Studies for Player Piano

“It is a dazzling experience to listen to this whole body of work – an experience not unlike the one many of us had some thirty years ago when we heard the first recordings of the complete works of Webern,” writes composer James Tenney in his 1988 introduction to Conlon Nancarrow’s “Studies for Player Piano”.

All five volumes of Nancarrow's prize-winning recordings, with their impossible sounding and acrobatic complexities, in one CD package.

“The ‘Studies for Player Piano’ by the American Conlon Nancarrow (born in 1912) show in a playful and virtuoso manner that the use of a mechanical piano need not lead to the automation of the music nor to a flow production by the composer. The CD-set is part of the first complete record documentation of the highly original life-work of a great entertaining musical outsider of our century, a gentle loner.”
(The jury of the German Record Critics’ Award on the occasion of awarding the CD-set “Conlon Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano” the International Record Award, Frankfurt 1991)