Loss

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During my brief period working as a guitar professor at the University of Passo Fundo in southern Brazil I had the pleasure to share an apartment with a composer good friend of mine, Lauro Pektor, who worked at the same university teaching music theory, analysis and acoustics, and currently is working on his PhD in music composition at the University of Calgary. During our discussions about music and the contents we were interested in teaching the students, he introduced me to some aural illusions and the Shepard-Risset glissandi. This effect is defined by Tim Rutherford-Johnson as “an aural effect analogous to a rotating barber’s pole in which a sense of continuously descending pitch is created by fading in the upper partials of a descending glissando while fading out the lower one.




At the time I found this effect curious, perhaps a bit gimmicky, but reading Chapter 7 I stumbled on Rutherford-Johnson exposition of Georg Friedrich Haas’s music which explores this effect on acoustics instruments without any electronic intervention. The Shepard-Risset glissandi, when used by itself as we witness in video games and movies, maybe not much more than an aural trick, however, in the context of Haas’s In Vain this effect constantly disintegrates sounds and functions as a metaphor of decay and loss. Every new group of sounds continuously dissolves, and from its decayed, decomposed remains another one rises, just to repeat the same cycle, hopelessly falling in the same vanishing process over and over again. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the sounds mimic the cycle of life, fluctuating from silence to silence, as a reminder of our own mortality. However, as tempting as it may be to understand this work as a metaphor of death, the ultimate human burden, perhaps what this music is really singing about is inevitability and nature’s indifference to the human condition, which our efforts against are in vain.
 (Links to an external site.)
Haas obtain a similar effect on his Quartett für 4 Gitarren. In this piece, the composer takes advantage of the guitar tunning system to obtain microtonal differences between the 4 guitars, increasing the "dissolving" effect:

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