3 paragraphs about nothing

Player pianos are pianos that can play automatically when loaded with a specially formatted ream of paper. These rolls of paper have holes in them, so that as they scroll past the hammers the piano plays the notes. Most models have a variety of levers and switches in order to control dynamics, speed, and articulation. They were fairly popular in the early 20th century, and lost mainstream popularity once phonograph technology developed further. In their day, they actually caused some controversy among companies that published sheet music, for threatening business and de-emphasizing the need for actual piano-playing skills.

But some piano roll artists made a name with pieces that couldn't possibly be played by an actual person. From around 1950 on, we have the works of Conlon Nancarrow, who found that most pianists of his day could not meet the demands of his complicated pieces, so he turned to write music specifically for the player piano. Most of his studies deal with complicated meters and polyrhythms. Many contain distinct voices playing the same line at different tempos, often in odd ratios. On top of this, most of the lines themselves tend to be highly dissonant and hard to actually play. While some of his earlier studies were influenced by jazz - some of them are quite catchy - the later ones are basically just random, and don't really sound like much as a whole.

Marc-Andre Hamelin, already a virtuoso pianist in his own right, has also made a few unplayable pieces for piano roll. His tend to be a lot more friendly to the ear than Nancarrow's polytempic experiments, give or take an assortment of random glissandi and tone clusters. One of his most well-known pieces of this type is Circus Galop. To actually play it would take at least four pianists, preferably on separate pianos, but would still be near-impossible to pull off faithfully because of the precise, multi-octave glissandi. While tamer than Nancarrow in terms of consistent tempos, it does throw an occasional polyrhythm around in the faster sections. Many internet users have created their own pieces in this vein, thus creating the genre of "black MIDI." I like it when people create a genre without knowing it. Especially if it doesn't take off until long after the founding work was created. And then people look back, and it's like, "oh yeah, that guy made that thing that sounds weirdly similar to what we have now, but it was a long time ago!" But I hate when the reverse happens, and you think you've found something like that but it's actually not. Like this one abstract animation they showed us in History of Animation from, like, the 20's that had an electronic-sounding soundtrack, and I was like, "oh, that's pretty awesome that they were able to make stuff sound like that way back then," but then the teacher mentioned that the soundtrack was added later from like the 60s or something. But even when it is real, the derivative works have often expanded the concept so much that looking back at the original is like, "meh," because compared to the later stuff it's only kind of interesting. Okay bye!