A Timeless Wavelength

Conlon Nancarrow – Study for Player Piano no. 40a

Experimental music is so named because no-one knows what the outcome will be.  An experimental composition might pave the way to bold new areas of musical expression, or it might just be an unlistenable cacophany; which is which usually varies according to the listener.  In some cases it seems like producing something listenable actually takes a back seat to just being experimental; people don’t sit down and listen to John Cage’s 4’55″ any more than they enjoy looking at Duchamp’s Fountain, whatever importance they may ascribe to these works in the history of art and music.  Other experimental composers like Glenn Branca produce works that are at least interesting to hear, but are mostly appreciated for paving the way for bands like Sonic Youth to take that interesting noise and make it musical.

I’m not sure where exactly Conlon Nancarrow fits in the spectrum between musical pioneer and weird-for-weird’s-sake, but I do know that he’s probably my favorite experimental composer.  All the supposedly revolutionary things today’s electronica artists do with MIDI trackers and drum machines Nancarrow anticipated back in the 1940s on that earliest of computerized musical instruments:  the player piano.  Normally piano rolls were “recorded” by a special machine that would punch the notes onto the roll in real time as a human player performed them, but sometimes they could be punched by hand according to a written score if no human player was available.  Nancarrow realized that the truly great advantage offered by the player piano was that it allowed a composer to write pieces no human player could play, and so he began punching piano rolls by hand, no longer limited by the number of fingers on a human hand or the speed and accuracy with which even the most accomplished pianist could play.

Study no. 40a contains lots of the super-fast glissandos and virtuosic noodling that were Nancarrow’s trademark, but the really interesting feature here is the time signature.  Nancarrow was a great fan of the composer Henry Cowell, whose book New Musical Resources questioned Western classical music’s dependence on rhythms based on powers of two.  Instead of time signatures like 2/2, 4/4, or even 5/4, Cowell proposed signatures like 2/3 and 11/7, even going so far as to invent his own system of notation which added “third notes” and “sixth notes” to the standard whole, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth.  This book may also have been the first to propose the use of player piano rolls to handle these complex new rhythms.  Nancarrow took Cowell’s advice and did him one better, experimenting in time signatures based on irrational numbers:  Study no. 40a is supposedly in e/π time.

This may not be as weird as it seems.  Cowell liked to see rhythm and pitch as intimately related; for example, the ratio of frequencies in a perfect fifth is exactly the same as a two-against-three polyrhythm, just much faster.  The ancient Greeks preferred music based on exact integer ratios, but, for a number of complicated reasons, the modern equal-tempered Western scale is based on multiples of the twelfth root of two.  That’s why the seventh partial, even though it’s a nice integer ratio, sounds out of tune to people who are used to hearing scales based on irrational numbers.

So, is Nancarrow’s irrational piano roll avant-garde, or just unlistenable?  I kind of like it,  but I’m not sure I’d listen to it for fun.  It does take on a kind of cats-walking-across-the-keyboard feel (which, I believe, John Cage actually did once).  But parts of it are pretty nice.  If nothing else, it should at least make you see those Aphex Twin albums in a new light.