I have to acknowledge a factual error - the pieces didn't actually start life as scores, that was an erroneous assumption on my part. I confirmed this in Kyle Gann's book on Nancarrow - the works seem to have begun life as piano rolls, and only afterwards did Nancarrow convert them into more conventional scores, often forcing him to undertake the equally laborious task of precisely measuring the distances of each note, so that the notes in the score would line up appropriately.

Man, you make such great videos! Seriously, thanks for doing this, it's really inspiring.

There is an amazing guitarist named Scott McGill who performs his pieces on solo guitar.

I love Namcarrow's Study No. 6 because it's so chill in comparison to his other stuff.

I learn so much from your clips/lectures. You really are a brilliant musical analyist and presenter. I come away from watching your presentations much richer musically. Thank you.

You should do a house tour! The way your home is decorated with musical instruments is so amazing I’d love an in depth look

Best video about Nancarrow I've seen so far! I love wonky rhythms, thank you for this.

I hadn't come across Nancarrow until your 12 Days of Christmas video.

This is lovely, thank you! I'm (trying to) finish a PhD in polytemporal music and Nancarrow has been a big part of that, so it's great to hear content like this. Can't wait to watch your other videos!

Great video! I became aware of Nancarrow via "Sound Forms for Piano" by Robert Miller, the player piano studies featured on that comp blew me away and I had to learn more after thinking "There's no way anyone can actually play this"

Gosh dang it! No wonder don't have the patience for the basics. You, Neely, and others keep enticing me with this intriguing knowledge. I find this stuff more fun than basic composition.

these videos keep getting better and better, keep it up!

You mention the third symphony Scherzo in this video. I find the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Scherzo to be more interesting when it comes to rhythm, tempo, and meter. The rhythm alone isn't atypical, but the way it combines with the tempo and the meter is. I myself am arranging this Scherzo for a piano sextet. If you don't take into consideration the way that Beethoven writes his Ninth Symphony Scherzo, the beat is around quarter note = 300 BPM, same as the Ligeti example. However, the way that Beethoven wrote it, it feels much more like it is at 130 BPM with eighth note triplets than 300 BPM quarter notes(Presto and Prestissimo pieces that I hear a quarter note beat in are typically eighth and sixteenth note heavy, not so with the Beethoven Scherzo). This is where the meter comes in. Beethoven writes the Scherzo section in 3/4, but I don't hear it as being in 3/4 at all. I hear duple meter all the way through, even in the 3/4. Now how does Beethoven do this? Well for one thing, the phrasing is almost completely in groups of 4. This is very common in Classical Style works and the grouping of bars into larger units of 2's, 4's, 8's, 16's etc. is often referred to as hypermeter. Secondly, because the quarter notes go by so fast that they feel like triplets, this hypermeter goes from simply being a way of organizing the bars to imposing an accent pattern on the measures. And what accent pattern is being imposed here? That would be the 2/4 accent pattern, i.e *1* 2, *1* 2, etc. This 2/4 accent pattern is supported later on when the full orchestra comes in with a tympani strike on every other measure in the first fortissimo.

If you can tolerate heavy music, Meshuggah plays polyrhythms in a manner that people used to tell me was impossible to actually play (on drums).. So they come to mind for me. Though it's for sure possible to play, I have to say it's a spectacle to hear humans play such abstract yet calculated rhythms so well live. In any case, awesome channel! Great work and thanks for the content! Love hearing composers talk about music theory and creating music.

Nancarrow’s 4:8-5:8 line is very beautiful. Rhythmic quirks aside, the melodic line feels completely fresh, I love it!

Great video, I didn't know about Nancarrow! Great analysis!

But can we get we get humans to play Ligeti's 'Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes?'

6:35 those shaking eyes are creeping me out...

I dig that little green Uke back there on the wall. 👍 fascinating vid.

Fascinating. Thank you for this.

