*In Vain (for 25 instruments)

Georg Friedrich Haas - In Vain (Ensemble Dal Niente)

One way of approaching Georg Friedrich Haas’s composition in vain is to start right off with the spotlights. In one of the piece’s two versions the lights are taken out of their usual unobtrusiveness—the light’s intensity is part of the score; it ranges from concert lights on rostrum and desk to full darkness. The music that must be played in the dark not only puts audience and ensemble in an unusual situation but, at the very start, is also a challenge to the composer. First of all, the parts need to be easy to learn by heart; secondly, all the music played must be controllable by ear; and thirdly, it is futile to expect an invisible conductor to perform his usual function. When the lights gradually vanish only a few minutes after in vain begins, the brisk interwoven downward lines of the beginning come to a standstill—what remains are low, lingering tones, evading one another in microtonal steps by a semitone. Even in the version without light direction (to be heard at Wien Modern) the music moves in jet blackness, seems to get its bearings anew, gropes its way.

March forward, to call it marching, to call it forward. Should I one day, and now it starts, just have remained where, instead of following an old habit of going out in order to spend day and night as far away from myself as possible, it was not far. Perhaps this is how it started.

(Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable)