Georg Friedrich Haas

Biography

Georg Friedrich Haas (born 16 August 1953) is an Austrian composer. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, pieces by Haas received the most votes (49), and his composition in vain (2000) topped the list.

Education and career

Georg Friedrich Haas was born in Graz. He grew up in Tschagguns, Vorarlberg, and studied composition with Gösta Neuwirth and Iván Erőd and piano with Doris Wolf at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria. Since 1978, he has been teaching at the Hochschule as an instructor, and since 1989 as an associate professor in counterpoint, contemporary composition techniques, analysis, and introduction to microtonal music. Haas is a founding member of the Graz composers' collective Die andere Seite.
Haas completed two years of postgraduate studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with Friedrich Cerha, participated in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (1980, 1988 and 1990), and the computer music course at IRCAM (1991). He received a fellowship from the Salzburg Festival (1992–93), was awarded the Sandoz Prize (1992) and a music grant from the National Ministry of Science, Research, and Culture (1995). His works have been on the programs of the following festivals: Wien Modern (Vienna), Musikprotokoll (Graz), Witten, Huddersfield, Royaumont, Venice Biennale, Festival d'Automne (Paris), as well as at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and the Salzburg Festival 2011. Since 2005, he has lectured at the Hochschule in Basel, Switzerland; since 2013, he has been a professor of composition at Columbia University, New York.

Career

Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music. His aesthetics is guided by the idea that music is able "to articulate a human being's emotions and states of the soul in such a way that other human beings can embrace these emotions and states of the soul as their own" ("Emotionen und seelische Zustände von Menschen so zu formulieren, daß sie auch von anderen Menschen als die ihren angenommen werden können"). Thus Haas has disavowed the intellectualism of some strands of the modernist musical avant-garde (such as serialism and deconstructivism). The emotional atmosphere of many of his works is sombre. Haas's operas have been criticized for evoking themes like suffering, illness and death to aesthetic voyeurism: "the piece [Haas's opera Thomas (2013)] comes dangerously close to a kind of palliative care ward tourism."
In a similar vein, his orchestral works have been compared to film music: "[Dark dreams for symphony orchestra] lets us think of a soundtrack ready-made for a suspense movie" ("lässt aber auch an einen probaten Soundtrack zum Suspense-Streifen denken").
Haas's opera Morgen und Abend, to a libretto by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, was jointly commissioned by the Royal Opera House, London, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It was premiered on the main stage of the Royal Opera House on 13 November 2015.

Personal life

Haas is the dominant partner in a BDSM kink relationship with his wife, the American writer, BDSM educator, and actor Mollena Williams-Haas. In 2016, The New York Times published an article about his BDSM relationship with his wife. The couple live in Harlem.

Writings and compositions

Haas has published musicological articles on the works of Luigi Nono, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Alois Hába, Pierre Boulez, and Franz Schubert, among which:

'Arc-en-ciel" op.37: Ivan Wyschnegradskys behutsame Annäherung an das Zwölftonintervall', in Horst-Peter Hesse (ed.), Mikrotöne IV. Kongressbericht über das 4. internationale Symposium "Mikrotonforschung, Musik mit Mikrotönen, ekmelische Musik", Salzburg, 2.–5. Mai 1991 (Munich: Nymphenburg, 1993) (Grundfragen der mikrotonalen Musik 2), pp. 79–82
'Die Verwirklichung einer Utopie: Ultrachromatik und nicht-oktavierende Tonräume in Ivan Wyschnegradskys mikrotonalen Kompositionen', in Claus Ganter (ed.), Harmonik im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: WUV, 1993), pp. 87–100