Soon Affordable by the Upper Middle Class

The most frequent and bitter complaint I’ve gotten about my book on Nancarrow over the years has been about the price. But I’ve just learned – over the internet, with the rest of the world – that a paperback edition is finally appearing this coming May. No price has been set yet, but I figure this should bring it down to no more than £150,000,000,000, or, in US dollars, approximately the monthly salary of an Exxon/Mobil CEO. So hold on a few more months and you’ll save.

I wish I could also correct a few of the errors in the book, most of which have been helpfully dredged up for me by subsequent Nancarrow scholar Margaret Thomas. The most egregious is that, in the charts that show the structure of Nancarrow’s canons, Study #43 is inexplicably missing. There are also some pitches wrong in Example 8.33, which analyzes the bass line of Study #41b. Maybe I can put together a list of errata for the web. Even so, there are fewer errors in the book than there were in Thomas Adès’s pissy review of it in the London Times Literary Supplement.