Conlon Nancarrow

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Conlon Nancarrow (born October 27, 1912 in Texarkana; died August 10, 1997 in Mexico City) was a composer.

Nancarrow is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use mechanical instruments as machines, far beyond human performance representations. He lived most of his life in complete introspection, 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. He played trumpet in a jazz band in his youth, before studying music first in Cincinnati, Ohio 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.

In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Francisco Franco. Upon his return, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were being denied their U.S.A. passports as punishment for their political preferences. To escape the harassment visited upon such other left-leaning composers, Nancarrow moved in 1940 to Mexico, which remained his country until his death. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955.

It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work he is best known for today. He had already written some pieces in the United States, but the extreme technical demands they made on performers meant that satisfactory performances were very difficult to mount. In Mexico, with few musicians capable of performing his works, the need to find an alternative way of having his pieces performed became even more pressing. Taking a suggestion from Henry Cowell's book New Musical Resources, which he bought in New York in 1939, Nancarrow found the answer in the player piano, with its ability to produce extremely complex rhythmic patterns at a speed far beyond the abilities of humans. Nancarrow later said that if electronic resources had been available to him at this time, he would have probably written music for them, but they were not.

Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow traveled to New York City 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 very 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 (also a result of Cowell's esthetics), 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) and are probably the most jazzy of all his works. Later works tend to be more abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from Nancarrow's.

Many of these later pieces (which on the whole he called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution. While most such canons, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1, Nancarrow's canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio e:pi, while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.

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 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.

Still more recently, Nancarrow's entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the German Wergo label. Many of his studies have also been arranged for musicians to play. 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 and elegance: he did not see a clear border between both approaches and he never looked worried about it. This natural, organic 'double-esthetic' is one of his most relevant contribution to the 20th century’s music.”

"Other important contribution has relation with a kind of 'semiological extrapolation'. On one hand, his music can be listening as 'symbols', with their often-recognized analogical correspondences (Blues, Jazz, Flamenco, bla-bla). On the other hand, there is an 'abstract, decodified profile' (the complex poly-temporal structures, for instance) which may be also present in the same piece. This fact does break the statement 'something is more different when its similarity decreases' generally used in semiology...

"His answer to the electronic music –where everything has to be invented, and meaning (signum), origin (origo), symbol (symbolon) are not necessarily implicit, not to mention explicit— is the creation of a closed self-contained system, at the same time versatile and self sufficient. Just like the systems one can find in aural-oral tradition systems. This issue is related with the idea of a 'natural language', based (in his case) upon a very generic sense of motif, applied to different level resources: melody, tempo, rhythm and texture."

"Many scholars think of Nancarrow as exiled in a small island called Mexico. Typical colonialist arrogance: An isolated is someone who ignores everything around him, not someone who is ignored by others."

The complete Nancarrow's studio, with player piano rolls, instruments, libraries and other documents and objects are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel. The Germans Jurgen Hocker and Wolfgang Heissig are the current live-performers of Nancarrow's rolls using acoustical instruments.

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Sound samples

Opening of the Study 3a (Vorbis format, 20 seconds, 92KB) - one of the first piano rolls that Nancarrow made, clearly showing the boogie-woogie influence of his early work
Ending of the Study 40b (Vorbis format, 16 seconds, 74KB) - this later piece demonstrates Nancarrow's mature, abstract style, with copious use of glissandi. 40b is one of the studies for two player pianos playing simultaneously.

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