Gregor Herzfeld: Nancarrows erhabene Zeitspiele

In his Studies for Player Piano Conlon Nancarrow experiments with rhythm, meter, and tempo―the dimensions of musical time. Although this primary compositional element is most often treated in analytical and theoretical discussions, it proves to be historically and aesthetically relevant when placed in a broader cultural context. Commonly portrayed as an isolated loner, Nancarrow can be positioned in the historical development that includes Charles Ives’s and Henry Cowell’s experiments with musical time as well as the objective and quasi-scientific view of music that gained footing between the 1920s and 50s. In Nancarrow’s case the reduction of music to facts and technique, which stands in direct opposition to the metaphysically loaded concept of a work of art, reveals itself as a specifically American extension of the aesthetics of the sublime―as the “technological sublime” (David E. Nye)―which grew in importance during the second half of the nineteenth century. The ultra complexity found in Nancarrow’s time structures indeed tends to force the overwhelmed listener, not without a certain pleasurable vexation, up to the perceptual boundaries of what is humanly possible.

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