Anywhere in Time: A Conlon Nancarrow Festival

Study #1 Not actually the first of the Studies composed (the #3 collection was the earliest), and more similar in character to later, more abstract works. Based on as many as four layers of musical lines changing speeds within a palindromic structure. The tempo changes are achieved by shortening and lengthening note values. The work was quoted

by Nancarrow’s friend Elliott Carter in his first String Quartet.

Listening note: A high melody that slows down with each phrase while a jarring groove speeds up underneath; a middle section of layered chaos; then the jarring groove slows down while the high melody has become a low melody and speeds up to the end.

ANYWHERE IN TIME: A CONLON NANCARROW FESTIVAL JUNE 17–28, 2015

Study #2a A contorted blues featuring an ostinato made up of a clashing 5 against 6 with a melody played no fewer than nine times at four different tempos. Probably also written after #3.

Listening note: Three versions of the melody played simultaneously at three different speeds in two different keys.

In the eighteen years since his death, the music of composer Conlon Nancarrow has steadily grown in influence and infamy. Viewed as a fascinating anomaly during much of his lifetime, Nancarrow created staggeringly complex pieces with rhythmical structures—borrowed from boogie-woogie and the atonal avant-garde, and, eventually, formed in his own unique language—that he achieved through highly unusual means.

After fighting in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist regime, Nancarrow returned to the United States but was refused a passport renewal on the basis of his political beliefs. He responded by relocating in 1940 to Mexico City, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Working in near isolation, Nancarrow ceased writing music for live performers and instead turned to the only means of realizing his musical vision in the precomputer era: composing for the player piano.

The eventual patronage of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Györgi Ligeti, and others ensured that Nancarrow’s oeuvre was ultimately recorded and distributed. By the 1980s, a new generation of highly skilled players took an interest in his work, and his ensemble pieces crept into the canon.

Heroically difficult instrumental arrangements of his player piano music have become increasingly popular. But while the recordings of his works are relatively familiar, player pianos themselves have all but disappeared.

The eleven-day Anywhere in Time festival is a comprehensive reflection of Nancarrow’s music, bringing together leading artists whose practice is directly or indirectly informed by his work. It marks the first complete retrospective of Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano in the United States, performed on a renovated 1921 instrument identical to the composer’s own. One of the most innovative interpreters of Nancarrow, Alarm Will Sound, is in residence for two days, playing existing and new arrangements plus a fascinating selection of related works by other composers. Percussion virtuoso Chris Froh leads a day of percussion, playing seemingly impossible solo Nancarrow arrangements and discussing and dissecting the works. Dancers from the Merce Cunningham Trust

Study #2b In 1943, Nancarrow wrote Piece No. 1 for Small Orchestra but he was not to hear it played until 1986. In response to this frustration, he punched this player piano version of the fourth movement, with some embellishments.

Listening note: A harmonic language reminiscent of Erik Satie’s faster pieces, but as if three different ones were playing at once.

Try to count the number of different lines and ideas within this one-minutetwenty-second whirlwind.

Fellowship Program present reconstructed performances of Cunningham’s seminal dance Crises (1960), which famously brought Nancarrow’s music to its first international audiences. Jazz composer and saxophonist Steve Coleman, with his ensemble Five Elements, brings his own M-Base rhythmic principals to the proceedings. Guitar improviser Henry Kaiser and composer/percussionist Lukas Ligeti share a bill exploring the deep influence of Nancarrow on their own innovative practices. Virtuoso of the Player Piano, the best film made about Nancarrow, screens twice during the festival.

Anywhere in Time offers opportunities to hear the player piano firsthand and up close, as visitors to Nancarrow’s studio would have experienced it. In sessions entitled Nancarrow Deconstructed, the architectural nature of the compositions is exposed and explained by a combination of the featured artists, festival co-curator Dominic Murcott, and special guests including Charles Amirkhanian, the producer of the most important Nancarrow recordings; Kyle Gann, journalist, composer, and author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow; and James Greeson, director of Virtuoso of the Player Piano. The Whitney is delighted to welcome Yoko and Mako Nancarrow, the artist’s wife and son, who will take part in discussions and share their experiences of the composer’s life. Anywhere in Time: A Conlon Nancarrow Festival is co-curated by Dominic Murcott and Jay Sanders, Curator and Curator of Performance.

Notes on Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano appear, one by one, in numerical order, atop each page of this brochure. The first paragraph describes the technical issues explored; the second provides a “listening note” indicating aspects of interest that may help aural navigation. Notes are written by Dominic Murcott. Those curious to explore Nancarrow’s works in more depth may wish to refer to Kyle Gann’s excellent book The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Major support for the Whitney’s Performance Program is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Generous support is also provided by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the Performance Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Special thanks to the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (London), The Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel), Rex Lawson and Denis Hall of the Pianola Society, Helena Bugallo, Wolfgang Heisig, Gregor Quack, Erica McLeod, and Yoko and Mako Nancarrow.

Study #3a, b, c, d, e Likely the first Studies written, these were initially five separate pieces, later collected together as the so-called “Boogie Woogie Suite.” These are, for many, the archetypal Nancarrow Studies and some of his best-known works. They could be respectively described as extremely fast, slow, medium, slow, insanely fast!

Listening note: The almost entirely unique relationship between blues structures and mathematical numbering systems allows this collection to tread a line between human feel and mechanical invention. Studies a and e layer line upon line, each of different lengths; b and d present relaxed, swinging backings with rhythmically challenging “solos” over the top. C presents a delightful melody that builds into a Coplandesque climax of thoroughly American grandeur. Listen for the sudden flurry in d that happens exactly at the “Golden Section,” a mathematical ratio of 1:1.618 that often represents the positioning of points of interest in visual art and the timings of important features in music—in this case 1' 30" into a 2' 14" piece. E ends with a neat trick: it gives the impression of slowing down simply by removing notes while actually maintaining the same breakneck speed.

Listening note: Unlike the movements in Study #3 which generally keep melodic interest in the upper voices, as jazz does, here the melodies switch between any of the three voices, suggesting the canonic works to come.

Courtesy Charles Amirkhanian

Study #4 While Schoenberg and the so-called “serial� composers used systems of all twelve notes to avoid tonality, Nancarrow invented numerical systems freely. Here he uses eleven tones in a row of fifty-one notes to create a blues melody that wanders charmingly while remaining coherent.

Study #5 An experiment almost architectural in structure starting with two loops and ending with thirteen loops playing at the same time. Each loop is a different length and runs at a different speed.

Together they cover all but one note of the pitches available on the player piano.

Listening note: As the loops gradually appear, some don’t change, while the ones based on tiny, superfast arpeggios get closer and closer together until there is no space between them, bringing the piece to its logical conclusion.

ANYWHERE IN TIME DOMINIC MURCOTT

Study #6 A favorite of many. A simple idea of bass line plus melody, underpinned by a complex system based on a ratio of 4:5:6, where the 4 and 5 lines merge to make the bass line. One could almost be fooled into describing Nancarrow’s sound here as nostalgic—surely not a term he would have approved of.

Listening note: Easy and dreamy but on careful listening nothing actually fits. Try to find the groove of the bass line—it feels consistent but never actually settles.

Pulse, beat, groove: whatever we wish to call it, it is the underpinning structure of music. Finding the pulse allows us to embody sound and dance to it, nod to it, or simply feel our way perceptually through unfamiliar musical territory. The latter half of the twentieth century produced an astonishing array of rhythmic explorations. The atonal composers of the avant-garde often relegated pulse to the role of a flexible tool that enables performance but is obscured from the listener. If a pulse is felt, then it is surely a trick, a transient moment to bait the listener. Steve Reich, conversely, placed the pulse at the front of his music, then gradually shifted the listener’s relationship with it. Even when audiences had stopped dancing to jazz, that music continued to explore relationships with the groove.

You might not always know exactly where it is, but it is there to be found.

The common factor among these different ideas is that there is always a single pulse. However complex the music—even if the pulse changes speed every bar—there is only one pulse at any one time.

Within the polyrhythmic music of Sub-Saharan Africa, where different rhythmic layers seem only tenuously connected, those dancing to it nevertheless agree on a single version of the pulse. A few notable thinkers have tested this idea, however. Charles Ives imagined two bands marching towards each other playing at different speeds, and Henry Cowell suggested ways of superimposing musical bars of varying tempos.

Far ahead of its time, his book, New Musical Resources, eventually published in 1930 but begun in 1919, also suggested that punching rolls for the player piano would be the ideal way of making them heard.

By the time Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) read Cowell’s book, he had already begun composing pieces that explored the fabric of musical time as a flexible entity. His attempts at establishing himself as a composer, initially in the United States and, from 1940 on, in Mexico, had been thwarted by a lack of skill, or more likely a lack of will, on the part of the available performers. Nancarrow’s gently belligerent personality was not that of a strident leader, and it is easy to imagine the problems he faced in getting his works performed. In 1947, he traveled to New York to buy

Study #7 If a study is traditionally a short piece that explores a specific idea, Study #7 is a hugely rich exploration. At just over six minutes long, it is considerably longer, more complex, and more varied than anything that had come before in Nancarrow’s oeuvre. The material used in this piece is stated in its basic form at the beginning, then develops through an immensely long and complex series of isorhythms often layered on top of one another (isorhythms are a method of creating continually changing musical lines by repeating a fixed number of pitches in a fixed but different number of rhythmic placements). Unusually for Nancarrow, the structure resembles classical sonata form. Ivar Mikhashoff’s arrangement for chamber orchestra has become a contemporary classic in its own right.

Listening note: The opening melodies return with added complexity at about 2' 15", then keep reappearing in slightly different guises.

a player piano and to have a roll-punching machine custom made.

He also had a large and exquisite soundproofed studio built in his Mexico City garden, designed by the celebrated architect Juan O’Gorman.

Able to compose, perform, and, through recordings, disseminate his work from within this cocoon, Nancarrow created the first-ever “home studio” and began a most unusual journey of musical discovery. He would not compose another piece for live performers for nearly forty years.

The player piano provided both freedoms and constraints, and Nancarrow used each to his artistic advantage. Free from the limitations of human performers, he could punch holes anywhere on the paper rolls and literally, in his own words, put the notes “anywhere in time.” The constraint, at least on the surface, was that the piano offered a limited sonic world, even more so when the hammers of the piano were prepared with metal to make everything sound sharp, percussive, and harpsichord-like. But as his interest was primarily rhythmic, he kept himself “entertained” by building increasingly complex musical structures that were unlike any other.

He also discovered a number of idiomatic gestures for the player piano that had not been heard before and rarely since. Perhaps the most striking is the so-called “Nancarrow Lick”: a supersonic glissando that can zoom up and down any portion of the instrument's range, using, excluding, or sustaining any notes on the way. As his writing developed, this device appears more and more frequently, and, reminiscent of the piano playing of Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, becomes a personalized punctuation mark.

Study #8 Changing speeds is rare in popular music, though standard fare in several hundred years of classical music.

Nancarrow’s contribution was to manipulate acceleration and deceleration as a specific artistic process, and with an accuracy that humans are as yet unable to match. This is the first of his acceleration experiments, possibly the first ever by any composer.

Listening note: Some lines speed up and some slow down. The drama of the work lies in the difficulty of comprehending multiple lines changing speed simultaneously.

Like Tatum, Nancarrow was highly influenced by early jazz, particularly the stride piano style of Earl “Fatha” Hines, and this bluesy influence is heard throughout his work.

While the complexity of Nancarrow’s music is celebrated, its sheer density can be overwhelming. He may have preferred his work to speak for itself and was notoriously laconic when interviewed about his innovations.

The musical devices he invented are so fascinating in themselves, however, that unearthing them becomes a key part of the Nancarrow experience.

So what of these musical inventions?

Two of Nancarrow’s primary compositional tools were his use of tempo canons and isorhythm. A “simple” canon is a line of music that is followed at a set distance by a similar version of itself, so that the two (or more) lines overlap. Each line starts at a different point in time but runs at the same speed. “Frère Jacques,” the prototypical canon, features a ratio of 1:1, as do most others. In a “tempo” canon, the lines run at different speeds, and the ratio between them becomes a critical aspect of the composition. Cowell’s book had suggested a relationship between tempos that was analogous to the frequency (or pitch) ratio of musical intervals.

For example, two notes an octave apart have a frequency ratio of 1:2, while in tempo terms a 1:2 canon would have one line, or voice, running at twice the speed of the other. Following this logic, an interval of the notes C to E has a ratio of 4:5, which if translated to tempos is immediately more rhythmically challenging.

Nancarrow’s other hallmark device, isorhythm, was used in medieval music and then largely ignored until the twentieth century. A repeating series of pitches is placed in a repeating rhythmic pattern, but the number of pitches is not the same as the number of rhythmic notes. For example, if four pitches, F, G, Bb, D, were repeated in a rhythm of three notes and one rest, then the result would be F G Bb rest 1 2 3 4

D 1

F 2

G rest 3 4

Bb D F rest 1 2 3 4

G Bb D rest 1 2 3 4

Study #9 Made from three lines of material, each running at a different speed in a ratio that is generally 3:4:5. The lines all have a background ostinato (a phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice) plus a foreground melody.

Listening note: Bursts of melody suddenly jump in speed as they appear on different lines. The final phrase has three lines stacked on top of each other, with the resulting texture suggestive of inventions to come!

and then the pattern would start again. Now if that were framed in a bar of five beats, we get etc.

F G Bb rest D F G rest Bb D F rest G Bb D 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 and the result is a pattern that is always similar but never exactly the same, until sixteen bars later when the whole pattern restarts. Place this five-beat voice against a melody moving at 4/5 the speed and then the fun really begins. This is exactly what happens in Nancarrow’s Study #2a.

As the Studies for Player Piano progressed, Nancarrow observed that tempo canons could produce remarkable musical dramas. Musical order emerges and then disappears as the point where two voices converge is approached, crossed, and surpassed. Melodies in one voice may reappear at different speeds in another. The voices themselves can be complex, and then the tempo relationship between voices multiplies that complexity. The whole process can unfold gradually, but using elements that occur so fast that they push the very limits of perception.

If individual musical voices can be made to speed up and slow down in precise, specified ways, then another new musical chapter begins.

Humans themselves cannot change speed gradually at precisely defined rates, but under Nancarrow’s control, the player piano could. Study #21 (subtitled “Canon X”), simply presents an upper and lower line of seemingly random notes, with one accelerating and one decelerating. There is still no other piece of music like it. As Nancarrow further developed his own language, the tempo ratios became more extreme. There was, however, always a clear musical purpose. Study #36 has four voices at the ratio 17:18:19:20, all engaged in an intricate game of catch-up, disappearing into a mass of notes then reemerging. Study #48 has voices at a ratio of 60:61, which serves to test the very point at which musical lines sound either out of time or “loose” but in time. A leap into irrational number relationships, for example, √2/2 (Study #33), or e:π (Study #40), means

Study #10 Perhaps beginning to tire of blues as a basis for his structures, Nancarrow later cut the slow introduction heard on early recordings of the piece.

Listening note: The opening lines include a “bouncing ball” effect that comes from reducing the space between each note.

that the separate voices theoretically could never meet. And within these tempo relationships unfold seemingly endless cascades of ideas that had never been tried before.

These numerous ideas are themselves built into exquisite, almost architectural musical structures, and these structures appear as a series of holes on the piano rolls themselves. Though Nancarrow was rather uninterested in the rolls as visual objects, the beauty of the musical structures is often revealed as they scroll past the tracker bar when played on the player piano.

Nancarrow’s life story is as intriguing as his music—an American fighting against the fascists in Spain, resulting in his self-imposed exile in Mexico; his hermitlike isolation as he anticipated computer music by decades, on an antique mechanical instrument. By the time of his death in 1997, he was known throughout the contemporary music world, and—thanks to being frequently name-checked by Frank Zappa in interviews—to a somewhat wider audience as well. His sonic language still sounds very much his own, perhaps due to his focused and repeated use of a blues-meets-atonality fusion persistent through nearly all his life’s work. At the same time, his conceptualization of musical time and his inventive polytempo ideas have gone on to either directly influence, or at least resonate with, much contemporary music making, be it classical, jazz, or electronic. During his lifetime, Nancarrow’s music was championed by a number of influential composers, Györgi Ligeti and James Tenney in particular, as being among the most important work of the late twentieth century. We may come to find that the archetypal outsider eventually becomes a pillar of the musical establishment as, like voices in his tempo canons, we gradually catch up to him.

Study #11 A sequence of 120 chords is manipulated over two, three, or four lines.

In a microcosmic analogy for the whole collection, the initial blues material becomes increasingly atonal.

Listening note: The opening chords suggest a jazz style that has since appeared (the piece was probably written in the mid-1950s), but did not exist at the time.

Listening note: More overtly lyrical than any of the other Studies. It is almost impossible not to imagine the impassioned strumming of an acoustic guitar once the idea has been suggested.

Courtesy the artist’s estate

Study #12 It has often been suggested that this Study emulates Spanish flamenco guitar technique, though Nancarrow resolutely refused to describe it in programmatic or sentimental terms.

(He also declared that he didn’t hear any music while fighting in Spain.) Kyle Gann likens the harmonic material of Study #12 to Gregorian Chant. The seeds of the “Nancarrow Lick” are sown in the rapid figures.

Studies #13–19—the Seven Canonic Studies Whereas Studies #3a, b, c, d, and e were collected retrospectively, Nancarrow planned Studies #13–19 as a collection that explicitly explored tempo canons.

He published them as separate entities, however, possibly because they didn’t individuate themselves enough to maintain his interest as a collection. They are all based on common mathematical numbering systems and share many musical qualities.

Apart from #13 (whose score Nancarrow did not deem worth publishing), each of the rest has the ratio of the tempo canons included as a subtitle.

Listening notes: Study #13: Multiple lines with minimal material in each.

Study #14—Canon 4/5: A beautifully simple idea: two lines of music at different tempi that share the same midpoint. Listen for the entrance of the slower, higher voice after about 10", and note that it ends ten seconds earlier than the lower, faster one.

Study #15—Canon 3/4: So fast and jagged that it is almost impossible to hear the relationship between the two tempi.

Pianist Ivar Mikhashoff, a celebrated Nancarrow expert, was apparently able to play this without adaption.

Study #16 (subtitled as being 84 bpm against 140 bpm­—which is the same as 3/5): Another simple idea that predicts the two-player piano works of the years to come. One piece of music over four lines plays for about a minute, followed by a different piece for the same duration, followed by both played at the same time.

Study #17—Canon 12/15/20: Each line plays the same three sections of material but in different orders. Good luck on recognizing them though!

Study #18—Canon 3/4: Like #14, #18 is just two versions of the same material, with the higher, faster one starting later than the lower, slower one. This time, however, they both reach their end at the same time, so one appears to play catchup. Again, not easy to hear!

Study #19—Canon 12/15/20: Like Study #18, but two lines now catch up to the first.

Short and sweet.

Study #20 It has been often said that this piece resembles Györgi Ligeti’s work of some years later, not through direct influence but simply similar ideas occuring at different times and places. This Study has up to eight simultaneous lines playing a single note, each at perceptually random rhythms.

Listening note: Imagine the piece as a mechanical wind chime and each note as one of the sounding bars.

EVENT SCHEDULE JUNE 17–28, 2015

Study #21—Canon X Surely one of the most striking and unique pieces of twentieth-century music.

