James Tenney: Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow

(photo by Paula Court)

Tenney composed the Spectral Canon in 1972. It is a piece for player-piano. Nancarrow punched the piano role for it. It would be impossible to be performed by a human: maybe by more musicians on more pianos.

I found the Spectral Canon on youTube right now and it's amazing. It uses 24 notes of a harmonic sequence and variates the duration of each sound. The timing is logarithmically determined by the position of the note in the sequence. Says Dok in Doklands, his daily musical blog, Tenney seems to be testing the limits of piano construction.

(video by playerpianoJH)

(James Tenney)