Conlon Nancarrow

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Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 - August 10, 1997) was an American composer who took Mexican citizenship in 1955. Some three fourths of his musical output was written for the player piano, which he used to create perhaps the most rhythmically complex body of music ever written. He lived most of his life in complete obscurity, not becoming widely known until the 1980s. Today, he is remembered as one of the most original and unusual composers of the 20th century.

Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas, where his father - who later became the town's mayor - had moved to open a barrel factory for an oil company. Nancarrow played jazz trumpet in his youth, before studying music first at Cincinnati College-Conservatory and later in Boston, Massachusetts with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky. He met Arnold Schoenberg during that artist's brief stay in Boston in 1933-4.

In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he went to Spain to fight in the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Francisco Franco's fascists. Upon his return, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were being denied American passports as punishment for their Party membership. To escape the harrassment later visited upon such other left-leaning composers as Aaron Copland, Elie Siegmeister, and David Diamond during the McCarthy Era, Nancarrow moved in 1940 to Mexico City, where he lived until his death.

Nancarrow's interest in rhythmic complexity predated his interest in the player piano. The handful of live-performed instrumental works he wrote in the U.S., and then in his first few years in Mexico, already gave evidence of the elements that would always fascinate him: canon, tempo contrast, notated jazz, use of the entire piano range. Early performances, though, were disastrous: a Mexico City performance of his Septet fell apart because there had never been a rehearsal with more than four players present. Disgusted with performers (and not possessing the kind of gregarious personality that is helpful in getting one's pieces played), he took a suggestion from Henry Cowell's book New Musical Resources, which he bought in New York in 1939, and decided to focus on the player piano.

Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance from his father (who had been the mayor of Texarkana), Nancarrow traveled to New York in 1947, bought a player piano, and had a machine custom built to enable him to punch the piano rolls by hand. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was hard work, and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their dynamic range by tinkering with their mechanism, and covering the hammers with leather or metal so as to produce a more percussive sound. On this trip to New York he also met Cowell, and heard a performance of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, which would later lead to Nancarrow experimenting with prepared piano in his Study #30.

Nancarrow's first pieces combined the harmonic language and melodic motifs of early jazz pianists like Art Tatum with extraordinarily complicated metrical schemes. The first five rolls he made are called the Boogie-Woogie Suite (later assigned the name Study No. 3 a-e). The first few studies were based on ostinatos. Next Nancarrow took up an interest in isorhythm, rotating a pitch row and a rhythmic row of unequal lengths of notes for complex patterns, as medieval composers had done, and as Messiaen had just resumed doing in his Quartet for the End of Time. Nancarrow's most common technique, however, would become the tempo canon, which he would use in about half of his Player Piano Studies. Starting with Study #25, he would realize that the player piano was good, not only for tempo complexity, but for speed so extreme that it can create timbral effects quite different from anything possible on a human-played piano.

Having spent most of his life in obscurity, Nancarrow benefitted from the 1969 release of an album of his work by Columbia Records as part of a brief flirtation of the label's classical division with modern avant garde music. (Others benefitting included Steve Reich, Harry Partch, Terry Riley, and percussionist Max Neuhaus). The recording resulted from John Cage's discovery of the music, and Merce Cunningham's subsequent use of it for choreography.

In 1976-77, Peter Garland began publishing Nancarrow's scores in his Soundings journal, and Charles Amirkhanian began releasing recordings of the player piano works on his 1750 Arch label - thus at age 65 Nancarrow started coming to wide public attention. He became better known in the 1980s, and was eventually lauded as one of the most significant composers of the century. The composer György Ligeti called his music "the great discovery since Webern and Ives ... the best of any composer living today." In 1982 he received a MacArthur Award which paid him $300,000 over 5 years. This increased interest in his work prompted him to write for more conventional instruments, and he produced several pieces for small ensembles. In 1987 Nancarrow met the German musician/inventor Trimpin, who invented a machine to convert Nancarrow's player piano rolls into MIDI notation, thus saving their contents from potential loss by accident or deterioration.

Still more recently, Nancarrow's entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the Wergo label. Many of his studies have also been arranged for musicians to play, and Joanna MacGregor has used multitracking to record several pieces on a normal piano. In 1995, composer and critic Kyle Gann published a full-length study of Nancarrow's output, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press).

Carlos Sandoval, who was Nancarrow's assistant (1990-94), says: "Nancarrow’s imagination was a mixture: the result of mixing the fantasy of an artist and the imagination of a scientist. Apart from his musical mastery, there is in his music a mathematical beauty: he did not see a clear border between both approaches and he never looked worried about it. This 'double-esthetic' is one of his most relevant contribution to the 20th century’s music.”