A simple premise: two lines of notes, one starting fast and getting slower, one starting slow and getting faster. Remarkable also for the melodic material, which is composed to attract no attention to itself, simply to transmit the sense of its own speed.

Listening note: There is a fleeting moment when both lines run at exactly the same speed. Also try to catch the final perfect cadence, a musical punctuation device at the ends of lines in everything from Mozart to jazz that indicates the end of a section. Almost uniquely, Nancarrow uses perfect cadences at the end of atonal works, as he felt the audience needed help hearing when a piece ended. Hereafter, the device becomes a feature of many of his pieces.

6/17

Study #22­—Canon 1%/1.5%/2.25% Another so-called “acceleration canon.”

The subtitle refers to the percentage at which each of three lines speeds up or slows down. In one line, for example, the difference in spacing between notes reduces by 1% every note, while in another line it reduces by 1.5%.

The second of these lines therefore accelerates more rapidly.

Listening note: This method of acceleration produces an almost exponential curve, so something that speeds up gradually suddenly seems to rush. To maintain drama, the lines are initially stopped before they become too fast, and only allowed “off their leash” in the second half of the work.

Player piano on view Free with Museum admission An ongoing installation of a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano identical to Nancarrow’s own will be on view along with the piano roll for his Study #36. Periodically throughout the day, various Nancarrow Studies will be played and discussed including a 1 pm program: Nancarrow Deconstructed.

Conlon Nancarrow: Virtuoso of the Player Piano (2012) by James Greeson 4 pm film screening. The filmmaker will be present.

Running time: 57 minutes Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details A biographical overview of Nancarrow’s life and times, from his beginnings in Texarkana, Arkansas, and his years in Boston through his fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his emigration to Mexico. The film features interviews with his family members and those who were closest to Nancarrow during his career, including Yoko Nancarrow, Charles Amirkhanian, Kyle Gann, and Trimpin, among others. It also presents performance footage of his first published piano pieces, as well as a newly discovered set of two-part inventions he composed in his first years in Mexico performed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, by pianist Helena Bugallo. Other highlights include “live” performances of his powerful Studies #25, 3a, 37, and 21, his famous “Canon X.”

Study #23 As if forcing #21’s accelerating intensity into small “packets.� This work also features just two voices but with almost unrelated characteristics. The development from #21 to #23 is an inspiring example of trying an idea, then learning from that attempt.

Listening note: At about 3' 30" into a 4' 30" piece, things start to reach a crescendo, and it feels like an obvious end is on the way. The piece abandons this notion, however, slowing again to end with a quiet sense of compositional maturity.

6/18

Study #24—Canon 14/15/16 Possibly the first piece to put aside the need to hear the actual canonic relationships and instead experience the textures they can enable. Not one canon but a series, all starting and ending at the same time but jumping from one speed to another to ensure that each can run at a different speed while ending up at the same overall duration.

Listening note: The obvious thing to hear about this structurally exciting Study is that it is a work of extremes: each new canon is either soft and slow or fast and loud. The slow canons feel dominant and the emergence of the fast ones like interruptions, until suddenly we find a fast, loud canon taking up almost the whole second half of the piece.

Player piano on view Free with Museum admission An ongoing installation of a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano identical to Nancarrow’s own will be on view along with the piano roll for his Study #36. Periodically throughout the day, various Nancarrow Studies will be played and discussed including a 1 pm program: Nancarrow Deconstructed.

Steve Coleman and Five Elements 8 pm performance Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details Steve Coleman: alto saxophone Jonathan Finlayson: trumpet Miles Okazaki: electric guitar Anthony Tidd: bass Jazz composer Steve Coleman has cited Conlon Nancarrow as an important influence and one of his favorite composers. In his own singular music, Coleman has explored the complexities of rhythm and time in utterly unique ways. In most music, there is an agreed-upon groove.

Other music uses syncopation to suggest other rhythms. Finally, there comes a point where the glue dissolves and the separate rhythmic entities have more and more tenuous relationships. Coleman’s dense, mysterious musical structures tip over into something else, as his rhythmic work is often both polyrhythmic (one rhythm with a number of grooves), and he is one of the very few players working with polytempo (completely different tempi).

Listening note: Should almost be called a “viewing note”: the huge diamond shapes of holes punched in the roll look as exciting going by as they sound. The end involves more than one thousand notes played in twelve seconds with the sustain pedal down.

Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Study #25 For a composer so engaged with formulating strict musical structures, this piece is an atypically overt exploration of the sonic possibilities afforded by the player piano. Probably written in the late 1950s, it is the culmination of ten years of producing unique musical effects from rapid figures. Here these effects come to life and the “Nancarrow Lick,” a supersonic glissando of vast numbers of chromatic notes, is truly born.

Study #26—Canon 1/1 The only Study that uses what we might call a “normal” canonic ratio, with all parts at the same speed but starting at different times. This slow, cool work uses only steady streams of whole notes, possibly as an antithesis to #25.

It seems that Nancarrow might have discarded it were it not for John Cage’s encouragement to have it published.

Listening note: Seven lines on top of one another form a series of almost random seven-note chords.

Nancarrow later recalled Cage’s response to being asked what happens if notes chosen by chance operations don't sound good together: “You get used to it!”

About Steve Coleman: Steve Coleman is an alto saxophonist and composer whose technical virtuosity and engagement with musical traditions and styles from around the world are expanding the expressive and formal possibilities of spontaneous composition. Whether performing solo or with his regular ensemble, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Coleman delivers signature performances of notated works and brings a masterful facility to intricate and complex improvised pieces. His original compositions weave disciplined rhythmic structures, refined tonal progressions, and overlapping and mixed meters into soulful and fluid interpretations.

In his improvisational performances, Coleman energizes and updates iconic musical idioms in the creative traditions of luminaries like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker by infusing them with melodic, rhythmic, and structural components inspired by music of the larger African Diaspora, as well as from the continents of Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas (in particular, West Africa, Cuba, Brazil, Europe, India, and Indonesia).

His work also draws heavily on inspiration from nature, metaphysics, and science, integrating, for example, patterns derived from the cycles and relationships of the planets in our solar system and the pulsating patterns of the human heart.

Study #27—Canon 5%/6%/8%/11% The second acceleration canon subtitled with percentage changes in tempo rather than ratios, this piece uses a simple device in an ingenious way: the central idea is that a “clock” line in the middle of the piano “ticks” consistently so the ear can hear the canons above and below it change speed in relation to it.

Listening note: The first sound heard is the “ticking,” which is made up of four close notes whose pitches play as if randomly but at a consistent tempo. (The whole tempo does increase in speed, but only a couple of times and in clear jumps.)

