Complete Studies for Player Piano: A Marathon Concert Event

Floor Three, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Excluding unfinished experiments, fragments, and alternative versions, Nancarrow wrote fifty studies for player piano, the majority less than four minutes long and those longer made up of short movements. Although he composed with an obsessive attention to structural systems, this obsession did not extend to the cataloging of his works. The Studies were also sometimes renumbered or completed out of sequence, so their exact dates can only be approximated; it can be said for certain that the earliest was begun in 1947 and the last completed by 1993. When these works have previously been presented live or on recordings, the tradition has developed to organize them aesthetically. Eschewing this impulse, they are here presented in simple numerical order, ending with the two known titled pieces. The result is a story of a life's work, broadly chronological, told in a single day. Special guests Yoko and Mako Nancarrow will join in the program. 

Part of Anywhere in Time: A Conlon Nancarrow Festival, co-curated by Dominic Murcott and Jay Sanders, Curator and Curator of Performance.