Studies For Player Piano

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Conlon Nancarrow is perhaps the definitive American maverick composer: a lifelong Marxist who lived most of his life in exile in a suburb of Mexico City, a man whose work is so densely complex that he had to have machines play it - decades before computer music was even a vague notion. At some point in the 40s, the young Nancarrow grew tired of his pieces, pieces being written along increasingly mathematical lines, with more and more mind-boggling time signature, being performed inaccurately. So, taking his lead from Henry Cowell, he turned to a device whose inventors had very different intentions for it: the player-piano. Nancarrow took to making piano rolls - the "brain" behind a player piano - in order that the machines could handle his work. Over the next half century, Nancarrow wrote over five hours' worth of player piano studies of an extraordinary complexity which somehow always had an exuberance at their heart. If at times the pieces present an impenetrable wall of sound, at others they sound like nothing so much as a drunken barrelhouse boogie woogie player from Saturn (not so far-fetched; Nancarrow had been a jazz trumpeter in his early years). The very fine Wergo label recorded and released this huge body of work in the early 90s as 3 separate volumes. This package sees the three brought together in a single box set that includes a lavish 150 page booklet jam packed full of notes and history. For any serious fan of ground breaking, revolutionary music as yet unaware of CN's work, it's a must-have.