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Conlon Nancarrow left New York in 1940 for Mexico City, where, frustrated with the limitations of live, human performance, he started writing for an instrument he could control himself, and with which he could precisely define the complex cross-rhythms he wanted. This instrument was the player piano, or pianola. Beginning in the 1980s, Yvar Mikhashoff arranged several of the resulting Player Piano Studies for ensemble.

Study No. 6 is an untypically lazy piece, though certainly not without its quirks. The repeating bass line, maintained on the piano throughout in Mikhashoff’s version, is squashed and stretched by constant changes of rhythm and tempo, while the melody, whose returns are punctuated by up–down scales, is developed with elements of harmonisation and counterpoint on the way to a humorous close.

Humour runs all through Study No. 9. Here, three related patterns skim and dive around, again, a continuing line, which in this case is made up from repetitions of one of the patterns. The melodies collide in different combinations and relationships of speed – a feat the mechanically programmed player piano takes in its stride but that is trickier for live instrumentalists. There is a change of angle partway through, and a joyous scramble at the end.

^{Programme note © Paul Griffiths}

As its title suggests, this piece is an electric-lit nocturne. It is cast as a succession of short segments, smartly and snappily articulated, the first of them played twice and repeated at intervals. Other segments shadow this chorus more or less; still others are caught in the same rhythmic trap. As the composer puts it, the work is made of boxes. ‘Each box contains a pattern or groove: some are bright and shiny, others dark and grimy.’

^{Programme note © Paul Griffiths}

1 (after Pérotin)
2 (after Locke)
3 (after Josquin des Prez)
4 (after Brumel)
5 (after Rameau)

in situ is inspired in part by the mirror sculptures of the late American artist John McCracken. These reflective pillars alter our perception of the landscapes they inhabit in fascinating ways, each one simultaneously merging into its surrounding while mirroring it back on itself, creating angular incisions of spaces and uncanny perspectives on otherwise familiar scenes.

Each of the five parts of in situ takes a pre-existing piece of music and treats it as a kind of landscape into which analogous distorting mirrors are placed. These works are Beata viscera, attributed to Pérotin; ‘Symphony at the descending of Venus’ from Matthew Locke’s semi-opera Psyche; Memor esto verbi tui by Josquin des Prez; the ‘Benedictus’ from Antoine Brumel’s Missa ‘Et ecce terrae motus’; and the overture to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Zaïs. Fragments of the original pieces are spliced, freely reassembled, recomposed, dwelt upon, as if being folded into new shapes or reflected back on themselves. The attitude towards the source material is never one of irony or subversion, but instead comes out of a deep fondness – a desire to live and move around for a while in these musical spaces.

^{Programme note © Edmund Finnis}

Jonathan Davies bassoon

The noble bassoon is perhaps the least likely instrument to go wild, but in this miniature piece, written for the Camberwell Composers Collective, it does, thanks partly to electronic distortion the player controls with a foot pedal. The resulting effect is reminiscent of a wailing electric guitar – hence the work's title.

^{Programme note © Paul Griffiths}

1 Check it out
2 Pile driver/alarms
3 It’s been a honeymoon – can’t take no mo’
4 Heartbeats/boats & buoys
5 Heavy smoke

Reich’s music is inseparable from the city of his birth and long-term residence – from its race of vehicular and pedestrian tempos, its mix of traditions, its grid of blocks. City Life is his affectionate and amused, yet also at times darkening, portrait of New York.

The work brings the sounds of the city into the concert hall by means of recordings to be played by two performers at keyboard samplers. Fragments of speech, traffic noises, subway bells, heartbeats and sirens can thus be introduced into the orchestral texture alongside figures on pianos, strings or woodwinds, and the two kinds of sound – recorded and instrumental – can enjoy the same sort of rhythmic flexibility.

Of the five movements, the second and fourth are slow, include no speech and involve a regular rhythmic background, suggestive of a heartbeat in the second movement and then actualised as such in the fourth. In contrast, the middle movement starts out as a speech duet and has sampled speech sounds continuing all the way through, imitated and developed by the instruments. As in It’s Gonna Rain, his earliest acknowledged composition, created 30 years earlier, Reich recorded the source material at an outdoor gathering of African-Americans – this time a political rally near City Hall (not far from his apartment).

The first movement – within a hymn-like enfolding that might be a homage to an earlier New Yorker’s vision of home, Copland’s Quiet City (performed by the Â鶹ԼÅÄ SO on Friday 28 August, and still available to watch or listen to via Â鶹ԼÅÄ iPlayer and Â鶹ԼÅÄ Sounds) – is guided by a street vendor calling: ‘Check it out!’ Technology allows the man’s speech melody to change its key.

The finale again includes intermittent words, but the mood is very different. Here Reich drew on the Fire Department’s field communications at the time of the ineffective 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the voices have to be made out through hazes of pre-recorded instrumental sounds.

Such an intimate combination of speech fragments with instrumental lines seems to answer an expressive impulse to deal at once with the city’s actuality and with its myth. Commissioned by a consortium of European ensembles, including the London Sinfonietta, City Life is directed at an audience familiar with New York from a distance – a distance mediated by films, novels, poetry and other music. At the same time, it contains awkward edges of the real, some of which appear in a different light than they did at its first performance in 1995 following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.

^{Programme note © Paul Griffiths}