Today's Edition
NEW YORK (The New York Times News)
Piano plunks resonated from opposite ends of the immense drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory. Each time a key was struck, the pitch inched higher and higher.
It was Saturday afternoon, and technicians were at work, equipped with tools like a felt ribbon and a wrench, to tune the pianos as quickly as possible. Each one, made by Hailun, had more than 200 strings, all of which needed to be tuned to specific frequencies using an app called TuneLab.
Once the tuners were satisfied, they moved on to another piano. And then another. And another. In all, they had 50 pianos to prepare for the North American premiere a few days later of Georg Friedrich Haas’ "11,000 Strings,” running at the Armory through Tuesday.
Haas calls for the instruments to be arranged in a vast circle, surrounding about 1,300 seats. The 25 players of the ensemble Klangforum Wien are dotted throughout, in front of every other piano. Last Saturday, the layout was in place, but the pianos were a work in progress. Sisi Ye, Hailun’s artistic director, said that tuning for "11,000 Strings” takes about 20 hours.
It’s one thing to tune 50 pianos. It’s another to tune them for this piece, which demands that no two instruments sound the same.
The differences between each piano, detailed in a spreadsheet of frequencies, are microtonal. While it is difficult to perceive the change from one instrument to the next, their cumulative uncanniness registers immediately. At the scale of Haas’ score, listeners will hear sounds that are joltingly strange yet awe-inspiring in their effect.
Technically, there are more than 11,000 strings. Between the pianos and the Klangforum Wien instruments, there are closer to 11,400. But the important thing, Haas said in an interview, is for the title to "give the impression of how complex this sound is.”
Complex is one way to describe it. The premise of "11,000 Strings” is almost ridiculous, requiring not just a lot of space and preparation, but also the resources necessary to muster 50 pianos. For all its sensational qualities, though, the piece came about with unusual smoothness.
Its seeds were planted when Peter Paul Kainrath, Klangforum Wien’s artistic director and chief executive, visited the Hailun factory in China, where he came across a room of 100 pianos being played simultaneously, by machines, for 24 hours straight as a quality control measure before being shipped out.
"Of course, there’s no music behind it,” Kainrath said. "It was this pure, massive sound. But then I thought about Georg Friedrich and his, we can call it, obsession with microtonality. I was inspired so directly and spontaneously that I called him from there.”
Haas asked for two weeks to think about it, then called back the next morning. He couldn’t sleep, he told Kainrath, because he was so full of ideas. If Kainrath could bring him 50 pianos, Haas said, he would write a piece.
That number, 50, is crucial. In Western music, instruments are most commonly tuned with the 12-tone equal temperament system. Octaves are made up of 12 semitones, and the distance between each is measured in cents.