I can't recommend the work of Clifton Callender enough. His"canonic offering" is supposed to explore the concept of canons with infinite solutions. He also did a canon for cello and digital delay which takes nancarrows ideas to a wildly masterful extreme: the performer, a cellist, ends up interacting with the two delay signals (if increasing delay length) in a very contrapuntal way. Very sonically exciting, as the concepts are very perceivable to the ear

Great video. I remember seeing an arrangement of one of Nancarrow's player piano studies (I think it was actually No. 7) in 2013 at the Royal Albert Hall, along with Zappa's Greggery Peccary (and Philip Glass' Symphony No. 10, though I found that less interesting). What an interesting evening of rhythm... I was aware of the chamber arrangements of the studies, but that was the first time I heard one, and I think I prefer it to the piano version - the lines are much more clearly delineated by the instrumentation which clarifies the polyrhythmic ideas as the timbre isn't as homogenous (although there's something satisfying in the piano versions about the lines sort of "sticking and unsticking" because of the timbral homogeneity). Maybe you could touch upon the use of nested tuplets in some classical works? I did a brief tutorial on how to approach them in music that's firmly "on the grid" rhythmically, and very lightly touched upon Ferneyhough as a counterexample, but my background as a performer is more rooted in the popular idiom, so whilst I've studied and write contemporary classical music, I feel less qualified to discuss it with any authority from a performer's perspective.

Great video! Thank you!

Fascinating stuff!

thank you for your great videos

You deserve waaaaaay more subs

Great video!

Very, very insightful.

thanks for your vids¡ I never before listened about these

I really enjoy these videos, even though I have zero music theory knowledge!

This is good information. Juicy. Thanks.

A NANCARROW VIDEO, look sharp people this is what we've been waiting for

Tipographica played some "impossible rhythms" on their God Says I Can't Dance album. One of my favorite albums of all time as well (4th place).

Really interesting!

Great vid. I saw you used a small clip from Dutch tv. Are you familiar with ''vrije geluiden''? They often have weird or strange music performed live.

Though I do have an ear for music, so to speak, I have no idea what you'r talking about from a technical perspective; that said, I do get the underlying idea, which I think is great. I don't know if you've heard of Bang On A Can Allstars, but they did a piece of Nancarrow's called Study 3a. It's fucking brilliant! Best!

BRILLIANT!

nancarrow the absolute Madman

Very interesting. Can't say it sounds very good to my ear, though.

Oh man, that's my video of the Ligeti Études!! I'd hope that you'd ask for my permission to use this video but I'll let it slide for now.

Do you have more examples of the interesting depressed key technique (Etude 3: Touches Bloquees)?

I freakin love Conlon Nancarrow

I really recomend checking out Dominic Mucott’s arrangement of study 21. Its outstanding

Enjoying your series a great deal. I believe Joann Mcgregor who advocaes for contemp music has recorded and played some Nancarrow stuff ! Wonderful to see Ades here playing another recently live(i didnt research Nancarrow).Who did the fantastic ensemble arrangement of Nancarrow no. 7 ? Do you have a video on effective or really any use at all of microtones. Ben Johnston's work has yet to affect me but I'm having fun writing music where some winds and strings use cents.Don't know if bras can make these bore and moving the diff parts of their instruments.Can string players put labels small enough to show where a -30.0 cent or other would be ?

this was mesmerising and special interesting is the fact that they not started as a piano roll and as a "machine head" its interesting that music writen for machines started befor the computer age

I both worked for QRS and studied with yvar mihashoff at the university of buffalo...he knew nancarrow and set a few of his pieces for ensemble as well as for two players one piano....crazy challenging no matter how its cut

You get a like for the alien :D (and the amazing content)

Hi men! Nice videos! could you please tell me the name of a song at the end of your video on the saxophone? A song that's all about arpeggios in triplets o something ternary. Thanks!

Good food for thought! Many composers I wouldn't have sought, as they're not "mainstream," so your video is a great primer. One question I've had is this: why do we not usually see the "internal" triplet. By this I mean (in a measure of 4/4), a quarter-note triplet beginning on beat 2. Like all (?) quarter-note triplets in 4/4 time, it takes up half a measure, but, in this case, it's the middle "half." I hope I've explained it correctly. I haven't seen it used, that I can recall, though you can bet I checked Rachmaninoff's symphonies and concerti pretty closely, suspecting he'd have used the concept. When you play it, it's not that "powerful," so I wondered if that might be the reason it's not used. But, again, that subtlety is why I thought Rach (a master of sotto voce) might have used it in a background pad. By the way, bolstered by info from another of your videos, I frequently keep foreign language audiobooks from around the world in the background while listening to music, or composing/arranging (if I can concentrate well enough). Different languages accent differently, and it's like cross-training for your musical mind. Cheers!

