James Tenny's "Music for Player Piano"
By Walter Tenten
Hallo to Jody and Robbie and the MMD community!
In contrast to the eight ways to insert a 35-mm slide into a projector, there are only four modes to insert something elongated like a note roll into a pneumatic piano.
I know of at least one occasion that a composer has implemented these four possible modes to produce a roll. Nobody will be astonished if I add that this belongs to the area of new music.
The composer is the contemporary American artist James Tenney, who in 1964 generated explicitly for player piano a piece that he called "Music for player piano". I am not aware of the tools he used to put his music onto a roll, but later on there was a small series of recuts available (I assume PlayRite, but I am not sure). James Tenney put the same sequence of notes in four different orientations onto the roll; the total playing time was 5.5 minutes.
How do I know about this curiosity??
30 years after the creation of this opus I was attending the "Donaueschinger Musiktage" in the Black Forest of Germany. I have reported in the MMD several times about this most important festival for contemporary music in the German speaking countries. Juergen Hocker, President of the German GSM, presented there to a very interested public several compositions for player piano. The pieces were taken from, among others, Ligeti (Hungary), Tom Johnson (USA), and Conlon Nancarrow (Mexico). I should also mention MMD member Wolfgang Heisig. James Tenney was personally present when his "Music for player piano" was performed by Juergen Hockers Boesendorfer Ampico.
A funny thing happened after the official performances -- James Tenney told us that the roll was not oriented correctly. In the subsequent discussion we found out that, when putting his composition onto a roll master, he was not aware of the usual direction that a note roll is running, i.e. from top to bottom on an upright piano with the treble notes on the right. He had had a different notion of this. As he intended a certain sequence of the four variants on the roll we assisted him in unrolling the completely spooled roll, swapping it, re-fixing it on the core, and finally putting it back onto the spool.
In the end he personally signed the roll for Juergen Hocker, who now owns the only authentic sample of this roll. My wife took several photos of these procedures in order to keep them for the future. So 30 years had to pass until James could listen to a player piano performing his own composition for the first time.
There was a second roll from James Tenney that was performed on the same occasion. In 1974 he made a "Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow". Two remarkable things make me remember this composition still now. The piano had to be tuned harmonically, instead of well-tempered, for optimum performance. The dampers were removed (or lifted) during the whole performance. The result resembled the ringing of (big) clocks like that of (several) churches. I was very astonished by this aural impression which I had never expected from a piano.
Walter Tenten
[ I hope that Mr. Tenney autographed the music roll for Dr. Hocker
[ at all four possibilities: both sides, both ends! -- Robbie
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(Message sent Fri 24 Jan 1997, 11:16:08 GMT, from time zone GMT+0100.) |
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