal music. In his compositions, you’ll be able to hear quarter tones or sixth notes, which at first pay attention results in the impression of a sure dissonance, usually slightly unpleasantly irritating.
Georg Friedrich Haas step by step tried totally different approaches to this detuning and located methods to extract from uncommon tunings works which are constricting, dramatic, but in addition nice and uplifting. Within the composition 11,000 Strings, written in 2020 on the request of the Busoni and Mahler Basis, in addition to the Klangforum Wien directed by Peter Paul Kainrath, he once more pushes the boundaries of the probabilities of working with sound. When Kainrath offered him together with his imaginative and prescient impressed by a Chinese language piano manufacturing facility, Haas known as it “a type of concepts that is so loopy that you don’t have any selection however to say sure.”
Pianists will likely be seated in a circle round a part of the viewers. | Photograph: Anna Cerrato
The composition, which will likely be heard by the guests of the Karlín Discussion board on June 2, was written for 50 pianos arrange in a circle round a part of the viewers. Every is tuned two cents greater than its neighbor, making a “piano orchestra” able to beforehand unheard-of shade mixtures. Though the composition works completely with acoustic devices, in lots of moments it appears as if we’re listening to futuristic sounds produced electronically. Fifty devices are reworked right into a single one, whose quick runs or huge chords spill over the listeners.
To ensure that the system to work in keeping with the creator’s concepts and have a homogeneous sound shade, it was essential to search out pianos of fully an identical building. They had been supplied by the Chinese language firm Hailun, which delivered fifty pianos to Europe for this event. A group of specialists should repeatedly tune them earlier than the efficiency in order that the exact frequency shifts don’t change.
Haas had already tried the thought of detuning an ensemble composed of 1 kind of instrument when he wrote an Octet for eight trombones in 2015. Nonetheless, what’s essential within the composition of 11,000 strings is the variety of devices that encompass and overwhelm an individual. The sound constructions vary from delicate ethereal surfaces to roaring plenty, in some passages the pianists must placed on thick gloves in order to not tear their arms by transferring shortly throughout the keyboard. The venue additionally performs an essential position. The world premiere came about final 12 months in Bolzano, Italy, adopted by Vienna, after the Karlín Discussion board, the Gashouder industrial area in Amsterdam will see one other efficiency.
The fifty pianists can even be joined in Prague by the Klangforum Wien chamber orchestra, which, along with string and wind devices, additionally contains two in depth units of drums, accordion, harpsichord and harp.
The instrumentalists scattered between the pianos collectively create a really spatial sound. Along with their common instrument, everyone seems to be answerable for one other percussive instrument, drum or cymbal. On this case, the conductor’s place will likely be taken by digital expertise within the type of time code, which synchronizes the shift of the sheet music within the tablets from which the musicians will learn.
Final 12 months, Georg Friedrich Haas was the composer-in-residence of Prague Offspring, the part of the Prague Spring pageant devoted to modern music. There, listeners may get to know his work extra completely, together with essentially the most well-known composition In useless from 2000. This 12 months’s resident composer is the British Rebecca Saunders, whereas the ensemble Klangforum Wien will play the position of resident ensemble for the third and final time.
Haas’s experimentation with retuning pianos was additionally symbolically linked to a different merchandise on the Prague Spring program, through which the piano, as a sound image of classical music, was subjected to transformations. The Pianofonia challenge was performed twice per week in the past on the Nationwide Technical Museum, through which the composers Michal Rataj and Jan Trojan explored the sound potentialities of grand pianos and their particular person elements together with electronics.
The performances had been related with the exhibition The Piano as a Technical Work, held on the event of the a hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Petrof firm. It was she who launched her merchandise to musicians. The live performance grand piano was performed within the conventional type by the world-renowned performer Ivo Kahánek, the composer Michal Nejtek, whose expertise connects modern classical music with jazz and rock, performed it unconventionally, and the percussionist Štěpán Hon performed piano elements in addition to percussion devices. Michal Rataj and Jan Trojan joined the ensemble by way of digital sound processing in actual time.
In recent times, Prague Spring has devoted itself extra systematically to modern classical music. His daring concepts are a very good contribution to the dialogue in regards to the standing of this sort of music within the modern world and transferring its conventional symbols, such because the piano, into new contexts.
Video: What a monumental composition for 50 pianos feels like
Georg Friedrich Haas’ monumental piece for 50 pianos will likely be performed by Klangforum Wien on the Prague Spring. Photograph: Anna Cerrato | Video: Prague Spring