JACK Quartet, Georg Friedrich Haas
novembernov 23
© Cherylynn Tsushima ©
Sunday november 23
15h
Georg Friedrich Haas, In iij Noct. (2001).
JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto violin, Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello.
Presented in collaboration by Théâtre de la Ville-Paris and the Festival d’Automne à Paris.
In our modern-day existences, finding ourselves so constantly under the presence of lights has meant that we have lost all sense of the dark and darkness. Georg Friedrich Haas draws upon this observation In iij Noct, a string quartet performed in absolute darkness. Enveloping us with sound, it results in our experience of time being overturned, as well as the rhythms of our body, and our relationship with others and listening.
The title of the work recalls the third nocturn of the Holy Week’s Office of Tenebrae, as part of which fourteen candles are gradually put out, leaving the last one, that of Christ to be hidden behind the altar, until nothing remains visible. Accordingly, Georg Friedrich Haas' string quartet bears, in its last quarter, a quotation from the Tenebrae Responsoria composed by the musician and Renaissance prince Carlo Gesualdo, himself a past master of crime, mourning and pain. In addition to sharpening our ears and making our emotions more intense, the darkness modifies the secular rules of tradition. The score is no longer comprised of stricto sensu notes, but rather of invitations to perform certain gestures. The playing space becomes distended, each of the members of the quartet being as far away as possible from each other, and surrounding the audience. The duration of the work is also rendered mobile, in constant evolution. The audience finds itself left to the discretion of the musicians, deprived of sight and who communicate with each other and with each of us only through what they play, plunged in the immersive power of darkness.
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