How I learned to stop worrying and love 11,000 strings: Haas at Park Avenue Armory

Fifty pianos encircled the 55,000 square foot Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Each was tuned two cents apart from its neighbors, purportedly the smallest difference in pitch discernible to the human ear. The ringed risers also housed an assortment of orchestral instruments: strings, brass, reeds, percussion and at least one harp. Music stands held scores and clocks. The audience assembled for the North American premiere of Georg Frederich Haas’ 11,000 Strings was seated inside the circle, facing the pianists (an assemblage of some of the city's finest contemporary music performers and students drawn from several colleges and universities). The non-pianists were drawn from Klangforum Wien (like the composer, from Austria), all under the direction of Bas Wiegers.

The seating arrangement in the Armory is key to 11,000 Strings. It's difficult to say what the best seat in the house might have been – there probably wasn't one – but it was nevertheless hard not to feel an odd sort of FOMO for a piece that by design one can't entirely hear. Dissonance was slow to seep in. From my aural perspective, it started with a nearby trombone but soon all 50 pianos were playing arpeggios at the bottom of the lower register, resounding like parade drums, like distant thunder. Climatic and overly climactic, it seemed like weather patterns at high-speed. Each wave took a different shape. Events – trills, ostinatos – bounced around the room.

It was a 75-minute sensation, but so is a circus. It was episodic, some motifs lasting under a minute. Some moments were genuinely surprising, moments which might have been developed but worrying about that would have amounted to over-intellectualizing while something else was already happening. Plinks, pulses and pounds spun around and interrupted themselves. At times it sounded entirely electronic and occasionally I felt slightly dizzy, off-balance, my brain trying to track the activity. Maybe it was more than sensation, but still less than brilliance. I relaxed into it being experiential and found my happy place.

Haas has built a reputation for writing music that falls between the cracks; microtones, overtones, spectral structures and polyphony all play a part in work, which isn't as confoundingly dissonant as one might expect. Here the cracks were between piano keys. The tuning created a swarm effect, allowing for unbroken glissandi. The result didn’t often register as dissonance, it was more ethereal than that. Like Ligeti before him, Haas makes the avant garde approachable and the large hall was filled with appreciative listeners.

Forty minutes in, the pianist directly in front of me played a bold chord progression, a sequence of six in both hands. It echoed to my left and then again elsewhere else and within seconds the room was awash with asynchronous and slightly off tune repetitions. Trombones moved in like foghorns. It was alarmingly musical, dissolving into strings, then near silence. One distant piano continued, as if coming from a saloon downstairs. Here was where the little uprights made sense. Bowed cymbals wafted through like cigarette smoke.

There was no real arc, and it could have gone on forever. It could be an installation piece for piano orchestra and chamber ensemble playing eight hours a day. But it couldn't be a record. It couldn't be a video. It couldn't be less than what it is and still be anything at all. 

Liszt transcribed Beethoven's symphonies for solo piano. Haas’ 50 pianos would stand no such reduction. It would fall apart, lose all its gravitas but, presumably nobody's trying to do that. Anything under 11,000 strings would be less than sensational.