15 questions to herbert henck

Herbert Henck Piano Music. In doing so, he flirted with the Uncanny Valley, taking the human dangerously close to the mechanical.

15 questions to herbert henck: On a more general

And while his American debut was met with less fruitful derision, Antheil remained convinced that he was as important as ever. Almost instinctively, both composers took to the player piano, treating it as though it were an organism in and of itself. Of Nancorrow there is little to say, as he spent much of his life in hermetic obscurity in Mexico, no less, after having been denied reentry into America from Spain, where he took up arms against the Franco regime and professed his allegiance to the communist party , quietly amassing a sizable oeuvre of laboriously perforated pianola rolls, which later astonished the musical world with their depth.

Where the former employs a host of rotary techniques and melodic turbines, all given upward lift by the aerodynamic contours of its fuselage-like core, the latter is a more enigmatic mosaic of unreachable clusters gilded in consonant frames. This is a piece that asks not which mechanisms are being described, but which are being deployed.

The Little Shimmy that ends the disc is precisely that, scooting the listener ever closer to an indefinable threshold. This music was meant to be played by only the most skilled of human performers. Henck handles their notorious challenges with a practical ease nowhere to be found when originally composed, showing us in the process that the animate body is still the most creative machine of them all.

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