Alex Ross: Georg Friedrich Haas Arrives in New York: The New Yorker The opening minutes of Georg Friedrich Haas's Third String Quartet, which unfolds in total darkness and can last more than an hour, are so unsettling that the members of the JACK Quartet - who have performed the piece almost twenty times, and will play it again on Nov. 19, as part of the White Light Festival - prep the audience with a "practice run" beforehand. The lights are turned off briefly, and anyone who feels too uncomfortable with the plunge into pitch-blackness can leave before the music begins. Occasional adverse reactions are understandable: it's like being buried alive. But the sounds that Haas elicits from the quartet - a minutely varied array of musical cries, whispers, songs, and sighs - gradually allow the ears to map a space that the eyes cannot see. The musicians are positioned around the hall, playing from memory. Toward the end, there is a quotation from the Responsoria of Carlo Gesualdo, the shadowy Renaissance master: it has the feeling of an occult communication. What begins as an experience of deprivation becomes one of radically heightened awareness. Haas, a sixty-year-old native of Graz, Austria, is among the leading European composers of the present day - a master of avant-garde techniques who has a flair for assembling large-scale structures. This year, he became a New Yorker, when Columbia University appointed him to its music faculty. I met him the other day at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, in Morningside Heights, which Haas described as "a very special place with an anachronistic Austrian-Hungarian character." He had with him, as reading material, a pocket score of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Soft-spoken and bespectacled, Haas is still adjusting to the tempo and the timbres of New York life. Yet he has long been open to American influences, having made a study of such experimental composers as Harry Partch and La Monte Young, who abandoned conventional Western scales in favor of intricately shaded, microtonal divisions of the octave. Haas's fascination with microtones, and particularly with the shimmering spectrum of overtones that arise from a resonating note, leads to an abiding ambiguity in his work, a pendulum swing between consonant purity and dissonant density. In the end, he says, "This distance between consonance and dissonance is a fiction. The two terms are all wrong for the complexity of our experience. Haas likes to present old instruments in new guises. His most recent theatre piece, "Thomas," which shows a man watching his partner die in a hospital ward, employs a spidery microtonal ensemble of harpsichord, harp, accordion, zither, mandolin, and guitar. He is also writing a concerto for four alphorns, drawing on the natural resonances of those long-tubed instruments, which have been echoing across Alpine valleys for centuries. And he plans to make further use of the in-the-dark effect, because of its power to focus the ears on sonic possibilities that, even after a century of modernism, still seem to him underexplored. "One thing I believe one hundred per cent," he told me. In each era, human beings will want to express themselves by creating new soundscapes. There will be no end of new music, ever. (Clark Studio Theatre, Lincoln Center. Nov. 19 at 7:30.) ♦