Ella Feldman in Smithsonian Magazine:
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.
More here. [A friend wrote this on Facebook about the experience of hearing this piece: “Last night, at the Park Avenue Armory I experienced the most exhilarating, awe-inspiring, piece of music I have ever heard in my life.” This friend is not given to exaggeration.]
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