Conlon Nancarrow : Master of the Contemporary Piano Roll

 

Conlon Nancarrow  1912-1997

Piano Rolls are not just about Stride Piano and cute sing-a-long-tunes.  While many of the early piano rolls were incredible (see my earlier posts on Piano Roll Masters James P. Johnson and Jimmy Blythe ), Nancarrow propelled the art form to the next level using complex hand-operated and cumbersome mechanical roll punching devices, punching one hole at a time, to be played automatically on his customized acoustic player pianos.

  To review the process if you've never seen one of these, player pianos use air, or more correctly, vacuum,  to trigger notes based on a punched paper template that runs over a brass plate with 88 holes in it, and some more for pedal and dynamic functions and a couple more to keep the track running down the center of the tracker bar.   The force of vacuum powered the tracking of the roll, the playing of the individual notes AND the operation of the pedals.  The vacuum is created initially using electric motors or foot pumps. At the very beginning of the video below you will see a photo of the underside of the Ampico Grand Player Piano to get a sense of the complexity of the mechanism. The motor is visible off to the right with a belt connecting it to the pump.

   The process of creating the rolls for Nancarrow was extremely slow and the results were somewhat expressively limited by the nature of the technology but the compositions are nonetheless compelling.  In the commercial world of piano rolls, masters were creating through actual artist-performance  and embellished by hand, a considerably faster process.
   Having studied with some of the masters ( Walter Piston, Nicolas Slonimsky and Roger Sessions ) and having played jazz trumpet out in the real world,  Nancarrow was intellectually well equipped to produce some of the most innovative and important 20th century music to come along in some time.
    Nancarrow lived in Mexico City most of his life - he was raised in Arkansas and at one point, joined the Socialist Party when that was not particularly popular among politicians - his US passport was denied after fighting in the Spanish war against Franco.  He moved to Mexico to avoid the harassment that he experienced in the U.S.  In relative isolation it was impossible to find musicians with the skills to play his extremely complex and polyrhythmic music - he naturally gravitated to the player piano to realize his vision.

Conlon Nancarrow in 1983

Study for Player Piano #21   - note the constantly changing tempo and multiple layers each at a different tempo.   Check out YouTube - just type in Conlon Nancarrow - there is a wide stylistic variation in his compositions - some are undeniably Jazz  influenced.


There are 305 hits on YouTube for Conlon Nancarrow to explore further and a number of CD's available to purchase.  All of the Studies for Player Piano are on Rhapsody as well as some of his instrumental compositions. 

RESOURCES FOR MORE DETAILED STUDY - some very well-written articles here:

http://www.sonoloco.com/rev/mdg/1403/nancarrow2.html

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/studies_for_player_piano/
http://www.schott-music.com/shop/persons/featured/conlon-nancarrow/index.html


FASCINATING INTERVIEW AND BIO
http://www.bruceduffie.com/nancarrow2.html