Name: Guest Recital: Impossible Music: Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo
Start: 2023-09-30T18:30:00
Location: Carnegie Mellon University

Amy Williams

Helena Bugallo

Carnegie Mellon University School of Music

The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo began a transcription project of Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies in 1998, while in graduate school at the University of Buffalo. The works explore dizzyingly complex rhythmic combinations (often canons with the voices at different speeds) and extremely fast tempos. The Duo will perform 12 of these Studies for four-hands at one piano and one for two pianos. They can be very directly jazz-influenced (3 are from his early “Boogie Woogie Suite”) or highly abstract (a canon where the “melody" is constructed out of long and short repeated notes). After Ligeti discovered Nancarrow’s music in 1981, he said “ His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed, but at the same time emotional... For me it’s the best music of any living composer today.” Though his Three Pieces for Two Pianos (1976) pre-dates this discovery, there are many connections. The Duo will play the middle movement, "Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the background)", which is to be played “as fast as possible—or even faster” and includes canons and phasing, as well as his signature “blocked key” technique and a reference to the end of Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata. Steve Reich’s ground-breaking minimalist piece from 1967 requires the two performers to pull apart unison patterns as slowly as possible before locking into a new combination. This concert will be a rare opportunity to hear this music performed live. The Duo last performed in Pittsburgh in 2017.