In an Experimental Composition, 50 Pianos Tuned to Slightly Different Frequencies Play Together
Audience members are surrounded by a ring of dozens of pianos in “11,000 Strings”
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On a visit to the Hailun piano factory in China, Peter Paul Kainrath observed a room full of 100 pianos being played simultaneously by machines for quality control before being shipped off.
“Of course, there’s no music behind it,” Kainrath, who leads the contemporary orchestra Klangforum Wien, tells the New York Times’ Joshua Barone. “It was this pure, massive sound.”
The cacophonic scene left Kainrath so inspired that he called Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas to discuss its potential, per the New York Times. The next morning, Haas told Kainrath that if he brought him 50 pianos, he would compose a piece.
The resulting composition is Haas’ 11,000 Strings, which runs at New York’s Park Avenue Armory through Oct. 7. The piece features 50 pianists playing 50 Hailun pianos, which are all tuned to strike a slightly different frequency. In conjunction with a 25-person chamber ensemble, the musicians envelop their audience in a “sonic forest,” as New York Magazine’s Justin Davidson writes.
That enveloping effect is by design. While the audience sits in the middle of the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall, 50 pianos surround them in a ring, with the pianists’ backs to the crowd. There is no conductor—the musicians perform from a digital score that automatically turns pages to keep time. Listening to the piece “can feel like entering a busy hive or being taunted by an elusive sprite, coming at you from all sides and in constant motion,” per the New York Times. Sound is “the star of the show,” writes ArtNews’ Andy Battaglia. “And a lot of sound, to be sure,” he adds.
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Key takeaway: What is "11,000 Strings"?
This piece by composer Georg Friedrich Haas features 50 pianos, all tuned differently, playing together.
The composition is the culmination of Haas’ career-spanning devotion to microtonality: the use of intervals between notes that are smaller than semitones, or half steps. Microtonality is uncommon in Western music, which relies on octaves containing 12 semitones each. The distance between any two notes can be measured in a logarithmic value called cents, and Western semitones have 100 cents between them.
Every piano in 11,000 Strings “is tuned two cents higher than the last; that’s the smallest interval a human ear can perceive,” per the New York Times. Tuning the pianos to these specific and distinct tonalities takes about 20 hours, Sisi Ye, Hailun’s artistic director, tells the Times. The tuners use an app called TuneLab to make sure each piano hits the particular frequency they’re looking for.
Between the 50 pianos and the instruments in the orchestra, the total number of strings the audience hears is closer to 11,400, the New York Times reports. Haas tells the Times that he wants the composition’s name to “give the impression of how complex this sound is.”
Haas composed 11,000 Strings during the pandemic lockdown in Morocco, where he was in isolation with his creative partner and wife Mollena Williams-Haas. The work gave him something to look forward to, he tells the New York Times: a time when performing for an audience would be safe again.
The composition had its world premiere in 2023 in Bolzano, Italy, where it was performed by pianists from numerous conservatories with the Mahler Academy Orchestra. It went on to play at numerous European festivals. The Park Avenue Armory run marks 11,000 Strings’ North American premiere.
The first time Kainrath heard 11,000 Strings, he was nearly brought to tears by the experience, he tells the New York Times. “The closest thing I can think of,” he says, “was what it’s like to take an airplane for the first time.”