A performance unlike any other just wrapped up in New York City, where an audience of a few lucky hundred were encircled by 50 pianos.

The pianists played out a piece called “11,000 Strings,” named for the number of strings in 50 pianos, each of which was tuned slightly differently than the others.

The tuning was the smallest difference perceptible to the human hear—all 50 pianos fit between one half-step, but not a single was in tune with the others.

What resulted was a “sonic forest,” according to New York Magazine; “like to take an airplane for the first time,” according to the New York Times; or “like sitting in a spaceship being rocked by cosmic waves.” according to Art News.

The story of this monumental performance begins with the composer Georg Friedrich Haas of the now-storied Austrian music ensemble Klangforum Wien. He received a phone call from a friend, named Peter Kainrath, who had just visited the Hailun piano factory in China.

Kainrath had been in the quality control hall and heard the sound of 100 newly-made pianos being played at the same time, which he described as “this pure, massive sound.”

Haas liked the idea for a project, and told Kainrath that if he bought him 50 pianos, he would compose a special piece of music. Shut up in a home in Morocco during COVID, Haas experimented with something that Western music has only just begun to use as a musical modality—microtones.

Simply put, in Western music there are 12 notes, each one a semitone, or half-step, higher or lower than the other. But in between each of those semitones are roughly 100 stages of pitch, called microtones. Each microtone can be as small a difference as 2 of those 100 “cents”, and each piano in “11,000 Strings” is tuned 2 stages higher or lower than the one next to it.

“Important is that when you go to this concert you feel something… and that you also learn that out of tune is really beautiful,” Haas said of the work.

The piece debuted in Bolzano, Italy in 2023, after which it performed in various music settings.

The setting is designed to envelope the listener, which made The Armoy at Park Avenue in NYC a perfect location for “11,000 Strings’” American debut. The venue’s 55,000 square feet Drill Hall could be arranged so that the audience could be arranged in the middle with the 50 pianos surrounding with them, each playing with their back to the crowd.

No conductor organizes the emotion, and the 25-man ensemble from Klangforum Wien, playing a chamber orchestra that included two massive percussion sets, sit and act slightly apart from the sometimes murmuring, sometimes roaring, sometimes clanging pianos.

“To gather 50 talented pianists and an ensemble like Klangforum Wien in this concert installation is an extraordinary act of experimentation, especially when each performer must surrender to the sheer force and surprising nature of sound,” said Haas. “Bringing ‘11,000 Strings’ to the Drill Hall, with its vast acoustics and intensity, is the realization of the piece’s full power.”

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