In 1981 Gyorgy Ligeti found the first two LPs of Nancarrow's player-piano music in a Paris record shop. His response was immediate: ''This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives... something great and important for all of music history... the best music of any composer living today''. By then Nancarrow was emerging from almost total isolation—an American refused a passport for fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War who went to ground in Mexico City in 1940. Obliged to become self-contained and free of unreliable performers he devoted almost all his composing time to working with two altered Ampico player-pianos. He had no thought of an audience. Recognition came slowly and was confirmed with the availability of the LPs and the MacArthur Foundation's ''genius'' award of $300,000 in 1982.
Volume 5 of the complete Studies for Player Piano came out on CD only (Wergo (CD) 60165-50—see DJF's slightly lukewarm and somewhat mind-boggled review, 8/89). Volumes 3 and 4 were originally recorded for LP in Nancarrow's studio in Mexico City in 1977. So these CDs are not a transfer but a new recording with excellent sound made by the same team—Charles Amirkhanian and Robert Schumaker. The documentation provided by Wergo is lavish. The CD booklet contains 35 pages of information, mostly by James Tenney, which is more than doubled in length by the German translation which follows. (Seealso The Player-Piano Music of Conlon Nancarrow by Philip Carlsen, a valuable slim monograph from the Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, New York 11210. Also the all-Nancarrow volume of interviews, commentary and scores: Soundings Book 4, spring/summer 1977; available from Schott in London. I mention these sources because Nancarrow fans tend to be obsessive!)
The way in which Nancarrow has created his own sound-world has always aroused my admiration. The limitations are apparent rather than real. The player piano can control minute rhythmic detail and independent part-writing in a way which would be impossible for live performers. And Nancarrow's calculations are applied to an idiom with roots in his own jazz playing as a trumpeter, Bach fugues and clear tonality. As a listening experience, the studies are scintillating and exhilarating: there is, surprisingly, no lack of variety. Compare, for example, the inhuman prestissimo of Study No. 21 (disc 1, track 8) with the variable-tempo polyphony of Study No. 8 (disc 1, track 5). Thanks to Tenney's notes you can become as involved with the mathematics as you wish, or not at all. But it is all clearly audible and, incidentally, knocks spots off most synthesizer music which it sometimes superficially resembles. These studies are classics in American keyboard music, comparable to Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, which Nancarrow heard in New York shortly after they were composed. Their rhythmic concerns are shared with Cowell and Carter but transmuted through jazz piano into something unique.'