I started reading a new book today - The Music of Conlon Nancarrow by Kyle Gann. Reading without listening would have been a waste of time, so for the past hour and a half, I have had the sounds of a player piano blasting out of my speakers. No. 25 (from his Studies for Player Piano) is my favorite so far.
First, a bit about Nancarrow - he was so progressive in his approach to rhythm, that musicians were unable to perform his works. Henry Cowell (one of Nancarrow’s inspirations) wrote,
“‘An argument against the development of more diversified rhythms might be their difficulty of performance…Some of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer; but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player-piano roll. The would give a real reason for writing music specially for player-piano, such as music written for it at present does not seem to have.’” (pg. 1)
And so, after reading Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, Nancarrow left for Mexico City and began creating rhythmically complicated (for lack of a better word) compositions to be executed by player pianos.
From the first chapter, here are a few details that I found particularly interesting:
Rather than creating lengthy works using the compositional technique of motivic development, Nancarrow instead wrote short and compact pieces based upon long lines. He was able to maintain this compact structure because the long melodic or rhythmic lines were “juxtaposed simultaneously”(pg. 3).
Le sacre du printemps by Stravinsky was an important inspiration.
Nancarrow blended Cowell’s method of divisive rhythm (associated with Schoenberg) - “taking a larger unit…and dividing it simultaneously or successively into equal parts of various lengths” - with Stravinky’s method of additive rhythm - “the grouping of small durational units into irregular meter progressions”. (pg. 7) Here is an example of how Nancarrow did this in Study No. 1:
“Paying homage to Cowell’s divisive rhythm, Nancarrow notated 4/4 meter in one staff as equal to another’s 7/8. His rhythmic groupings within those meters, however, are largely additive, changing between articulations of 3,4, and 5 beats.” (pg. 7)
In regards to harmony: “Nancarrow aims not for consonance or dissonance, but for a key vaguely defined by the omnipresence of its seven scale steps and blurred by the gradual introduction of foreign pitches.” (pg. 12)
Also in regards to harmony: “during decades in which all but the most reactionary composers avoided major triads as irretrievably banal and exhausted, he used them in good faith and invested them with a function that carried no shadow of their earlier meaning in tonal music.” (pg. 15)
A list of the different forms used by Nancarrow: arch form, palindromic, loose arch form, variation over ostinato, sonata-allegro, tempo canon, sui generi, and tempo canon.
I am out of time to read and write, but there are plenty more details in just the first chapter that might be of interest to you. I would highly recommend reading the book for yourself! Potentially more blogs on this book to come.
