Why player pianos have a role to play

YOU MIGHT NOT ever have seen or heard one in the flesh, but you’ve probably seen a player piano in a movie. Even in this age of digital wizardry, there’s a special aura attached to watching a piano, as if by magic, playing itself, the keys going up and down and the music pouring out without any direct human intervention.

Of course, that’s not always how it was intended to be. Yes, you could buy piano rolls – long, perforated rolls of paper that activated the instruments’ pneumatic mechanism – to play popular pieces from Haydn and Mozart to Chopin and Liszt. You could also buy performances that had been recorded on piano rolls by the great players of the day, many of whom provided glowing testimonials to the companies marketing player pianos. You could also learn how to manipulate levers governing dynamics and speed, so that you could create your own, tailor-made performances. In fact, so big was this idea at one time that major orchestras occasionally performed piano concertos with player pianos – the soloist provided their individual interpretation by controlling the player piano’s output.

So, why did a system using real pianos fade from history while the apparently far-less perfect, scratchy-sounding recordings of the 78rpm era continued to hold sway? Well, simply put, the music-making on a player piano almost never sounded like the work of a human performer. The big-name testimonials were given after the stars had heard their rolls played back on the instruments they used when the rolls were being cut. No two pianos feel the same to play, so to get the same results on a different instrument, the performer has to make adjustments. Even if you were able to mimic, with 100 per cent accuracy, the physical movements of someone playing on instrument A and apply them to instrument B, the results could sound spectacularly different. If you also make allowance for the fact that performers adjust to the acoustic feedback from a particular room or hall as well as the instrument, you can clearly see why the reproducing piano roll died even when audio recording was still in its infancy.

The player piano was of interest to composers, and Stravinsky and Hindemith were among those who wrote for it. But it was the American Conlon Nancarrow (1912-97) whose name has become indelibly linked with the composition of original music for player piano. Nancarrow, born in Texarkana, Texas, learnt the trumpet, studied in Cincinnati and Boston, joined the Communist party and fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war. When, after his return, he was denied a passport, he moved to Mexico (for which he did not need a passport) and lived there for the rest of his life. It was in self-imposed exile in Mexico that he started writing studies for player piano, a project he carried through without any apparent regard to career success or acclaim. Although he had won the respect of Aaron Copland, John Cage and Elliott Carter at an early stage, it was only from the 1970s onwards that his work began to achieve any real acknowledgement – György Ligeti discovered his music by accident, and secured a major international publisher for Nancarrow.

The composer wasn’t interested in the interpretative possibilities of the player piano. He was obsessed by the idea that if he punched the holes in the piano rolls, he could investigate complexities of rhythm beyond the reach of any performer’s control, and he could juxtapose patterns using more layers than any 10-fingered being could ever deliver. In rhythmic terms, he could have a slavishly perfect performer. Mechanical perfection was what he wanted, and he even hardened the hammers of his pianos so that the sound was sharp, immediate, and extremely loud.

Not loud enough, though, for even a small concert hall – the models he used were uprights, not grands. Impossible Brilliance: the Music of Conlon Nancarrow, the first ever concert survey of the composer’s complete player piano studies, at London’s South Bank Centre last weekend, used amplification for performances in the Purcell Room, the idea being to reproduce the volume levels that would have been heard in the composer’s own studio in Mexico City.

The studies are works which move from hyperactive boogie woogie into worlds of simply astonishing complexity. The supercharged upright player piano may be unbelievably rigid in terms of conventional musical expression, but it can stream layers of metrically-independent counterpoint of a complexity and density that can challenge both brain and ear.

Nancarrow wanted to explore how particular metrical relationships would sound and kept other aspects of his music pared back. His favourite device was canon, where melodic lines imitate each other, in his case using ratios that could involve square roots or even pi. Most lines in his counterpoint are either loud or soft, so that volume becomes more a matter of the density of the writing than anything else. The sustaining pedal is remarkable by its absence.

His melodic style is gangly and fractured, unpredictable in step, direction and speed. The style, you could say, is black and white, as if drawn in fine, crazily independent lines. But those lines can explode, or cascade, or simply run riot. Energy is a big part of the Nancarrow experience, energy which the composer was fond of switching off at the end of a piece with the most unlikely of twists.

Nancarrow’s is, more than most, a take it or leave it kind of music. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Its rigour and determination are of a rare order. It really has no natural forum apart from the recordings that have been made of it.

Finding and preparing an instrument of the kind Nancarrow owned was a major undertaking. The two full days of Nancarrow on the player piano, with fascinating supplementary concerts by the London Sinfonietta and the Arditti Quartet, were as wild and exhilarating, if sometimes disconcerting a musical ride as I’ve ever experienced.

* Celine Byrne'ssuccess in landing the role of Mimì at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden has taken a twist all too reminiscent of a convoluted opera plot. It was on April 12th that Covent Garden posted a news item on its website announcing that Byrne was to replace Anja Harteros (although the news had been leaked in Dublin a couple of days earlier). Then on April 18th, a new news item announced that "Due to health reasons, Irish soprano Celine Byrne has withdrawn from singing the role of Mimì in The Royal Opera's upcoming production of La bohème. The role will now be sung by Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio, making her Royal Opera debut."

As ever, one singer’s loss is another singer’s gain.

* There waseven bigger opera news of Irish import last week, from Denmark. The Danish National Opera has announced the appointment of Annilese Miskimmon as its new general manager/artistic director. Miskimmon (38) is currently artistic director of Opera Theatre Company, which is based in Dublin, and she will relinquish that post when she takes up her new role in Denmark in August.

Danish National Opera (Den Jyske Opera) is not actually Denmark’s major opera company. That honour goes to the Royal Danish Opera, which is based in Copenhagen. The company that Miskimmon will head up is based in Aarhus, and is a touring company, although, unlike OTC, it tours with full orchestra and chorus.