Ru
EnS. Lavrova
Liminal spaces as a metaphysics of infinity: “Sieben Klangräume” by Georg Friedrich Haas
The article is devoted to the composition of Georg Friedrich Haas Sieben Klangräume – Seven spaces created as “framing” to the existing fragments of Mozart’s Requiem that belong to the composer. In Sieben Klangräume, Haas recreates the liminal space of imaginary silence that frames Mozart’s Requiem. The composer presented silence as an “audible”, tangible sound quality that surrounds the “sounding” fragments of Mozart’s Requiem and frames them with segments of silence as sound images of an impending death. Haas encrusted his Sieben Klangräume into the general context of the composition, without trying to correspond with the musical style of Mozart in any way, avoiding both stylization and direct quotation, with the intention of supplementing and expanding the content of the sections with texts related to the circumstances of the composer’s life at that time. The composer is fascinated by the transgressive (borderline) experience of multisensory perception. In Sieben Klangräume light and darkness are not represented in a literal physical quality, as, for example, in his Third String Quartet, but as existential symbols of life and death. The Requiem turned out to be the last work that was never completed by the composer, which gave the death of the composer mystical and fatal connotations. For Haas it became the starting point of his Seven spaces – mystical liminal soundscapes that unfold between fragments of the music of Mozart’s Requiem, and, in addition to textual references to the composer’s music, also contain gaps that serve as carriers of the fundamental compositional principle of discreteness.
Key words
Georg Friedrich Haas, ”Sieben Klangräume“, liminal space, transgression, “Requiem” by W. A. Mozart.
For citation
Lavrova S. Liminal spaces as a metaphysics of infinity: ”Sieben Klangräume“ by Georg Friedrich Haas // South-Russian musical anthology. 2021. No. 1. Pp. 25–32.
