Haas: Hyperion, for light and orchestra

Light is a musical instrument.

Changing colours alter the perception of sounds. Temporally organised light functions like a silent percussion part.

For many years (since my short opera Adolf Wölfli of 1981) I have been attempting to write for this musical instrument.

The basic idea of Hyperion is simple: four orchestral groups are placed around the four walls of the room. A different light source is placed in front of each of them, clearly visible to the players. The musicians react to the light, in the same way that they react to the visual signals of a conductor.

What this visual element actually looks like depends on the free decisions of the person responsible for the lighting. The score only prescribes when something has to happen. And it is necessary that these events should be clear enough for the performers to be able to perceive them.

Sudden changes provide demarcation points in the stream of sound.

Gradual intensification or dimming of the light determines specific parameters (notated in the score) of an aleatoric writing aimed at achieving a harmonic effect.

And sometimes the light is used in a quite traditional way, as a metronome.

But the light is not a conductor: it is a machine which – once set in motion – inexorably runs its scheduled course.

During composition, it was necessary to take account of this special performance situation. In aleatoric passages (which are conceived in such a manner that exactly predetermined harmonic processes will result), the freedom of individually organised time is pitted against the organisational power of the machine. And the place of the person conducting is taken by the percussion, which now has to ‘conduct’ acoustically, since the visual conducting cues have already been ‘composed away’ in the shape of the lighting part.

While composing I had repeatedly to remind myself that there was no one here who could tackle any potential uncertainties with a sure hand, no one who could spur the players on to greater power or intervene in any other corrective capacity. The people in the orchestra playing this music are alone with themselves and the light. 

In the music can be heard, among other things, overtone chords and sounds of the tempered tone system. Two pianos are tuned according to the overtone system, one on the basis of the partials of a very low A (A), the other on the basis of the partials of the E flat above it. The tension between fusion and friction – with which I work consciously in the majority of my pieces – is also one of the fundamental ideas in Hyperion.

But whatever structures are formed disintegrate again. Unison melodies jostle against one another in different time grids and antagonistically conceived tonal systems. The retuned pianos realise not only overtone chords but also sixth-tone clusters. Apparently rising (or falling) melodic movements run out of tonal space and simply tread water. What appears to be acceleration turns out to be standstill. 

Hyperion is a figure from Greek mythology, father of the driver of the sun chariot, of dawn and of night.

Hyperion is a novel by Friedrich Hölderlin, whose central theme is the breakdown of revolution and of love.

Hyperion, the Concerto for Light and Orchestra, is the first concrete step in a new direction for me. Much here is still experimental, and for me there are great uncertainties (how will the people react, who play this music in such unusual circumstances? How much will the light actually alter the perceptions of the music? Will it also alter the perceptions of the payers? What does ‘counterpoint’ mean between two such diametrically opposed media as music and light – conceived here not as co-existence, nor as doubling, but as integral component of an artistic whole which transcends generic boundaries?)

It was an especial stroke of good fortune for me to be able to collaborate with rosalie. Hyperion arose in dialogue with her. In several passages I have, quite literally, reacted to her light.

Georg Friedrich Haas

Translated by Peter Burt