50 Pianos Rumble With the Sound of ‘11,000 Strings’

Georg Friedrich Haas has written a piece of almost ridiculous scale and complexity. The effect is awe-inspiring.

50 Pianos Rumble With the Sound of ‘11,000 Strings’

Georg Friedrich Haas has written a piece of almost ridiculous scale and complexity. The effect is awe-inspiring.

• Oct. 1, 2025

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’s “11,000 Strings,” running at the Armory through Oct. 7.

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At the Park Avenue Armory, 50 pianos are arranged in a circle, surrounding about 1,300 seats.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times

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. On 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 difficult to perceive the change from one instrument to the next, their cumulative uncanniness registers immediately. At the scale of Haas’s score, listeners will hear sounds that are joltingly strange yet awe-inspiring in their effect.

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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.”

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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. (Stepping up a semitone, say from C to C sharp, is a leap of 100 cents.) Haas’s piece is set up so that each piano is tuned two cents higher than the last; that’s the smallest interval a human ear can perceive, he said. By the end, the group’s tuning range is exactly one semitone.

Haas, a seasoned master of microtonality, had a sense of how “11,000 Strings” would sound, but he wrote it in isolation during the pandemic; he and Mollena Williams-Haas, his wife and collaborator, were stranded in Morocco, a situation that he described as “a comfortable trap.” Composing the piece gave him something to look forward to, when large-scale performance would be possible again.

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Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times

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Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times

He knew, with a work of this size, and in its arrangement, that he couldn’t write something like the classic “Radetzky March,” he said, that lives or dies on collective precision. So he created a fuzzy rhythmical structure that accommodated the impossibility of everyone playing absolutely together. Because the pianists face away from the audience, and because there is no conductor, they and the Klangforum Wien members perform from digital scores whose pages turn automatically to keep time.

“11,000 Strings” premiered in Bolzano, Italy, in 2023, drawing from music schools for its pianists and featuring the Mahler Academy Orchestra. Kainrath was close to tears when he heard it. “The closest thing I can think of,” he said of the experience, “was what it’s like to take an airplane for the first time.”

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The pianists face away from the audience, performing from digital scores whose pages turn automatically to keep time.Credit...Amir Hamja for The New York Times

Remarkably for contemporary music, and especially for a work of this size, it has toured widely with Klangforum Wien: to Vienna, to festivals throughout Europe and now to New York. Each performance has drawn from local communities of pianists. At the Armory, there is a mixture of conservatory students and professionals.

It wasn’t easy to bring 50 pianos to the United States. “Let’s be diplomatic,” Kainrath said, “because we are living in very particular times.” As tariffs were repeatedly announced and revised, he added, shipping costs were unpredictable and financially painful. Kainrath is trying to raise Klangforum Wien’s profile in New York and didn’t want to cancel, so in the end he accepted that the Armory run would be “more of an investment than balanced business.”

His ensemble, which arrived last weekend, gathered in the drill hall on Monday morning to rehearse with the pianists. They started by running through the piece until it made sense to stop. It opens gently, even pleasantly, with Klangforum Wien players conjuring a stereophonic C-major chord.

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When the pianos enter, it’s with a soft thunder under the chord, so subtle that audiences may not realize it’s happening until the sound gathers overwhelming force. That’s far from the last moment Haas’s score teases the ear: The spatial and musical effects at work have the power to create a kind of tingling sensation that tantalizes you over the course of 66 minutes.

Listening to “11,000 Strings” can feel like entering a busy hive or being taunted by an elusive sprite, coming at you from all sides and in constant motion. It is purely acoustic but sometimes achieves, with the most conventional instruments imaginable, the sound of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s otherworldly, multichannel electronics.

On Monday, Haas paced the drill hall with a mixture of relish and concentration. When the players paused, he had notes to give them, like “Please take care that major thirds are not too consonant,” but mostly he wanted them to cherish the experience as much as he visibly was.

“Please enjoy your pitches,” Haas told them. “Enjoy everything.”

Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.

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