The joy is to hear the astonishing array of effects that the accelerations and decelerations produce, while keeping in touch with the clock.

6/19 6/20

Study #28 Continuing the idea of one voice remaining at the same speed while others change in contrast against it, Study #28 is based on two simple scales moving up and down.

One remains the same speed throughout while the other increases in tempo at the end of each ascending or descending line. Additional trills are added, presumably to add tension to the structure.

Listening note: Like three pianists practicing in adjoining rooms, one with consistent timing, one speeding up, and one trying to annoy the other two. According to Kyle Gann, this was not one of the composer’s favorite works due to its perceptual simplicity—anyone who teaches music might be particularly entertained however.

Crises (1960) June 19: 2 pm and 7 pm performances June 20: 2 pm and 4 pm performances Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details

Merce Cunningham and Viola Farber, Crises (1960).

Photo: BAM 1970 © James Klosty

Performances by dancers from the Merce Cunningham Trust Fellowship Program, reconstructed and staged by Jennifer Goggans

First performed at the Thirteenth American Dance Festival in the summer of 1960, Crises was described by Cunningham as “an adventure in togetherness.” Choreographed for four women and one man, the dance focused on physical contact between the dancers. The physical entanglements came both through holding each other and being held, and through elastic bands, worn around a wrist, an arm, a waist or a leg, which connected the dancers in various positions. Cage noted, “This is a dramatic, though not a narrative, dance concerned with decisive moments in the relationship between a man and four women.” Conlon Nancarrow’s musical score reinforced the dance’s harsh atmosphere

Study #29 and Study #30 One type of complex material contains some elements that accelerate in steps, only to be periodically interrupted by a different body of complex material that contains different accelerating elements.

This study was originally planned for a prepared player piano “à la Cage,” but that plan was thwarted by technical troubles. #30 was a fully realized prepared piano piece, recorded but never published.

Listening note: The two types of material may not be obviously different apart from perhaps the first couple of times they change.

Furthermore, the accelerations are complex and embedded, making them hard to grasp. The whole effect is marvelous, however, as the piece manages to speed up to a tremendous pace and density without the listener clearly hearing how it is happening.

with an assortment of jangling rhythms, and Rauschenberg’s costumes were leotards in various shades of red, evoking the romance of the piece.

Choreography: Merce Cunningham

Costume Reconstruction: Jeffrey Wirsing

Music: Conlon Nancarrow, Studies for Player Piano

Production Consultant: Carrie Wood

Design: Robert Rauschenberg Staging: Jennifer Goggans

Dancers: Erin Dowd Rebecca Hadley Vanessa Knouse Tess Montoya Benny Olk

About Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg: Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) was a leader of the American avantgarde throughout his seventy-year career and is considered one of the most important choreographers of our time. With an artistic career distinguished by constant experimentation and collaboration with groundbreaking artists from every discipline, Cunningham expanded the frontiers of dance and contemporary visual and performing arts.

Cunningham’s lifelong passion for innovation also made him a pioneer in applying new technologies to the arts. Born in Centralia, Washington on April 16, 1919, Cunningham began his professional dance career at twenty with a six-year tenure as a soloist in the Martha Graham Dance Company. In 1944 he presented his first solo show and in 1953 formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a forum to explore his groundbreaking ideas. Together with John Cage, his partner in life and work, Cunningham proposed a number of radical innovations, chief among them that dance and music may occur in the same time and space,

Study #31—Canon 21/24/25 Around 1960 Nancarrow entered what he described as a five-year depression when he stopped composing because “he didn’t feel like it.” Instead he worked on producing publishable scores of the previous Studies. #31 was probably the first piece composed after this hiatus and is very short, harkening back to his earlier ideas about canon.

Listening note: The opening theme is particularly easy to recognize when it begins in the lowest and slowest line, before it is added at two faster, higher ones.

but should be created independently of one another. They also made extensive use of chance procedures, abandoning musical forms, narrative, and other conventional elements of dance composition. For Cunningham the subject of his dances was always dance itself. An active choreographer and mentor to the arts world throughout his life, Cunningham earned some of the highest honors bestowed in the arts, including the National Medal of Arts (1990), the MacArthur Fellowship (1985), Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (2005), and the British Laurence Olivier Award (1985). Always forward-thinking, Cunningham established the Merce Cunningham Trust in 2000 and developed the precedent-setting Legacy Plan prior to his death, to ensure the preservation of his artistic legacy.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) was born in Port Arthur, Texas.

The creative relationships and methods that Rauschenberg developed at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, and at the Art Students League of New York proved formative to his almost sixty-year career, one that was characterized by an irreverent and innovative approach to images, mediums, and disciplines. Rauschenberg realized his first Combine in 1954, eschewing established artistic boundaries and hierarchies; he introduced the materials of everyday life while combining aspects of painting and sculpture. Collaborations with composer John Cage and dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham spurred Rauschenberg to add performance to his wide-ranging palette, including costume and set designs for the Cunningham and Paul Taylor dance companies. His affiliation with the Judson Dance Theater allowed Rauschenberg to choreograph his first performance, Pelican (1963), and it led to a lifelong collaboration with dancer/choreographer Trisha Brown for whose performances Rauschenberg designed costumes, lighting, sets, and on occasion, music.

Performance description: “About Crises” by David Vaughan, from Merce Cunningham Dance Capsules. Courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust. All rights reserved. Crises is performed courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust. The performers are freelance professional dancers who study Cunningham Technique® and repertory through the Merce Cunningham Trust Fellowship Program. For further information, visit www.mercecunningham.org.

Study #32—Canon 5/6/7/8 In contrast to the comparative simplicity of #31, this piece represents a conceptual progression. Many of the previous canonic experiments have been designed to allow the listener to grasp which line is playing at which speed (a feat you will no doubt by now have discovered is challenging nevertheless). #32, however, mingles the four voices to create a gentle but tense holistic entity.

Listening note: It is just barely possible to hear melodic fragments repeated in the different voices at different speeds and registers.

6/21

Study #33­—Canon √2/2 While we might just about be able to hear the exact relationship between tempo canons at a ratio of, say 4:5 (Study #14), the irrational ratio of √2/2 guarantees that we will not be able to.

Once again Nancarrow uses hidden tools that generate abstract ideas.

Listening note: Groove along with either of the two opening lines: enjoy the other not quite fitting with it.

Percussion Day: Nancarrow Deconstructed 1 pm public demonstration free with Museum admission Chris Froh and Dominic Murcott explain and demonstrate the almost unplayably fast workings of the percussion arrangements of Nancarrow’s Piece for Tape and Study #5.

