Bionic ragtime

Conlon Nancarrow couldn’t actually play any of his legendary Piano Studies—but nor could anyone else. Demanding up to 100 notes a second, embroidered with multiple melodies in widely varying tempi, his polyphonic compositions were so complex that only a machine could come to grips with them: the pianola. Frank Zappa, who was a pushover for Nancarrow’s playful polyphony, neatly summed up the appeal of his music: “If you’ve never heard it, you’ve got to hear it—it’ll kill you. Some of it sounds like ragtime that’s totally bionic.”

On 21st and 22nd April, a century after Nancarrow’s birth, the Southbank Centre is organising a festival to celebrate this most eccentric of composers. The weekend of concerts will feature Rex Lawson, piano virtuoso, performing the Piano Studies, plus concerts by the London Sinfonietta and the Arditti Quartet (the ensemble’s ability to sight-read Nancarrow’s 1945 first String Quartet prompted him to compose his third especially for them in 1987).

Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas in 1912 and had his earliest piano lessons with a “horrible old spinster” but soon ducked them, preferring to pick up jazz trumpet from a “nice old drunk” instead. He completed his musical education at the Cincinnati and Boston Conservatories of music, but his epiphany came at age 18, when he heard Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet score The Rite of Spring. Although his rhythmic experiments would far exceed even Stravinsky’s fiendish time signatures, the composer remained a touchstone for Nancarrow’s work. This focus on rhythm, rather than the Schoenberg-influenced adventures in pitch that dominated the interwar musical avant-garde, is perhaps what makes his work such fun to listen to—no one ever accused Schoenberg of being hummable.

At the age of 25 Nancarrow spent two years fighting the fascists in Spain and his enduring communist sympathies led the US authorities to deny him a passport on his return. In 1940 he emigrated to Mexico (no passport required) where he lived until his death in 1997. It had been hard enough in America to find musicians able to cope with tempi that made The Rite of Spring look like Chopsticks but Mexico proved a musical desert (one clarinettist refused to work for him in case the audience thought he was playing the wrong notes). He turned to machines for help. In 1947, Nancarrow made a return visit to New York where he bought a bespoke hole-punching machine for $300 and began cutting piano rolls.

The pianola became Nancarrow’s faithful and tireless collaborator. The instrument, which was already somewhat dated by the 1940s, came in two basic varieties. One kind of player piano was wheeled up to an existing instrument and played the keys with pneumatic “fingers”; the other, automatic kind sat in the corner of the parlour and pretty much played itself once the perforated roll had been fed into place (rather like the paper in a fax machine). Either type was handy for banging out foxtrots but piano rolls could also be perforated note-for-note while an artist played, bringing the brilliance of Paderewski, Mahler and Gershwin into the home.

Composers and performers had been quick to exploit the mechanism’s fidelity but it was Nancarrow who discovered its creative potential, prompted by a suggestion in New Musical Resources, a seminal work by the hugely influential composer and music theorist Henry Cowell. Freed from human limitations, his Piano Studies—over 50 of them, composed between 1948 and 1983—extract every ounce of sound from the instrument, producing fantastical counterpoint delivered at speeds no single player could replicate.

It wasn’t easy work—Nancarrow once spent a year composing and punching just five minutes of music—but the results were astonishing. The tempo ratio of Study No 40 is based on the number pi, the infamous No. 37 has 12 melodies each with a different tempo, No. 22 is written in palindromes, with the same sequences going into reverse. And yet, despite his work’s brain-frying complexity, the sheer wit and exuberance with which Nancarrow juxtaposed anything from a tango to a toccata is remarkably accessible. He never lost his love of jazz and blues and many of the studies— notably the irresistible Boogie-Woogie Suite—fizz with almost improvisatory energy, as if eavesdropping on a Tin Pan Alley stairwell where Stravinsky, Scott Joplin and Art Tatum have left their rehearsal room doors ajar. Enthusiasts have likened this multifaceted approach to Picasso and the cubists but Joyce would be equally apt: the same tapestry of allusion and invention, the same flashes of wit. Nancarrow once punched the word “Hello” on to a piano roll just to see how it would sound.

The same questing spirit led to further whimsical experiments. The composer noticed that piano rolls were sometimes as pretty as broderie anglaise: would a strong pattern make great music? Sadly not. Undismayed, Nancarrow just moved on to the next idea. His unique working method will always intrigue but in the end what impresses is the product, not the process.