Listen! Conlon Nancarrow, or how to play the unplayable

Computer music before computers

We are in the first part of the 20th century with a truly fascinating composer. In general, and all the composers who listen to us know it well: we agree that when you compose, you have performers in mind. Not necessarily a particular person, but at least a staff, an orchestra, a quartet, a more or less good pianist, etc. My composer today: no. He composes pieces so difficult that they can only be played by a musical instrument which, if you think about it, is technically the first computer in the world: the mechanical piano. This is the American composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997).

Extract 1 - "Study 21", by a mechanical piano

We can hear a bit of the mechanism behind it: this study n°21 by Conlon Nancarrow, which dates from the early 1960s, is played by a mechanical piano, that is to say that the score has been perforated on a sheet and the piano recognizes a hole as a note. For Conlon Nancarrow, this instrument which has always been considered a bit of a gadget is a godsend since it can do everything: you can drill as many holes as you want, make 20 notes per second, play more notes at the same time than the 10 fingers of the hand, and it will. And that's perfect for him, because he has music in his head that's way too complicated to be played by humans.

In a few words...

Conlon Nancarrow was born in 1912 in Arkansas. At the age of 25, he left for Spain to fight the fascists, and when he returned to the United States, his communist sympathies earned him instead to settle in Mexico City, where he remained until the end of his life. He frequents Schoenberg as much as Cage and Ligeti. Mexico not being exactly at that time a haven of public thirsty for contemporary music, and its interpreters refusing to play for fear that this public would think that they were playing badly, he left for New York to buy a puncher for sheet music so as not to to be able to depend only on this gadget already quite obsolete in its day, the mechanical piano. Its first rolls are rather affordable technically: it's ragtime, and it's rather playable by human beings, if they play slower.

Excerpt 2 - "Study 3a"

Where is the difficulty?

After his first very ragtime rolls, he intends to take advantage of the INFINITE possibilities of the roll to attempt the impossible rhythm. Because his music isn't just complicated polyrhythm, it's not just the right hand doing three notes while the left hand is doing two, but rather one line at one tempo, and another line at one. another tempo, with a relation of proportion between these tempos: it can be pi, it can also be ratios of the type 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4 (the same ratios which, level of note pitch , would give the octave, the fifth, the fourth and the third).

In short, this means that, when he mixes the tempos, he reaffirms that a note is a rhythm. A la is someone who claps their hands 440 times per second. His study 37, for example, has 12 different tempos, that is to say the same number of tempos as there are notes in the scale.

There, we are going to leave ourselves with a rather crazy and exciting experience: since a single human cannot play a roll by Conlon Nancarrow, can an entire orchestra? Here is study 7, and it's orchestrated in a brilliant way.

Excerpt 3 - Study 7