Percussion Day: Chris Froh in Concert 4 pm performance Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details Percussionist Chris Froh plays Nancarrow, James Tenney, John Cage, and others About Chris Froh: Percussionist Chris Froh specializes in promoting and influencing the creation of new music through critically acclaimed performances and dynamic lectures. A member of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Empyrean Ensemble, Rootstock Percussion, and San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Froh has premiered more than one hundred chamber and solo works by composers from fifteen countries. His rich and diverse career also includes performances with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall and the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall, as well as session recording at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch for a video game about monkeys and pirates.

Study #34— Canon 9 10 11 4/5/6 4/5/6 4/5/6 Written around the time he met his third wife, Yoko, in 1969, when the oeuvre’s complexity and sophistication increases with each new piece. Here, three voices at a ratio of 9:10:11 have the ratios of 4:5:6 embedded within them.

Listening note: The start of each of the three voices is quite clear. Each voice then appears to speed up as it goes through its own series of tempo ratios.

6/22

Study #35 Simply loaded with melodies and musical devices, managing to feel both coherent and yet almost freely improvised. This work is often described as being jazzy, but it is very much a jazz of the composer’s own making.

Listening note: The harmonic material straddles extended tonality and atonality. The resulting tension is powerful and continuous throughout.

Imagine seeking a touch of sweetness in a sharp cocktail and never quite finding it.

Player piano on view Free with Museum admission An ongoing installation of a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano identical to Nancarrow’s own will be on view along with the piano roll for his Study #36. Periodically throughout the day, various Nancarrow Studies will be played and discussed including a 1 pm program: Nancarrow Deconstructed.

Conlon Nancarrow: Virtuoso of the Player Piano (2012) by James Greeson 4 pm film screening Running time: 57 minutes Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details A biographical overview of Nancarrow’s life and times, from his beginnings in Texarkana, Arkansas, and his years in Boston through his fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his emigration to Mexico. The film features interviews with his family members and those who were closest to Nancarrow during his career, including Yoko Nancarrow, Charles Amirkhanian, Kyle Gann, and Trimpin, among others. It also presents performance footage of his first published piano pieces, as well as a newly discovered set of two-part inventions he composed in his first years in Mexico performed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, by pianist Helena Bugallo. Other highlights include “live” performances of his powerful Studies #25, 3a, 37, and 21, his famous “Canon X.”

Study #36—Canon 17/18/19/20 Pure genius with a simple premise: four identical voices at different speeds and pitches. The result is a fantastic exploration of the relationship between tempo canon and texture. A glissando smoothly crosses all four voices, at one point going up, at another coming down, and later zooming up and down.

The creation of a single line that can enable all that when played at different tempi is an architectural miracle.

Listening note: Any feature that can be discerned in the mass of glissandi will reappear in another voice except for the joined glissandi which appear to cover the whole spectrum.

Listening note: Rather than hear each separate voice, try to listen to each of the twelve contrasting sections. The first few should be easy but later ones begin to overlap.

Courtesy the artist’s estate

Study #37—Canon 150/1605/7/ 1683/4/180/1871/2/200/210/225/240/250/ 2621/2/2811/4 Another immaculate piece of musical architecture, this time featuring twelve different tempo canons, each containing twelve voices at the ratios noted in the subtitle. While this appears complex, the use of only a few notes in each voice means that they are repeated twelve times at twelve different points on the piano, one rapidly after another, and fuse into elegant textural sections, each with its own character.

Study #40a, b—Canon e/π The first of four Studies created for two player pianos and the second to use irrational number relationships; e:π translates to approximately 2.72:3.14.

A work in two movements, the first played on one piano, the second with both pianos playing the identical piece but with one starting slightly later and faster so they finish simultaneously. For the presentation here, one of the parts will be heard on a recording made with a similar piano in London.

Listening note: While the exact tempo relationships are impossible to grasp, the extraordinary texture of Nancarrow Licks and trills is highly entertaining. In the second movement, the material on the recorded piano repeats everything on the live one and gradually catches up to it.

6/24

Study #41a, b, c— Canon 1 3 13/16 3 π

1 √2/3 π If Study #40 approached the limit of mathematical tempo relationships, Study #41 steps off the edge! Considered to be Nancarrow’s masterwork by many, the piece’s three movements add up to the longest Study in the collection, at a total of about twenty minutes. Another two-player piano work, movements a and b are quite different in character and are played on separate pianos, while movement c is both of them played together. At the height of his compositional powers, Nancarrow uses just about every technique he has devised so far.

Listening note: The work is based on contrast. Each of the first two movements begins an idea (a jazzy one in a and a slowly accelerating pulse in b) that is continually interrupted with seemingly unrelated material. Apart from the brutality of the Nancarrow Licks as punctuation (descending to introduce a and rising to start b), there is much contemplative reflection and impending calm.

Player piano on view Free with Museum admission An ongoing installation of a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano identical to Nancarrow’s own will be on view along with the piano roll for his Study #36. Periodically throughout the day, various Nancarrow Studies will be played and discussed including a 1 pm and 4 pm program: Nancarrow Deconstructed, with special guest Kyle Gann.

Study #42 With this Study we enter the period of Nancarrow’s life where everything changes: he begins for the first time to achieve real recognition. Recordings of his work had been released almost as a curiosity in 1969, and with serious intent to a specialist audience in 1977. Györgi Ligeti famously wrote in a letter of January 4, 1981 to Charles Amirkhanian that Nancarrow’s was “the best music of any to-day living composer.” The MacArthur Foundation award followed, as did, for the first time, commissions, including Study #42. This exercise in the gradual layering of ten voices was part of a collection commissioned by philanthropist and photographer Betty Freeman.

Listening note: A player piano roll can have only a limited length, so silence is precious. This is one of the few points in the collection where sparseness is celebrated. So the spareness of the beginning is worth savoring—as you might expect with Nancarrow, it won’t last!

6/25

Study #43—Canon 24/25 As Nancarrow reached age seventy, commissions started to accumulate.

He was not used to working to anyone else’s deadlines, however, and expressed discomfort at the pressure associated with it. Either cheekily or simply being practical, he renumbered Study #38 to become Study #43 to fulfil a 1982 commission from a festival in Graz, Austria.

Listening note: A canon in two voices that swap tempos.

Taking full advantage of the player piano’s ability to repeat notes faster and more accurately than humans can, the central section becomes a brutal machine that today’s electronic musicians would be proud of.

