Playing with Shadows: Reinjection Loops and Historical Allusion in Georg Friedrich Haas’s Live Electronic Music

Abstract

Recent scholarship suggests that the music of Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas can be understood as a dramatic confrontation between “clashing harmonic systems” (Hasegawa, 2015). Building on this observation, the present article focuses on Haas’s recent endeavors in the genre of live electronic music, showing how the composer deploys a relatively straightforward technical procedure—the reinjection loop, or the delayed playback of recorded sound at various speeds—to juxtapose different modes of pitch organization, including twelve-tone equal temperament, ultrachromatic microtonality, and just intonation. After surveying the composer’s relationship to these historical idioms, the article presents detailed analyses of two pieces (Ein Schattenspiel and String Quartet No. 4) to illustrate how the reinjection loop operates at multiple registers simultaneously, bringing the performers into contact with their immediate past, while also bringing Haas into dialogue with the shadows of his own compositional predecessors.