Studies for Player Piano

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EDITOR'S PICK

Total Tracks: 46   Total Length: 177:33

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thanks for this!

kip-w

For years, I've been listening to an increasingly feeble cassette tape of one disc of this set, and seeing it here gave me the chance for a sparkling new listening copy. Disc 3 is a great introduction to the mind-altering world of Nancarrow's roll compositions, in which a piano is made to sound like something almost utterly alien. Passagework too fast to follow, huge, scary chords that span the width of the keyboard, and rhythms so complex no one human could play them in concert: these are the treasures here. I'd love it if someone would apply these techniques to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The roll recording goes some of the way, but Nancarrow could take it way farther!

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Other ways to play a piano

McEwin

The limitation of a piano of course is that you only have two hands and ten fingers, or if you have a friend, four and twenty. You can get around this if you have a player piano, because then you have as many notes at one time as you have holes in your piano roll. This was Conolon Nancarrow's realization back in the 1930s. Having served with the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, he was no longer welcome in the US, and moved to Mexico City where he established his own studio. He devised a machine that would punch his compositions directly into holes on a paper roll, an enormously laborious method that produces vast sheets of sound in intricate combination. The result can sound like ragtime on speed: listen to No. 21 for 1000 notes in ten seconds!. The percussive sound is reminiscent of John Cage, though the intense control is the polar opposite of aleatory. Beats hauling the vinyl up from the basement - thanks to emusic & Charles Amirkhanian!

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