Player piano on view Free with Museum admission An ongoing installati on of a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano identical to Nancarrow’s own will be on view along with the piano roll for his Study #36. Periodically throughout the day, various Nancarrow Studies will be played and discussed including a 1 pm program: Nancarrow Deconstructed, with special guest Charles Amirkhanian.

Henry Kaiser and Lukas Ligeti 7:30 pm performance Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details Henry and Lukas were originally introduced to each other in 1986, when Lukas’s father, György Ligeti, received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in Louisville, Kentucky. At that time, the thirty-fouryear-old Kaiser told the eighteen-year-old Ligeti that they would make a record together someday. This prediction has come true many times; Henry and Lukas have recorded together on a dozen occasions and have frequently performed live together in many different contexts.

Something that the two share is a great love for the music of Conlon Nancarrow, whom they both knew personally. Henry was the production assistant for the WERGO recordings of Nancarrow’s complete works and thus heard all of Nancarrow’s rolls played on his Ampico pianos in his Mexico City studio. Lukas was the fly on the wall for many interactions between his father and Conlon. Both Henry and Lukas have been greatly

Study #44—Aleatory Round The product of another Betty Freeman commission and the third of the four two-player piano Studies. Frustrated by the difficulties of making two player pianos synchronize accurately, he followed his friend John Cage’s lead and, for the only time in his entire output, allowed chance to be a factor. The two pianos may be played at any tempo, starting at any point, for any number of repetitions.

Listening note: While there are some classic Nancarrow mathematical tricks hidden here, the lack of definitive start, middle, and end turns this into more of an installation work than a concert piece. It is again tempting to define this charming tune as sentimental, but its unlikely the composer shared this view.

influenced by Nancarrow in their own musical compositions and improvisations. For this special lecture-performance, they will discuss and illuminate this influence, illustrating it with concrete recorded examples as well as live demonstrations with their instruments. You will probably never find another guitarist and drummer who list Nancarrow as one of their primary inspirations. —Henry Kaiser About Henry Kaiser and Lukas Ligeti: Henry Kaiser is widely recognized as one of the most creative and innovative guitarists, improvisers, and producers in the fields of rock, jazz, world, and contemporary experimental musics. The California-based musician is one of the most extensively recorded as well, having appeared on more than two hundred fifty albums and contributed to countless television and film soundtracks. Kaiser also produces and contributes to a staggering number of recorded projects, and performs frequently throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan, in several regular groupings as well as in solo guitar concerts and concerts of freely improvised music with a host of diverse instrumentalists. Evidence of his exceptional musical breadth and versatility can also be found in the extraordinary range of artists with whom he has recorded and/or performed. Kaiser has had a parallel career in the film and television industry since 1972, working as a producer, director, and soundtrack composer. He received an Academy Award nomination for his work as the producer for Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007); he was the underwater camera operator and soundtrack composer for the film as well. Kaiser is also a scientific diver in the US Antarctic Program. He has more Antarctic under-the-ice footage in films and TV shows than any other underwater cameraman.

Study #45a, b, c A second “Boogie Woogie Suite” written almost thirty-five years after the first.

Originally grouped with #46 and #47 to fulfill another Betty Freeman commission, they were split into three works. There is a return to lower, simpler tempo ratios but with the confidence and sophistication that half a lifetime of experimentation provides.

Nancarrow was able to mark rhythmic ratios accurately on his piano rolls using hundreds of slim paper templates that he stockpiled over the years. It seems that for this group of pieces he used them intuitively to create many of the rhythms.

Listening note: Study #45a relies on a purposefully awkward rising and falling scale as its consistent backdrop. Study #45b has an atypical delicacy. Listen for a group of ever-so-delicate figures and arpeggios around the two-minute mark that almost express vulnerability. #45c is more muscular and varied— more like a wander through Nancarrow’s back catalogue than a blues Study, with some rising glissandi in the middle for sheer sonic pleasure.

Composer-percussionist Lukas Ligeti has developed a highly individual musical style drawing on downtown New York experimentalism, contemporary classical music, jazz, electronica, and world music, particularly from Africa. His music ranges from the through-composed to the free-improvised and often explores polyrhythmic/polytempo structures. Born in Vienna, Lukas has lived in New York since 1998 (dividing his time between here and Johannesburg in the last few years).

Tonight’s concert, however, is probably his final one as a New York City resident: this fall, he will join the faculty in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology at the University of California, Irvine.

As a composer, Lukas has been commissioned by Bang on a Can, the Vienna Festwochen, American Composers Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, choreographer Karole Armitage, and many others. As a drummer, he co-leads several bands including Burkina Electric and Hypercolor and has performed with luminaries such as Marilyn Crispell, Elliott Sharp, and John Zorn. He is a pioneer of experimental intercultural collaboration in Africa, having worked with musicians in a dozen countries across the continent during the last twenty-two years. Lukas received the 2010 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music. For more information, please see www.lukasligeti.com.

Study #46 With ratios of 3:4:5, the complexity is found within the actual lines themselves.

Listening note: Suggestions of Spain plus an unusually Teutonic austerity. The “awkward� scale from #45a underpins the action from about one minute in.

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Study #47 The first four minutes and last thirty seconds of this six-minute work may suggest a man in his seventies finding a reflective mood. The interim section most definitely does not, featuring repeated Nancarrow Licks almost exclusively.

Listening note: Alternatively somber and dramatic.

The final notes are the trademark perfect cadence or “obvious ending” that pianola specialist Rex Lawson has equated to a “twinkle” in the composer’s eye.

Alarm Will Sound June 26 and 27: 8 pm performances Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details Conlon Nancarrow, Study #2a (player piano version) Conlon Nancarrow, Study #2a (arranged by Gavin Chuck) Conlon Nancarrow, Piece No. 1 for Small Orchestra Györgi Ligeti, Piano Concerto (in five movements) John Orfe: piano Conlon Nancarrow, Study #21 (arranged by Dominic Murcott) Conlon Nancarrow, Study #6 (arranged by Yvar Mikhashoff) The Shaggs, “Philosophy of the World” (arranged by Gavin Chuck) Conlon Nancarrow, Study #3a (arranged by Derek Bermel) Conlon Nancarrow, Study #3a (player piano version) Alarm Will Sound: Nancarrow Deconstructed June 27: 1 pm performance Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details Alarm Will Sound: Study #36 (arranged by Dominic Murcott) June 27: 2:45 pm performance Free with Museum admission

Conlon Nancarrow had perhaps the most single-minded career of any great American composer, devoting his life to exploring the rhythmic possibilities of juxtaposing multiple simultaneous tempos. Built often

Study #48a, b, c—Canon 60/61 Though written in the late 1970s, when placed in numerical order it becomes the final “monumental” work in the catalogue. Each of the two first movements has a different character, and each contains similar material played at two speeds at a ratio of 60:61. They begin a few seconds apart and gradually converge, joining exactly for the final chord. The final movement is the first two, played simultaneously on two player pianos with all four lines meeting at the end note.

