HYENA

'Around two or three in the morning, I turned over. I really had to pee and was bathed in sweat. I wanted to get out of bed when I noticed there was a bulge in the floor that had not been there before.[…] After a while it started to crack open from the top,

like a ball of dirt, and the crumbling revealed a large hairy something. The slope of the neck, the arch of the back, those tiny, black, glittering eyes and the oddly shaped ears that twitched to shake off the clumps of dirt. As the muzzle turned towards me, I was face to face with a hyena.' 

In HYENA, Mollena Lee Williams-Haas has discovered a vivid way to describe the inner devil that drove her repeatedly to the bottle, and her uphill battle to recover from alcoholism.  'In fact, I never wanted to talk about my recovery from alcohol addiction at all', explains the American writer and storyteller, who married composer Georg Friedrich Haas in September 2015. 'It felt too personal and, in a way, the story had already been explored in every medium, ad nauseam. But then I was invited to perform at the prestigious Porchlight Storytelling event in San Francisco. And when they asked me what I wanted to talk about, my first thought was: ‘Definitely NOT about going into rehab’. Of course I was terrified, and so, naturally, I had to do it.' 

HYENA was an enormous success and was subsequently broadcast on the National Public Radio programme, Snap Judgement. Eventually, it was Lee Williams' husband, the composer Georg Friedrich Haas, who suggested incorporating her story into a composition for ensemble and live narrator, a role which Lee Williams-Haas will play herself. 'My wife is a professional storyteller', says Haas. 'I know better than anyone how capable she is of communicating content, and I know how strong the impact of her artistic personality can be. It seemed natural to make use of our personal closeness to create a joint artistic project.' 

Spoken language has always played a significant role in Haas' work: from his Fragment for 29 Speaking Voices (1979) to the complex speech rhythms in his Hölderlin opera Nacht (Night, 1995-96; 1998) or his 2015 opera, Morgen und Abend (Morning and Evening), in which an actor plays one of the leading roles. The composer is continually searching for new ways of integrating spoken language into his music, which is characterised by hallucinatory sound experiments and employs microtonality and alternative tuning systems. 

Haas: 'In HYENA I tried to find a musical framework suitable to the borderline situation of the text. In doing so, a flexible relationship between music and speech was of vital importance: 'In Morgen und Abend and in das kleine ICH BIN ICH (the little I AM ME), there are extended passages in which longer sentences should be spoken within a certain fixed period.  I have taken this further in HYENA: extended text passages will be spoken freely. The voice can react spontaneously to the sound of the ensemble, becoming slower, faster, louder or softer.’