TEXARKANA -- Texarkana's Regional Music Heritage Center will keep on scrolling with the acquisition of 27 piano rolls' worth of native son and composer Conlon Nancarrow's work.
After they're made by Wolfgang Heisig in Germany, the player piano rolls will be played on the 1928 Marshall & Wendell piano owned by the Music Heritage Center.
That piano is currently on loan to Texarkana College, and it's the same type Nancarrow used to compose his work.
David Mallette, the center's director of operations, said funding from the Troike-Patterson Foundation makes the acquisition possible.
Mallette hopes to open the center next year, and it will include a research center to study Nancarrow, whose unique and groundbreaking work with the player piano made him an important figure in 20th-century classical music.
"I am walking on air," Mallette said about the gift from the foundation, recalling benefactor Nancy Troike attended a Nancarrow homecoming concert event.
Soon, these Heisig copies will help the Music Heritage Center bring Nancarrow's music to life in Texarkana.
"What makes them unique is that until he (Heisig) began work on this project several years ago, the only existing original rolls -- let's just call them the equivalent to Bach manuscripts that had not been found yet -- the only existing copies of Conlon Nancarrow's studies, which is what he's most famous for on the player piano, rested in the Sacher institute in Basel, Switzerland," Mallette said.
Of course, he said, those original copies are not played because they are priceless.
"There are only a handful, if any, places in the world where all of them that have been completed ... (and) those are present and can be played back on a 1928 Marshall & Wendell piano, modified as per Conlon Nancarrow's desires," Mallette said.
Howard Gustafson at Ragland Piano Co. previously helped the Music Heritage Center acquire that sort of piano.
Hearing Nancarrow's work on this piano, performed with these rolls, provides a connection to how they were originally performed. It's a musical step back through time.
"It would be just like hearing Bach play back his works on the church's instruments that he worked at and composed for," Mallette said.
Physically, they are beautiful rolls of music, he said.
"If you've ever handled one, you'll go, my God, this feels like a million dollars," Mallette said. "They make me feel like I'm handling a Torah (scroll), if you've ever seen one: the rolls, the metal workmanship. The paper is the finest I've ever seen on any piano roll anywhere."
He's working to get the Music Heritage Center's East Broad Street building ready for an opening sometime next year. In the interim, the rolls will be stored at Texarkana College along with the Marshall & Wendell piano.
"When the building is opened, then the piano and the rolls will go down there," Mallette said.
Once that happens, they'll be part of the Troike Center for Nancarrow research, which he envisions as a place to draw scholars from all over.
The first Music Heritage Center event was a Nancarrow-themed homecoming concert, and the latest was a first annual Nancarrow festival and seminar directed by Marc-Andre Bougie and Mary Scott Goode, music professors at Texarkana College, Mallette said.
"It drew very, very well," Mallette said. "They considered it very successful, and these rolls will make a big difference in pulling scholars in."
The piano rolls will be accessible to all comers. Young students will be able to hear them, because education is part of the center's mission.
"They'll have open access to them under the supervision of me or somebody else at the center," Mallette said. "They will be open to anybody. Anybody in the public will be able to hear them on request."