Midterm Research : Electronic musical instrument
Conlon Nancarrow, Player Piano, The Hanert Synthesiser, RCA Synthesiser, etc


:: Conlon Nancarrow ::




The expatriate American experimentalist composer Conlon Nancarrow is increasingly recognized as having one of the most innovative musical minds of this century. His music, almost all written for player piano, is the most rhythmically complex ever written, couched in intricate contrapuntal systems using up to twelve different tempos at the same time. Yet despite its complexity, Nancarrow's music drew its early influence from the jazz pianism of Art Tatum and Earl Hines and from the rhythms of Indian music; Nancarrow's whirlwinds of notes are joyously physical in their energy. Composed in almost complete isolation from 1940, this music has achieved international fame only in the last few years. In Mexico, where the contemporary classical music scene was poorly funded, and there were even fewer musicians capable of performing his works, the need to find an alternative way of having his pieces performed became even more pressing. He found the answer in the player piano, with its ability to produce extremely complex rhythmic patterns at a speed far beyond the abilities of humans. This method of composition gave him total freedom in conjuring up the most complex contrapuntal, harmonic, and rhythmic combinations that no human pianist or number of human pianists could possibly perform. Nancarrow has said that if electronic resources were available to him at this time, he would have probably written music for them. The player piano became his sole musical outlet, and he wrote over 50 'Studies' exclusively for the mechanical instruments Nancarrow had a machine custom built to enable him to punch the piano rolls by hand. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was very hard work, and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism, and covering the hammers with leather or metal so as to produce a more percussive sound.



Many of later pieces (which on the whole he called studies ) are canons in augmentation or diminution . While most such canons, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach , have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1, Nancarrow's canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40 , for example, has its parts in the ratio e:pi , while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo. Some of the 'Studies' employ not only odd-time signatures, but also dense polyrhythms and shifting tempos. 'Study no. 37' for instance employs twelve different tempos for twelve different voices. The true quality of Nancarrow's harmonic sensibility is to be found in the 'fully-formed' sound of his phrases. He writes with the authority and velocity of a jazz soloist, playfully orchestrating the group around his line. He was able to incorporate the power of atonality and the evocative logic of melody, and he even managed to incorporate noise (cluster chords, mistake noises) and mock-effects (some pieces use ultra-fast repeated notes like a primitive kind of echo). The later works deal with deeper issues than simple 'impossibility.' There are works for multiple player pianos, both synchronised and unsynchronised, works with very complex levels of polyrhythmic temporal ratios, works with the same section being played simultaneously at different tempos, etc... They incorporate unique touches, such as monstrously large chords, ludicrously fast glissandi, impossibly accurate tuplets and repeated lines. His history of writing impossible music ('post-performer music') did not fade, and one of the high points of his late-period recognition was a series of collaborations with instrument builder Trimpin, whose computer-controlled percussion ensembles were the ideal realisation of some of Nancarrow's most challengingly extreme scores. Trimpin's work with Nancarrow was an appropriate culmination, recalling Nancarrow's own 1940's attempts to build mechanical percussion instruments, and also maintaining the grinning dadaism of the player-piano works, (one of Trimpin's ensembles is an 'orchestra' of tuned wooden shoes).



Image above is a fragment of one of Nancarrow's "Studies for Player Piano" as it looks when transcribed to a MIDI score. This MIDI score was provided by Trimpin, who made MIDI transcriptions of all of the "Studies for Player Piano." Trimpin also created a device that fit over the keyboard of a standard piano that would play these MIDI transcriptions. Below is a photo of that device mounted on a piano.



:: Player Piano ::


A player piano is a type of piano which plays music without the need for a pianist . Rather than the keys of the instrument being depressed by a human, they are moved pneumatically, electronically, or mechanically. It was invented by Henri Fourneaux in 1863 , and was most popular at the beginning of the 20th century , before gramophones were popular. Player pianos are often known as pianolas , although the Pianola was in fact a tradename for a player piano produced by the Aeolian Corporation. The music which a player piano is to reproduce is recorded on a long rolled up piece of paper known as a piano roll . This has holes punched in it corresponding to the notes to be played. In some more advanced versions, the dynamics are also indicated. Piano rolls are typically punched by a machine in a factory, although it is possible for them to be punched "live" as a pianist plays a standard piano. This has enabled the performances of many musicians who died before the advent of reasonable quality sound recording to be preserved. Gustav Mahler ,Claude Debussy ,Scott Joplin and George Gershwin are amongst the composers to have had their playing preserved in this way. This use of the player piano gives rise to another name for the instrument: the reproducing piano . In addition to its important role in preserving old performances, the player piano has been used by some classical composers as a musical instrument itself, including Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith . The most notable use of the player piano in classical music , however, is in the work of Conlon Nancarrow , who wrote many works specifically for the instrument. Rather than largely sticking to having the instrument reproduce what was possible on a normal piano, as others had done, he got the instrument to play music so rhythmically complex, so dense, and so rapid in tempo , that it could only be reproduced by a machine. The Roll Playing System The player mechanism, typically referred to as the 'pneumatic stack', is located in the upper portion of the instrument and connected to the piano action by series of push-rods. For each note of the piano, there is a small pneumatic , a valve assembly, a soft flexible leather pouch and a bleed . The tracker bar has a row of equally spaced holes, each of which is connected to a channel , via a small pipe. The chamber is kept under vacuum by the foot operated bellows . The pneumatic is connected to the piano action by a simple linkage. The diagram below shows the whole assembly, firstly in resting and then playing positions.



