If you’ve ever spent a few hours in the woods at Night, bugs click, trees grumble, creuets of indeterminate size and ferocity trekough through the undergrowth, and coyotes howl in roving choirs, then you have some feel of what the Comproid Fri. AIMS TO ACCOMPLISH IN HIS WRAPAROUND WORK 11,000 strings. Haas, an Austrian Sage of Microtonal Music, Has Created His Own Sonic Forest in the Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall, Encircling the audience with 50 pianos (EACH HAS About 230 Strings) Percussion. For just over an hour, Currents of gritty, Glinting Sound Swirled Across the Hall, Gathering into Thick Roars or Thinning Out Into Quiet Franzies.
Two Elements Made the Event Bewitching, at Least for a while. The first is that it was embodied the exact opposite of the Canned Music That Permeates Our Lives. An orchestra squeezed out of a car stereo still resembles an orchestra, but listening to a recording of 11,000 strings Wold Be Like Swimming in a Water Glass. There’s no Way to appproximate this full-use Experience or reproduce the effect of millions of richly acoustic notes shooting in all directings.
The Other Source of the Work’s Character Lies in the Way Haas use Microtones, the minute shadings of pitch that of the notes of a western scale. Tuning a piano 88 Keys, like Slicing up the year into Smaller segments of time, is normally an excerpt in approximation. Fifths aren’t perfect and semitones are slightly off to prevent the keyboard from getting more jangly in some keys than in oters. For this work, Haas HAD EACH UPRIGHT PIANO RETUNED, CUTTING OUT THE ACCPTED CHEATS THAT EQUALLY REQUIRES, and INSTTEAD BUILDING IN INFINITIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ADJACT INSTRUMENTS. The result is a widening drift: if you played a c-marajor scale acroSs all 50 pianos, it beuled Slide progresively into different Keys.
Haas is not asking listens to detect those infinitesimal differences between, say, one c-sharp and the next. What matters is the cumulative buzz, the sense of harmonic slippage – the graininess in what look, on Paper, like a Simple Major Chord. The tuning is what kepes the air atremble, preventing the work from seting into a too-comfortable groove.
The Effect in the Drill Hall was electrifying at first, gradually more frustrating. I Kept Hoping Haas Wold Peel apsely Packed Timbres, Adding More Pinpoints and Precision. But the pianists donned Black Gloves so that their fingers Could Roll with Injury Across 50 Keyboards at Once, Over and Over, like Waves Crashing Against Cliffs. Outdoors, the Ear Quickly Learns to Differentiate the Panoply of Nature’s Noises. In the Hall, the Sonic Variety eventually oozed together into a brown mass.
I wished, too, that I could have up and mov around to the balance the balance. Confined to my seat, i had a flutist to my left and a cellist to my right, with three or four up pianos at their should, and no matter how the score gree, or how ferociously the bells clanged, gongs pealed, or the bass drums erupted in in -on A slice of a Vast Panorama.
“11,000 strings is not an experiment, “Haas Writes in a Program Note, echoing the 20th-Century Avant-Garde Composer Edgard Varèse (” My Experiment Always Wind up in the Wastepaper Basket “). Composer’s Command Over SO MANY Swarms of Sound, Give the Work Both Its Overwhelming Scope and Its Disappointing Sameness.
11,000 strings is at the park Avenue Armory Through October 7.