Conlon Nancarrow

For decades Conlon Nancarrow worked alone in his studio, writing music for the player piano, punching it by hand onto paper rolls and listening to it on his own mechanical instruments. This disc brings late and previously unknown pieces, many of them in first recordings, and plays them on those very instruments, specially modified by the composer. There is no more direct way to hear what he heard.

Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1912 and died in Mexico City in 1997, where he had lived for most of his life. The project is a co-production of WDR Cologne and the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, with Felix Meyer and Harry Vogt as producers. The pianos were restored by Hans-W. Schmitz, and the recording engineers were Cornelius Bohn and Thomas Peter. The liner notes are by the pianist Helena Bugallo. Bugallo knows this music from the inside: with Amy Williams she transcribed many of the player piano studies for piano duet and recorded them for Wergo in 2004.

The programme shows how Nancarrow turned old rolls into new works. For Ligeti (1988), the second version of Study No. 18 and the Unnumbered Study (canon 3:4:5:6) all grow out of earlier material. Three Canons for Ursula (1988) document another habit: he used the player piano as a tool to test almost everything he wrote. The centrepiece is Study No. 48 (ca. 1977), a canon in the ratio 60:61 for two superimposed rolls that last more than twenty minutes. Current technology made a properly coordinated version possible, and it is heard here for the first time on one of his own instruments, fulfilling a wish the composer long held.

Three further studies, No. 45d, No. 46 and No. 47 (all ca. 1983), were once part of the largest work Nancarrow ever planned, the so-called Betty Freeman Suite. Study 45d is little known, and here it sits between its two former companions, so the listener can hear something of the larger design. Across the disc the mechanical precision of the rolls allows tempo relationships and densities that no human pianist could play, which is the core of Nancarrow's music.

CD, Wergo WER 6754 2, released in 2012, 58 minutes, recorded on the composer's original player pianos.