It's odd, but sometimes I find an article in the Wall Street Journal on music to be more interesting than anything in the New York Times, which tends to puff pieces on musical personalities. Here is an article on a fascinating piece: ‘11,000 Strings’ Review: Georg Friedrich Haas’s Meditation.
“11,000 Strings” is precisely 66 minutes long and was performed in a gigantic oval of instruments and instrumentalists that surrounded an audience of 1,300 people. The music was played by 50 upright pianos, each of them with ever-so-slightly different tuning, amid a scattered chamber orchestra, the Klangforum Wien, of 25 other instruments. Each pianist had a tablet computer sending out individual musical instructions. No attendee heard exactly the same piece as a neighbor in any other part of the hall. (For the record, I was sitting between the harpist and a bassoonist, who were busily exploring the outer limits of their instruments.) But the circle of pianos provided a sort of unified backdrop that held it all together.
And here is a YouTube clip:
I have often thought that in this current phase of musical exploration a particularly fertile approach would be to consolidate the wildly experimental musics that appeared in the 1950s to 1980s of the last century. People like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen opened many doors and windows on landscapes that have scarcely been traveled. This piece is an excellent example.
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