Conlon Nancarrow Study for Player Piano no. 5

His music has a mathematical beauty and elegance that happily coexists with musical expressiveness and a puckish sense of humor. Nancarrow did not see a clear delineation between the two approaches and he never worried about it. This natural, organic "double-esthetic" is one of his most relevant contributions to 20th century music. Another important contribution relates to a kind of "semiological extrapolation". On the one hand, his music can be heard as "symbols", with their often-recognized analogical correspondences ("Blues", "Jazz", "Flamenco", etc). There is, also, an "abstract, decodified profile" (the complex poly-temporal structures, for instance) which may be present in the same piece. This fact does break the statement "something is more different when its similarity decreases" generally used in semiology...