I have a bit of an issue with polyrhythms at such high tempos. What I mean is that the "wonkiness" of these compositions you've talked about in this video become (to my ear at least) more of a subtlety, that is much less appreciable, than if played at slower tempos. What I mean by this is that high tempos are kind of a "regularizer" of notes, in fact high tempo mistakes in ones playing are very easy to overlook and therefore less important. Therefore if we consider these compositions as being "intentional mistakes" (not actual mistakes, but I think the analogy holds here), then high speeds kind of take away and make the highly irregular tempos not perceivable. The same effect on the execution could have been achieved with embellishments or similar techniques in regular time signatures. Anyway, nice videos you put out David!

Rhythm: Elliot Carter's Double Concerto for Piano and Harpsichord.

muito bom!

6:40 ah yes, memories of the occasional suite of practice rooms populated by banging crazies where instead of covering your ears and yelling "errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" until well out of range you were expected to concentrate on your own music, as if that weren't a special hell just for musicians.

after 250 BPM with each measure quantized/ sliced into 256 slices, it all gets kind of blurry, at least to my ears.

Check out Dan Deacon's recent work with player piano. I think there's a Tiny Desk video.

What about Ferenyhough's rhythms? There are some pretty complex cases as well..

Very interesting. Rhythmic irregularity can be found in galore in Persian Radif music. I post an example in the next comment.

ok i'm overwhelmed, i think i'll stick to chopin... lol. very educating though!

I love these videos purely as theoretical exercises, but when I watch them I sort of realise that this is a standard of music that I'm just never going to reach with my undisciplined and time-limited practice regime! I'll stick to Satie - I can play that sort of stuff!

i wrote a piece that had what i was told was an impossible rhythm, it was an 11:10 polyrhythm in a bar of 5/4

cool

Have you seen the drummer Pete Zeldman?

What if every musician plays with a click track at a different tempo? It might make complex polytempos easy to perform

Dutch composer Maarten Regtien finishes his piano composition "Zo hoor ik het graag!" / "That's the spirit!" with an ode to the amazing pianola music of Conlon Nancarrow! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i66dlb121b-wgaM.html

👍

Do you know Stephan Payen's work (kzfaq.info/sun/PL1eNlv-iq_ugLUvNgXtI5vSa6OdnYBPAP), a lot inspired by Steve Coleman (axis=>negative harmony etc..). He also as some pieces with what you called "negative rythm", where an instrument complements another. (btw the scores are included in the record)

I thought the underlying principle to music is that sounds good. Nonetheless very creative and funny so I guess it isn’t so bad😂

Comrade Nancarrow!

(Hello David, wonderful videos) in Ottoman classical music there’re nearly 50 rhythmical patterns. with unusual and grand time signatures. “Usül” is the general term for this patterns. Melodies flow on top. You can check out little samples on drumset versions here. soundcloud.com/gokce-e-e-gurcay/usul-collection-on-drumset-1

Conlon Nancarrow: doing black MIDI shitposts before it was cool

The dotted half note 116 in Beethoven is actually interpreted incorrectly. The metronome should beat two times per bar instead of 1. That was kinda how they read metronome markings back then

That last piece sounds like a boogie woogie from hell

I find Nancarrow's experimental efforts to be unpretentious since he or anybody else doesn't find the need to call them music.

Intelligence illuminates everything.

The piece at 4.33 has been plundered by Frank Zappa

Loved this video: been studying and playing odd-meter, Poly-meter, Poly-rhythm, and metric modulation for years on drums and bass. Keep up the good work! Check out Theinnerbright.com

I have a feeling he would love Thrash Metal.

So you could say that this polyrhythmic counterpoint?

1:43 Baroque Obama

Eyebrows.

So much math and complexity to make pieces that, in the end, sound about as cohesive and musical as a cat and a toddler walking on a keyboard. What a waste of time. Yeah, bring on the hate.