Darkness Audible | EQ Ensemble | Friday 20 September 2013
St Nicholas Church of Ireland Dundalk

“In the beginning, Haas said, let there be no light. And there was dark. And it was good. Mind-blowingly good” – LA Times

Louth Contemporary Music Society present a unique event for local audiences, the Irish premiere of Georg Frederich Haas’ In the Dark as the focus of a concert entitled Darkness Audible. The work is performed in complete darkness, with the musicians playing from memory in different parts of the room. The performance score contains musical elements with detailed instructions.

The Dark: it is the milieu of mystery, the womb of gestation, the home of the unknown. It is synonymous with the Origin of all origins and with humankind’s deepest fears and most exalted states. Naturally then, when a concert comes along which plunges both musician and audience into total darkness, its effects are likely to be astounding.

In iij Noct (In the Dark) is an innovative musical composition by the acclaimed contemporary Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Hass which uses the theme of darkness to explore how music initiates and expresses the genesis of the inner light that leads to ‘peace’. Haas reveals how music is both the means and the end to such peace through a radical reversal of traditional conceptions of the concert performance.

The idea of performance in the dark comes from Renaissance and Baroque composers who wrote settings of Tenebrae services, to be sung in gradually darkened churches during the three days leading to Easter. Towards the end of the In the Dark a quotation from Gesualdo can be heard, from which the work also takes its title (from the Responses: Feria V, Resp. VII).

The performers play from memory and they play blind. The score’s structure is a series of instructions which each performer may develop and make personal choices for individual expression. Indeed the performers are encouraged to use their personal choice to alter the direction of things. The musicians invite one another into a shared process and respond in kind through reciprocity to each other. The musicians act as exemplars of cooperation and communion where invitations are made, accepted, responded to in kind. Tension is transformed. Solutions are found.

Programme
Avet Terterian                 String Quartet No.1 performed in normal lighting.
Georg Friedrich Haas     String Quartet No. 3 in iij Noct (In the Dark).

EQ Ensemble
Katherine Hunka, violin
Oonagh Keogh, violin
Cian O’Duill, viola
Rudi De Groote, cello

Tickets €10 available at the door or in advance from Central Ticket Bureau

www.centralticketbureau.com

0818 205 205

Darkness Audible is funded by the Arts Council and financially supported by Create Louth.