The twentieth-century tradition of the musical outsider is a long and, in some cases, honourable one. Conlon Nancarrow has all the right qualifications—blessed with the compulsory exotic name and holed up since 1940 in Mexico, patiently producing Studies for reproducing piano which now amount to more than 60 individual pieces. Among recent endorsements of his achievements is Ligeti's, not surprisingly since the latter's Continuum arrives, by a quite different route, at the foothills of the same kind of mountain.
At a casual encounter Nancarrow's music seems like something out of an extra-terrestrial disco—a fondness for blues (Study No. 42) or boogie patterns (No. 45) played at superhuman speeds and dynamics, with a density of polyphonic layering and a controlled spasmodic continuity something like West Side Story performed by Max Headroom (at its simplest, that is). The machine which performs this music is a 1927 Ampico reproducing piano with leather strips on the hammers, sounding like Wanda Landowska's 'harpsichord' in overdrive (his other instrument with metal-covered hammers, was hors de combat at the time of these recordings). The technology and the music are described in appropriate detail in Wergo's excellent booklet.
Study No. 42 eases the listener into Nancarrow's world, its slow two-voice opening moving by stages towards a characteristically berserk peroration. Study No. 45 is, to coin a phrase, Nancarrow's 'Kunst der Boogie', starting with a harmonic cycle of 192 notes (the easy bit) set isorhythm-fashion against a rhythmic cycle of 15. After this it is something of a relief to come to No. 48 with its 'purer' style and identifiable dramatic continuities—''without question one of the most beautiful pieces in the entire literature of twentieth-century music'' may be a bit strong (though the annotator's enthusiasm is as welcome as his expertise) but this music certainly makes its mark the more decisively for its comparative avoidance of surrealist extremes.
Still it is those extremes, of which the coruscations at the end of Study No. 49c are a mind-boggling example, which will probably attract the majority of collectors, who can be assured that the reproduction and recording processes have been carried out with care and expertise. A calmer assessment of the music's durability can wait a generation or two.'