Mechanical music, improbable joy

Musicians do not typically strive to play like machines, but then again, there was not much typical about Friday's night's program of the music of Conlon Nancarrow . This American composer (1912-1997 ) was a maverick visionary who lived most of his life in the creative isolation of Mexico City, and for more than three decades composed exclusively for the player piano. This allowed him to write music unburdened by the softness of human fingertips or the mathematical fallibility of the human brain. The result is a body of work astonishing for its rhythmic complexity, its harmonic imagination, and its rather improbable quantities of joy.

Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano (recorded on the Wergo label) are commonly thought of as unfit for flesh-and-blood musicians, but this is not strictly true. The most recent group to tread fearlessly into the domain of canons written in multiple tempos and other brain-twisting activities is the superb Rochester-based new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. Under the easygoing yet exacting direction of conductor Alan Pierson , the group presented a Nancarrow program at the Gardner Museum. It was an exciting evening, part of the museum's invaluable Composer Portraits series, imported from Columbia University's Miller Theater .

The program included arrangements of the Player Piano Studies Nos. 6, 2, and 3A, by Yvar Mikhashoff, Gavin Chuck , and Derek Bermel, respectively . In distributing the often bluesy pile-ups of mechanical plinks to various combinations of woodwinds, strings, percussion , and piano, these arrangements naturally lose something of the maniacal speed and precision of the originals -- though not as much as you might think with these players. But they also gain an enlargement of expression and a vibrancy of color. Bermel's version of the boogie-woogie-fueled No. 3A was the most fun, as the group dug into the music's irregular grooves and fired off its blasts of punctuation with a gleeful sense of spontaneity.

On both sides of his player piano period, Nancarrow composed music for real people, and the program included the Bartokian "Sonatina" for piano and the String Quartet No. 1. Both are from the 1940s and betray his mounting fascination with rhythmic games. By the time he returned to writing for human beings in the 1980s, he was making them sound like machines, with metrical relationships of withering complexity. The Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra (1993) performed on Friday night sounded more difficult than anything that had come before.

There is something grimly 20th-century about the technological fantasy of eliminating the performers, or in the case of Glenn Gould , the live concert audience. But Nancarrow's music is also filled with the exuberance and sheer relish of a sonic scientist running wild in his private laboratory. His means of realization were distinctly modern, but the musical strategies he employed were not, as was demonstrated by the one non-Nancarrow work on the program: "Le Ray au Soleyl" by Johannes Ciconia ( ca. 1370--1412). Its melody had an austere beauty of its own era, but the simultaneous use of multiple tempos made it feel, well, like vintage Nancarrow.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.