Musicians - Conlon Nancarrow

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	Musicians - Conlon Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 - August 10, 1997) was an American composer who took Mexican citizenship in 1955. He is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano, using it as a sort of mechanical music sequencer. 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. 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 went to Spain to fight in the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Francisco Franco. Upon his return, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were being denied American passports as punishment for their Party membership. To escape the harassment visited upon such other left-leaning composers as Aaron Copland, Elie Siegmeister, and David Diamond, Nancarrow moved in 1940 to Mexico City, which remained his home until his death.

It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work he is best known for today. He had already written some pieces in America, but the extreme technical demands they made on performers meant that satisfactory performances were very difficult to mount. In Mexico, where the contemporary classical music scene was poorly funded, and there were even fewer 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 has 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 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 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, 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.

Having spent most of his life in obscurity, Nancarrow benefitted from the 1969 release of an entire 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).

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