Boogie Woogie #3A

A maverick's maverick, Conlon Nancarrow not only wrote innovative music, but invented his own painstaking technique for bringing his staggeringly complex works into being. To be specific, the American-born, Mexican-expatriated composer did not actually “write” his most celebrated works—he punched them, hole by hole, into player piano rolls. Using this system, in one of modern music's more striking paradoxes, Nancarrow would spend months or even years in composing short works for piano that flew by at dizzying speed, requiring more dexterity, precision, and digits on the keyboard than any human player could ever muster.

Born and raised in Texarkana, Arkansas, Nancarrow grew up in a home with a player piano. Showing an early interest in music, he gave up his attempts to learn to play piano himself following an encounter with an uncompromising teacher, and turned instead to the trumpet and the burgeoning world of jazz. Following an abortive trip to college and more fruitful private studies with the likes of Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky, he took a job in a cruise ship band in 1936. Arriving in Europe at the end of one voyage, he joined the storied Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. After his side's devastating defeat in 1939, he stowed away in a ship and returned America, but the following year, fearing trouble with the U.S. government over his past political ties, he emigrated to Mexico City, attaining Mexican citizenship in 1955.

Following his youthful exploits, Nancarrow fully channeled his adventurism into his music, in 1947 acquiring his own player piano and commissioning a machine for punching piano rolls. In 1981, he made his first visit to the U.S. since the late '40s, appearing in San Francisco at New Music America '81.

The Kronos Quartet were among Nancarrow's most avid American supporters in the 1980s, showcasing the composer's String Quartet (1942) on their 1986 Nonesuch debut album. As the liner notes point out, this early Nancarrow work already exhibits the “manic rhythmic labyrinths” and jazz finesse to come in the later player piano compositions. Despite Kronos' audible relish in performing Nancarrow's Quartet, however, there seemed to be no way to pursue his music further. After all, the composer's player piano masterpieces would forever be off limits to a string quartet. Or would they?

Enter the German-born, Seattle-dwelling composer, sound sculptor, and electronics trailblazer Trimpin. A collaborator and confidant of Nancarrow's in the 1980s, Trimpin designed an electronic system that could scan player piano rolls and convert the data of punched holes into the computer-friendly code of ones and zeroes. Furthermore, using a self-designed interface, Trimpin could manipulate player piano codes on his computer screen in seconds and play them back instantly on the player piano in his studio. When Nancarrow first witnessed Trimpin's magic, he was floored.

“What you would see on the computer screen was the image of a player piano roll, along with the music notation,” Trimpin recalls. “I showed Nancarrow how you can make something an octave higher, just on the computer. His jaw dropped. He said, 'What you just did would have taken me six months!' I told him that what I did was just editing—not composing, like he could. I also showed him a machine that could also print out the paper roll. He was just looking at that point, and not saying a lot.”

After the initial shock wore off, Nancarrow invited Trimpin down to his Mexican studio, where the two set to work converting Nancarrow's handmade piano rolls into digital information. In addition to preserving his legacy, Trimpin notes, Nancarrow was also interested in the potential for precision that the new technology offered, particularly in the realm of linking multiple pianos—or other instruments—in series, a project that had frustrated Nancarrow's past efforts using multiple rolls and a stopwatch.

Kronos' David Harrington was also highly intrigued by the Nancarrow/Trimpin possibilities. In Trimpin's words: “About 10 years ago, David told me the quartet was particularly interested in Nancarrow's Boogie Woogie #3A. This piece has up to 8 separate voices, and toward the end, Nancarrow has a chord playing 11 notes.”

To begin to address the piece's formidable challenges, Kronos' longtime sound designer, Mark Grey, sampled the Kronos members performing a range of textures, from pizzicato notes to a range of bowing techniques. With this database of available sounds, Trimpin then began the Herculean task of identifying individual voices within Nancarrow's work and matching each voice, note by note, with appropriate Kronos sounds.

“It was a very time-consuming process to separate out which notes belong to which voice,” Trimpin says. “Nancarrow would sometimes use different note durations for different voices, so on the roll, he could remind himself which notes belonged to which voice, by counting the holes. He might use two holes punched for one voice, and four for another, so he could visually follow it. On the screen, of course, I can assign different voices to different colors.”

While Trimpin never counted the holes in the Boogie Woogie #3A roll, he says that some of Nancarrow's studies comprised some 6,000 to 8,000 individual punches. And while—to preserve his own sanity, no doubt—Trimpin also avoided counting the hours spent assigning Nancarrow's notes to Kronos' tones, he does recall that, over the 10-year transcribing period, “A few times I had a laptop with me on an eight-hour flight to Europe. I would work on this project, and just get a fraction of the work done.”

The finished result is well worth the effort. As Trimpin points out, with the variety of timbres heard in the Kronos version of Boogie Woogie #3A—a far greater range of sounds than is available on a player piano—the individual voices of the piece stand out and intertwine for the listener as never before. In this performance, Kronos adds a further layer of interest by playing some portions of the work live over their own pre-sampled, faster-than-life accompaniment.

As a side note, while this feat of player-piano-meets-the-computer-meets-the-musicians is surely a fascinating commingling of media and technological eras, this is not the only lesson that player piano technology has for our modern era. With regard to that little “dangling chad” problem in Florida back in November of 2000, Trimpin points out, “Sometimes, in Nancarrow's work, there'd be a dangling chad. But when you buy a player piano, they sell you a special pump to suck out all the chads. Obviously, they didn't have that in Florida.

“At the time,” Trimpin adds, affecting a tone of mock self-importance, “I thought, 'Why didn't they ask me to fix this problem 10 years ago?'”

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