Rand Steiger

Program Note for Tributaries for Nancarrow (1987) In 1987 a synthesizer manufacturer lent six electronic pianos to CalArts, where I was teaching at the time. After working with them for a while I had the idea to set them all up in a concert hall or gallery, to perform a concert of new works written for this set up. Several of my colleagues and I composed works especially for the occasion. The six pianos were under the control of one central computer.

My contribution was Tributaries for Nancarrow. As the title suggests this is an homage to Conlan Nancarrow, the great composer of original, fascinating music for player pianos. When thinking of a work for six computer controlled pianos I could not resist Nancarrows influence, and so I decided to embrace it.

After a short introduction, the work unfolds with two large fugues, the first one melodic, and the second more "gestural". This second fugue subject was improvised on a midi keyboard and stored on a computer. The counter subjects are simply the inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion of the original subject. The two fugues are surrounded by transitions and stetti, and the work ends with a unrelated finale.