 When a roll perforation passes over a tracker bar hole, air is admitted, causing the pouch to move upwards under suction inside the chamber. The valve rises accordingly, uncovering the top of the chamber and resting against its upper seat.?This in turn connects the pneumatic to the vacuum supply, forcing it to collapse under atmospheric pressure and to operate the piano action. The bleed, which connects the channel to the chamber, allows the pouch to assume its correct resting position after a note has finished playing, by equalising the pressure above and below. The diameter of the bleed is necessarily much smaller than that of the corresponding tracker bar hole. The take-up spool, which is driven by an air powered motor , transports the music roll over the tracker bar at a speed that may be varied by means of a control lever. The tempo of the music is unaffected by variations in the force at which the pedals are operated, due to the presence of a governing device. Large diameter rubber hoses provide a connection between the main bellows and pneumatic stack, in addition to other auxiliary devices. Rubber tubing of small diameter is also used throughout, particularly in the case of the tracker bar, each port of which has an individual connection to its corresponding valve assembly.


:: Hanert Electric Orchestra 1944-45 ::


The Hanert Synthesiser or 'Electric Orchestra' was designed and built by John Hanert in1945 for the Hammond Organ Company and was described as an 'Apparatus for Automatic Production of Music'. The Synthesiser was an instrument for composition and synthesis of electronic music similar to the later RCA Synthesiser and other coded performance machines. Instead of using punch paper tape like the RCA Synthesiser the Hanert Synthesiser had a moving mechanical scanning head that moved over a sixty foot long table covered in eleven inch by twelve inch paper cards. The paper cards held the characteristics of the sound (pitch,duration,timbre and volume) stored in the form of graphite marks that were 'read' by direct electrical contact of the scanning head. The sound generating part of the instrument occupied a whole room and consisted of a bank of vacuum tube oscillators, a random frequency generator (to produce 'white noise' characteristics for percussive sounds) and wave shaping circuits. Speeding up and slowing down of the music(accelerando/decelerando) could be controlled by altering the speed and direction of the scanning head. Hanert's unique system allowed a great deal of flexibility in composition and synthesis, marks could be added to the cards simply by using a graphite pencil and the cards could be arranged in any order allowing variations and multiple combinations in the composition. Hanert commented: "The composer ultimately usually has but slight control over the instrumentation employed by the orchestra and it is only after tedious and time consuming steps have been taken and the orchestra has ultimately rendered the composition the composer can actually audition his composition...... its is seldom that a recording represents the closeness to perfection which is anticipated by the composer and the cunductor....... In the method and apparatus of this invention the composer, arranger or conductor has at his command means for controlling the quality of each note, its intensity, envelope and the degree of accent, duration and tempo without necessarily affecting any other note or tone of the composition. he has under his control, within the limitations imposed by the apparatus as a whole, facilities for producing, under his sole control, any of a substantially infinite variety of renditions of a composition."

:: RCA Synthesiser 1959 ::




The RCA Synthesiser was invented by the electronic engineers Harry Olsen and Hebert Belar, employed at RCA's Princeton Laboratories, as a way of electronically generating popular music. Although it never fulfilled its inventors expectations it's novel features were an inspiration for a number of electronic composers during the 1950's.




Harry F Olson in 1956 The publication of "A Mathematical Theory Of Music" (1949) inspired Belar and Olsen to create a machine to generate music based on a system of random probability. The theory being that random variations of already created popular songs could be used to create new marketeable songs.This flawed theory never came to fruition partly due to the lack of sufficient processing power available at the time and partly to the mistaken concept that the basis of composition could be gleaned from mathematical analysis of a muscial piece. The sound source was again the Vacuum Tube Oscillator (12 of them in the mkI and 24 in the mkII) but with a unique progammable sound contoller in the form of a punch-paper roll which allowed the composer to predefine a complex set of sound parameters. This allowed the mixing of generated sounds and shaping the sound with dividers, filters, envelope filters, modulators and resonators.




The final audio was monitored on two speakers and recorded to an internal laquer disk cutter, giving six concentric grooves-a total of 3 minutes per groove - which could then in turn be mixed together onto another laquer disk (this archaic system was not updated to the more flexible tape recorder until 1959). By re using and bouncing the disk recordings a totall of 216 sound track could be used. In 1957 a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Columbia University was able to rent the RCA Syntheiser MkII and set up the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre. This organisation became one of the most important centres of elctronic music during the 1950s. New electronic Composers such as Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky , Milton Babbit and others were now able to experiment with programming complex serial-type compositions on the MKII RCA, which previously were too tricky for a composer to handle manually.


:: Timeline ::

:: Sources & references ::

http://www.obsolete.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~kgann/index2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_piano
http://www.furious.com/perfect/conlonnancarrow.html
http://www.pianola.demon.co.uk/ppworks.htm
http://music.dartmouth.edu/~wowem/electronmedia/music/eamhistory.html
http://www.artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/piece.pl?pid=10
http://www.geometry.net/composers/nancarrow_conlon.php

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