My brother is a Frank Zappa fan, and went along to a concert series last
year at the Almeida Festival in London where they played a variety of
pieces that inspired Zappa, including several Nancarrow pieces (arranged
for string quartet). He got talking to someone who was a Nancarrow fan,
and had entered all the Studies for Player Piano into MIDI. This must
imply they are available in some notated form, so anyone could make
rolls if they wanted for the normal fees.

As Dan Wilson said, Mike Boyd has got masters prepared by Rex Lawson for
quite a number of Nancarrow Studies, but I don't think any copies were
ever publicly available. I really don't know whether there's any
chance of them being made available. It seems a shame to sit on things
like this if there are others who would enjoy them.

Rob DeLand's note about the Playrite copies was interesting. I wonder
how accurate they were - if ever there was music that needs 'recreation
of the original master roll' it must be Nancarrow. Not, of course, that
there were any triple-length masters to start with!

I loved A.B. Bond's description of an 88-channel frequency shifter from
Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil. Rex Lawson has been talking about
staging a performance of Ballet Mechanique - he keeps a tally on the
number of 88-note pushups available for it! Perhaps the performers
should all dress up as Hedy Lamarr. Now, that would really get some
publicity! Another 65/88n pushup turned up completely unexpectedly last
week in west London (some people get all the luck). That makes some 20
known now.

Julian Dyer