In 1609, Galileo Galilei flipped around a lens and the telescope became a microscope. This turn connected the massive to the minuscule, far-away made close to the too-close made visible. The same technology that would allow us to see massive bodies in space would also allow us to see minuscule bodies: the cells that make up much of life on this earth. Eventually, we’d find out that the same elements out there in space were in us too.
Georg Friedrich Haas’s piece at the Park Avenue Armory, entitled 11,000 Strings for the wires that sound in the fifty pianos—yes, fifty—the composer calls for, contains dual actions of telescoping and magnifying, only sound, not light, is his material and his mode. The result is a work of enormous scope and forcefulness that reaches, by some pivot of a lens, an intimacy that surprises.
The piece, making its North American premiere after its first performance in Bolzano two years ago, has a technical underpinning to it that I will fail to explain succinctly, so I shall defer to the composer’s notes:
When a violin tunes its strings in perfectly intoned fifths, this interval is a tiny fraction (almost exactly one-fiftieth of a semitone) higher than the piano’s fifth. If each of the 50 pianos is tuned higher by this very small interval, then an absolutely perfect fifth is created, for example, between the C of the first piano and the G of the second piano. The same applies between the C of the second and the G of the third piano (one-fiftieth of a semitone higher), between the C of the third and the G of the fourth piano, and so on. After 50 pianos, the circle closes, and the fifth has risen by a semitone.
No need to fret, though. One does not need an acoustical physics course or a perfectly pitched ear, however, to feel the power of 11,000 Strings; one only needs ears and a certain openness—openness to be enveloped, openness to sounds as they are given, openness to making them mean something all one’s own.
This is a piece of great precision that provokes diffuse and imprecise feeling. It requires a thoroughly modern approach—dozens of synchronized iPads, all timed down to the millisecond to allow for the configuration of the pianos, which, with the instruments, surround the audience on all sides. The fifty pianists and twenty-five instrumentalists, here, members of the Austrian ensemble Klangforum Wien are not conducted; they play, both alone and together, against their stopwatches. The Armory is perhaps the only venue in the city that could and would put on this piece, and here it is mostly unadorned: only washes of lavender, pink, and midnight blue light and the instruments.
11,000 Strings unfolds through almost tectonic shifts, starting from a place of ultimate simplicity—a cadence that lands on a C Major triad, first sounded not in the piano but in its direct ancestor, the harpsichord. It proceeds from there not forward, but outward, redoubling and expanding into massive plates of sound that shift and collide. Roiling timpani, a wheezing, breathing accordion, piercing flutes, a roaring bass trombone and many many other instruments, often more felt than heard, all vie for the listeners attention.
An octave, a chord, a scale—these are the building blocks of our musical worlds, but we’re so used to seeing the musical forest, so to speak, that we don’t consider the wonder of the trees. The sonic materials may be simple enough, but such “simple” things are the result of thousands of years of history and countless decisions by people, remembered and unremembered. The piano, so ubiquitous now, is a miracle of engineering; its expressive capacities were epoch-shaping. The major scale may be derived from the mathematical calculations of the overtone series, but it also reflects agreement, one undertaken by people with one another: about what they value, about how they build a shared musical language, about how they endeavor to play together.
11,000 Strings unearths the beauty and contingency of such human agreements by insisting on the elemental force of even “simple” things. A tremolo, a glissando: what wonders, not just for what they are, but for how quick we are to make them mean, to hear in them thunder, or waves, or rain. By hearing such things both in micro- and telescopic scale, indeed, to be placed within them and be buffeted by them, we hear them anew. When, late in the piece, a series of chords returned surrounded us, I felt overcome, close to tears. I recall thinking, “How beautiful to live in a world with chords and pianos and people to hear them.” And then I started to laugh out of sheer delight.
Perceptible or not, the effect of Haas’s microtones is a matter of relation. Fifty pianos, it suggests, can only agree in the same way that people can, by never entirely eliminating difference. Complete identity, that’s the stuff of sine wave generators, not of flesh and wood and metal. These tiny overlaps in alignment—present always, and made concrete here—give sound its timbre, make it an undulating mesh instead of a single crisp line on a graph. Best are the moments when, by some confluence of clashing overtones, any individual instrument’s timbre seemed to blur or hybridize with that of another. Sound is how we know our world, but we are reminded that that knowledge is a conditional and intimate negotiation between ourselves and that world.
At times, it is fascinating to listen with eyes open, if only to see how thoroughly you can be tricked by your ears. In other moments, Haas’s textures are so rich and all-encompassing that it’s best just to give over to them with eyes closed. There is no sonic equivalent in our oculocentric language for the twin moves of telescoping and microscoping, but one can hear what can’t be said.
Haas denies this piece as an “experiment”—“you don’t experiment with people,” he writes in the program notes—but it results in a monumental discovery, nonetheless.
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