Listening note: The difference between the tempos is too slight to hear when they are near the point of convergence, but for the majority of #48a and b, every gesture heard is repeated shortly afterwards. Part of the pleasure is in detecting this so called “echo distance,” which gradually reduces until both lines merge. Another pleasure is simply experiencing Nancarrow’s musical gestures flow past with extraordinary ease.

out of simple jazz and blues riffs, Nancarrow’s rhythmic experiments whip familiar ingredients into wildly original concoctions that were beyond the abilities of musicians in 1940s New York. Giving up on humans to perform his music, Nancarrow turned to the player piano and toiled in isolation and obscurity in a self-imposed musical and political exile in Mexico. But when the legendary Romanian composer György Ligeti encountered Nancarrow’s music in 1980 and declared it “the best music of any today living composer,” it changed everything for both men: Ligeti’s enthusiasm ushered in a surge of attention to Nancarrow’s work, helping him get a MacArthur “genius” award and his first commissions for humans; and Nancarrow’s ideas transformed Ligeti’s music, ushering in a new period of dancing rhythms in contradictory meters, exemplified by his 1985-88 Piano Concerto.

Most of us in Alarm Will Sound grew up during this very period, and Nancarrow’s wild ideas became part of the musical DNA of our generation, offering a way to take the propulsive rhythms of minimalism and rock music to exciting and complex new places. Nancarrow’s music has been a major influence on many of the composers we collaborate with, and it’s been a staple of Alarm Will Sound’s repertoire since the group’s founding in 2001. The combination of Nancarrow’s catchy materials and the complex way he deals with them puts his work in a sweet spot of immediacy and complexity occupied by much of the music we love. And the challenge of performing music not meant to be played by human beings is a stimulating one.

Alarm Will Sound is thrilled to be involved in Anywhere in Time at the new Whitney Museum. The centerpiece of the festival is, appropriately, a genuine Nancarrow player piano, outfitted according to the composer’s exacting specifications to perform his seminal player piano Studies.

Alarm Will Sound brings its own perspective to these Studies, presenting

Study #49a, b, c—Three Canons 4/5/6 Although best known for his player piano Studies, Nancarrow’s newfound fame brought renewed interest in his other instrumental works. The idea of combining player piano and orchestra seemed to become a possibility when he met pianola virtuoso Rex Lawson on a trip to London in the late 1980s. The problem was how to keep the players and the electric-powered piano in time with each other. But Lawson played a manually pedaled instrument, meaning that he could adjust the timing and follow a conductor. Subtitled “Excerpts from the forthcoming Concerto for Pianola and Orchestra,” the full work was never realized, though a number of versions and variations have been created and performed since 2000.

Listening note: Each of the movements has three voices in the now-familiar organization of the highest being the fastest and the lowest the slowest. To test your ear for tempo canons, listen to these relatively straightforward pieces as having two movements in which the lines all catch up on the last note (#49a and c) and one in which they all line up in the center (b). Musicians will note the repeated descending minor third present throughout the three movements; for the nonmusicians, it sounds like part of the Star Wars theme!

arrangements of them for live musicians in a range of settings: not only performing them onstage but also delving into their construction in a demonstration, and using the potential of the Museum’s beautiful new architecture as a canvas on which to open up the many layers of this music for a unique experience. We juxtapose this wide selection of Nancarrow’s groundbreaking work with Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, which Nancarrow deeply influenced. —Alan Pierson Erin Lesser: flute Christa Robinson: oboe Bill Kalinkos: clarinet Elisabeth Stimpert: clarinet and bass clarinet Gina Cuffari: bassoon and contrabassoon Matt Marks: horn Jason Price: trumpet Michael Clayville: trombone Matt Smallcomb: percussion Christopher Thompson: percussion John Orfe: piano

Courtney Orlando: violin Caleb Burhans: violin Nathan Schram: viola Brian Snow: cello Miles Brown: double bass, electric bass Alan Pierson: conductor, Artistic Director Gavin Chuck: Managing Director Jason Varvaro: Production Manager Peter Ferry: Assistant Production Manager

Alarm Will Sound’s participation is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Study #50—Canon 5/7 3 Originally a movement of his Piece for Small Orchestra No. 2. As in the early days, Nancarrow was keen to hear the work so he punched a roll of it and apparently liked the roll better.

Listening note: The exact tempo relationships might be difficult to grasp. But since each of the early voices comprises rather simple lines, it is possible to recognize the different lines at different speeds. Even when things become complex toward the end, the different tempos are still clearly present.

6/28

Study #51 In all likelihood Nancarrow’s last completed Study for player piano, this very short piece uses ratios not heard elsewhere in the collection, 12:16:21. The use of C Major scales and the innovative way the scales are used could be interpreted as reflecting both a return to basics and a continued drive for new ideas.

Listening note: The notes are allowed to meander then gradually find form in Debussy-like scales and trills and a final strong statement.

Complete Studies for Player Piano: A Marathon Concert Event Daylong event during Museum hours Special tickets required, visit whitney.org for details (Standby line for day-of entry available on a first-come, first-served basis) Excluding unfinished experiments, fragments, and alternative versions, Nancarrow wrote fifty Studies for Player Piano, the majority less than four minutes long and those longer made up of short movements.

Although he composed with an obsessive attention to structural systems, this obsession did not extend to the cataloging of his works.

The Studies were also sometimes renumbered or completed out of sequence, so their exact dates can only be approximated; it can be said for certain that the earliest was begun in 1947 and the last completed by 1993. When these works have been previously presented live or on recordings, the tradition has developed to organize them aesthetically.

Eschewing this impulse, they are here presented in simple numerical order, ending with the only titled piece. The result is a story of a life’s work, broadly chronological, told in a single day. We are joined by special guests Yoko and Mako Nancarrow.

Para Yoko After suffering a stroke in 1990, Nancarrow needed a great deal of support from his wife, Yoko, to redevelop the physical ability to compose and to punch piano rolls.

As a consequence, he named this work after her. With the exception of the renaming of an old, abandoned Study “For Ligeti,” this is the only Study to have a non numerical title.

Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 Front and back cover image courtesy the artist’s estate

Listening note: In keeping with the title and the ephemeral quality of the music, if there were ever a time to listen to Nancarrow with nothing other than conscious affection and reflection, then this surely is it.