The notes between C & C#: Haas' violin concerto 2
Seventy minutes into a piece by Georg Friedrich Haas, the house goes fully black. Not dim — black. Twenty-four musicians keep playing a piece called in vain by feel and memory alone, and the audience sits there unable to see the stage, the players, or each other. Klangforum Wien's recording of the full piece is on YouTube, though hearing it through headphones only gets you halfway to what the room does: strip out sight, and a chord that would otherwise register as "a violin, slightly sharp" just registers as itself — a pitch that doesn't belong to any key on a piano, heard on its own terms because there's nothing left to compare it to.
That's the reputation Haas built his career on, and it's not a stunt. In 2017, the Italian magazine Classic Voice polled critics and musicians on the best work of art music written since 2000. Nothing beat in vain.
Ask Haas what he does and he'll correct you before you finish the question. "I am a composer, not a microtonalist," he's said — flatly enough that it's clearly a line he's had to draw more than once. He writes operas, orchestral works, chamber pieces of every temperament; one of his lighter pieces is dedicated to his wife, the American writer and BDSM educator Mollena Williams-Haas, whose marriage to Haas — the dynamic inside it, openly discussed by both of them — was the subject of a widely read 2016 New York Times profile. They live in Harlem.
The tool Haas reaches for again and again, across four decades and dozens of pieces, is microtonal writing. The term is relative, not absolute: "micro" means smaller than a specific reference unit, and that reference unit is the Western piano's — one octave, cut into 12 equal semitones. That grid isn't a law of acoustics. It's a few centuries old, a practical European compromise that let one instrument play in any key without being retuned by hand each time. Once that grid gets treated as the default, anything falling between its cracks picks up a diminishing label — micro, in-between, out of tune.
Most of the world's musical traditions never signed onto that compromise, because they were never trying to solve the piano's problem in the first place — which means what a Western ear hears as "microtonal," they hear as simply correct. In Arabic maqam music, the octave holds 24 quarter-tone steps instead of 12, and those extra pitches aren't the scale going flat by Western standards — they're the specific coordinates that tell a listener which maqam, which mode with its own mood and grammar, they're actually inside. Nudge one of those pitches over to the nearest Western semitone and the maqam doesn't get corrected; it gets erased. Indian classical musicians go further still: Hindustani and Carnatic theory both recognize 22 unequal microtonal steps per octave, called shrutis, and it's the precise shading between two notes — not just which seven notes a raga uses — that lets two ragas built on an identical scale sound like two entirely different emotional worlds. Neither tradition is playing "in-between" notes. They're playing exactly what their own system calls for; it's only the Western grid, held up as the reference point, that makes those pitches look like they're falling through the cracks.
Western concert music arrived at that same in-between space by accident, twice, years apart.
Alois Hába grew up listening to local folk singers slide between pitches no piano in the house could reproduce, and instead of deciding his ear was wrong, he decided the piano was incomplete. His first quarter-tone string quartet was finished in 1920; four years later he talked the Prague Conservatory into letting him teach the first quarter-tone composition class anywhere in the world. His String Quartet, Op. 7, written entirely in that system, is on YouTube — put it on and the pitches sound "wrong" for about thirty seconds, then simply sound like a different, specific place.
In the 1970s, composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail started running sound-analysis machines on ordinary instruments playing single, unremarkable notes — and found that no note is ever really single. Underneath the pitch a listener consciously registers sits a whole ladder of quieter, higher overtones, and most rungs of that ladder don't line up with any piano key at all. Grisey pointed his equipment at a trombonist playing one low E and built an entire piece, Partiels, out of what the machine actually saw: instead of rounding those overtones to the nearest black or white key, he wrote out their real pitches for eighteen musicians, so everything hiding inside one trombone player's single note became audible as its own orchestral piece. This walkthrough of Partiels shows exactly how that translation works, step by step.
Haas studied both disvcoveries closely enough to publish scholarly essays on Hába directly, and on the Russian-French theorist Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who'd been chasing a similar idea in Paris even earlier. His own dense, churning textures owe an audible debt to György Ligeti too — close enough that one of Haas's earliest pieces is a direct tribute to him. The two lineages actually meet inside Haas's own résumé: the composition chair he's held at Columbia University since 2013 belonged, immediately before him, to Murail.
Which brings us to the reason to bring any of this up this week. A violinist named Miranda Cuckson has spent years inside Haas's music — she gave the American premiere of in vain, and has played his solo violin piece de terrae fine"many times," in her own words. After one of those performances, Haas came to her and said he wanted to write her a concerto. That became his Violin Concerto No. 2, which premiered in 2017 with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov. A new recording, just out on the label Urlicht AudioVisual, captures a later performance of it — live at Vienna's Musikverein, with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under Markus Poschner, taped in November 2023 — paired with Cuckson's own recording of de terrae fine.
That solo piece has its own small, specific origin. Haas wrote it in 2001 during a stretch alone on the Irish coast, and dedicated it to violinist Ernst Kovacic. The title translates as "from the end of the earth" — naming the place he was actually standing and the isolation he felt standing there, at the same time. A recorded performance is on YouTube.
Critics haven't tried to make the concerto easier than it is. MusicWeb International's Rob Barnett called it "a big-boned, capricious yet unremittingly serious concerto" that "makes no concessions to the romantics." Gramophone's Jennifer Gersten described its nine unbroken movements as putting the soloist in the position of "a prism refracting the orchestra's behaviours," and reached for Alban Berg's and Ligeti's own violin concertos as the nearest comparisons.
Haas still won't let you call him a microtonalist. Fair enough — but strip the concerto of the pitches that fall between the keys, and there's no piece left. It's the same space Hába found by trusting a child's ear over a piano keyboard, that Grisey found hiding inside one trombone player's single note, and that Arabic and Indian musicians never had to go looking for, because they'd been living in it for centuries already.
Sources
MusicWeb International, "Haas: Violin Concerto 2 & de terrae fine (Urlicht AudioVisual)," Rob Barnett, Aug 17, 2026
Wikipedia, "Georg Friedrich Haas"
Wikipedia, "In vain (Haas)"
Urlicht AudioVisual, release page for Violin Concerto No. 2 & de terrae fine (Cuckson, Gene Gaudette, and Gramophone/Jennifer Gersten quotes)
Wikipedia, "Alois Hába"; search synthesis on Hába's 1920 quartet and 1924 Prague Conservatory quarter-tone class
Wikipedia, "Gérard Grisey"; search synthesis on Partiels and the trombone sonogram
Search synthesis, Arabic maqam quarter-tone system (24 steps/octave)
Search synthesis, Indian classical shruti system (22 microtones/octave)
Search synthesis, overtone series / harmonic series / just intonation fundamentals
Search synthesis, de terrae fine origin (Irish coast, 2001, dedicated to Ernst Kovacic)
Search synthesis, Violin Concerto No. 2 premiere/commission details (Tokyo Symphony, Ilan Volkov, 2017)
Wikipedia, "Markus Poschner"