Apparently, there’s a whole “Black MIDI” scene on Youtube where people compose (or transpose) unplayable songs into piano playing programs.
This one has over half a million notes and is much more for show:
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Now that’s just clickbait.
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Sure seems insensitive to perform it at an old folks’ home…
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Nope, I think Cory just blew it again. 
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Eh, it’s no Hydrogen Sonata, though I do wonder what it would sound like transposed to the antagonistic undecagonstring for a solo performance.
That’s no waltz.
And …
Yup. Nancarrow.
Mind you, some of Charles Ives’ piano pieces look impressively unplayable too. But they got did. And not by player pianos.
Pity the melon (and maybe raspberry) fool!
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No penguins? No death march! Simple as that.
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So basically, nothing about this post is accurate. It’s not Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz. And it’s not being played by a person, as it’s just using the virtual player piano functionality of Synthesia to play the piece. Wonderful.
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I really want a poster of the sheet music in the image for my living room
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The nephew of the composer blogs about how the sheet music came to be created. I suspect all of the other posts without attributions that we have linked take information from this blog post.
(edit: wording)
Alright, that’s enough Culture for one blogpost…
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Charles Ives, exactly - he deployed what looks like insane noise music in ways that make musical sense to nearly anyone.
I made great hay with his “Charlie Rutlage” when I was an aspiring singer. That song (well, part of it) is a great example of what’s being made fun of in pieces like this, but when you actually listen to the work, it makes total sense as accessible art. A light, familiar cowboy sound descends (ascends?) into chaos, returns to light tonality, and just when you get comfortable again, transforms to the unresolved start of a funeral march.
Come to think of it, it’s like the serious, actually working version of the piece printed in the article. There’s nothing wrong with the comic music, but it’s important to know that this sort of sound can be used to make non-comic art, too.
Here are some great interpretations:
- Samuel Ramey and Warren Jones - fairly serious
- If you wonder what it would be like to spend an evening drinking with Thomas Hampson (at a pub with an inexplicable orchestra), I imagine it would end like this.
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