Review: Duo lends warmth to Nancarrow player piano piece
Reported 10/31/2012.
Conlon Nancarrow grew up listening to a player piano in his Arkansas home. In 1948, indebted to Henry Cowell's suggestion that difficult rhythms and simultaneous multiple tempos could easily be achieved on a player piano, he went to New York and bought one, along with a hole-punching machine to cut the piano rolls. The approximately 50 rhythmically intricate “Studies for Player Piano” he subsequently produced — many are indeed unplayable by human hands — were regarded by composers like Cage and Ligeti as a kind of 20th century “Well-Tempered Clavier.”
