Last year I gave an enthusiastic welcome to Volumes 3 and 4 of Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano (7/91) and provided details of various publications about the composer and his work. Volumes 1 and 2 are, perhaps surprisingly, the last of the series to appear. As before, James Tenney's documentation is admirable, although it would be a help to have some dates for the works, and it has obviously been worth making new recordings from Nancarrow's own instruments all over again. I got to know the studies through the 1977 Arch Recordings series of LPs, made by the same team of Charles Amirkanian as producer and Robert Shumaker as engineer. The dynamic level of the new digital recordings is lower but the quality has been improved.
The sound-world of Nancarrow is utterly fascinating: not limited as one might expect from being confined to the player piano. Much of the time it sounds as if a super-human pianist is playing the contrapuntal textures where each voice is in a separate rhythmic system. Coincidences are rare events. The studies numbered 3a to 3e show Nancarrow's early background as a jazz trumpeter and are some of the most obviously attractive. Nancarrow, like Ives, has been involved in notating rhythms that are hard to write down, virtually impossible to play, but that can arise spontaneously in improvisation. But Nancarrow is the more thorough-going. Apparently the rhythmic complexities of a single study could take him a year to devise and punch out on the piano roll. That was the original form and the scores came later. Eventually they will all be in print from Schott & Co.
Through the scores I have found an added interest in being able to follow the mad canons of No. 31, which don't get together at the end, and compare them with No. 35, which ends with a synchronized phrase in octaves. When a composer is as rhythmically innovative as Nancarrow he need not fear references to tonality: they appear in a completely new light. No. 40, which can be played singly or doubled up with the two instruments in canon, has close position major triads like rocks in a sea of swirling glissandos and ends in C major. A piece like Tango? (also recorded by Ursula Oppens for live piano) has cheeky tonal references that show a sense of fun hardly to be counted on from an American composer living in complete isolation and neglect in Mexico City for most of his life. Now that recognition has come, it will be substantiated by these complete recordings plus the scores.
And Nancarrow is still composing. He has his own sound world outside these mechanical instruments—try the piano pieces in Joanna MacGregor's American anthology (Collins, 8/89); the String Quartet played by the Kronos (Nonesuch, 2/89); or the Third Quartet written for the Arditti (on Gramavision, 11/90).'