This standard-setting complete recording on instruments from the collection of Nancarrow, confidant Jurgen Hocker now brings together all 50 Studies for player piano in one attractive box set. Recorded on restored grand pianos with Ampico playing devices from the Nancarrow collection, we hear his music for two player pianos in outstanding sound quality for the first time
Conlon Nancarrow first appeared in European music centres in the 1980s. For decades he had lived in Mexican seclusion and, unnoticed by the public, had created a unique oeuvre from his fascination with player pianos. Ligeti aptly calls it "The Well-Tempered Clavier of the Twenty-First Century".
Nancarrow concentrates in his work on the time structure of tones. His highly complex polyphonic compositional style, often based on mathematical ratios, was inexecutable by flesh-and-blood pianists. The self-playing player piano offered the composer the performer he needed, decades before it became common practice to program music through computers.
Nancarrow painstakingly punched hole after hole in the long rolls of paper that drive the player piano. It often took him months to make just five minutes of music. In the process, the limits of auditory experience are stretched to the utmost: up to 200 strokes per second create a rush of sound that even the human ear struggles to separate into individual notes.
