Yesterday I was lucky to visit two exhibitions, both in the San Paulo complex. One was in the beautiful Textile Museum and I will get to that shortly. However, the other contained one of my Holy Grails, one of Conlon Nancarrow's player pianos. In an installation by Berenice Torres which utilized player piano rolls, there it sat, the piano.
Because I have been involved in music, in particular, electronic music for most all my life, I was always fascinated by Nancarrow's music, which used an early form of programming, punching holes in paper rolls. He made the piano do the most wonderful and crazy things. When I was doing grad work at New England Conservatory, I spent days listening to his stuff. Check out these wonderful quotes from people far more knowledgeable that your humble blogger.
"Every time Conlon punched a hole, the world got more interesting." —Robert Willey.
His
life story is a fascinating one.
Early performances of his highly complex work were failures, often due
to incompetent musicians, and his attempts to relaunch his compositional
career ground to a halt in the (understandably) underfunded and
ill-equipped Mexican contemporary music scene of the day. Frustrated by
years of indifference and incompetence, Nancarrow withdrew from 'normal'
musical circles, and, inspired by the writings of Henry Cowell, ordered
an Ampico Reproducing Piano and the required hole-punching equipment
for the pianola rolls. The player piano became his sole musical outlet,
and he wrote over 50 'Studies' exclusively for the mechanical
instruments until a sudden explosion of commissions in the 1980's and
1990's saw live musicians once again tackle his formidably polyrhythmic
works.
I can relate to hearing musical parts being played perfectly by computers and watching humans struggle to match the speed and accuracy, I think most composers today deal with that.
Ain't no human gonna play like this. Here is a
link to his Piano Player No3a.
So it was a wonderful experience to wander through the interesting exhibit while his music played in the background. You can see the piano behind all these rolls.
Ahhhh.... at last, in all its glory, an Ampico Reproducing Piano.
The maestro
and the required hole-punching equipment for the pianola rolls.
¡Viva Nancarrow!
1 comment:
Pretty cool, you have to wonder how he composed it. I mean, he couldn't just highlight and delete or copy and paste. He must have made thousands of rolls just to hear the piece during its creation.
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