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.
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.
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