Composer, born in Texarkana, Arkansas, USA. He pursued both jazz and classical studies in his youth and in 1937 fought in the Spanish Civil War. Three years later he settled in Mexico City, where he created a series of unique, highly complex works for pianola by working directly on the piano rolls. He emerged from relative obscurity by way of a 1982 genius award from the MacArthur Foundation.
Nancarrow is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano.
Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas.
In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. After spending time in New York City in 1940, Nancarrow moved to Mexico to escape the harassment visited upon former Communist Party members.
He relinquished his American citizenship and became a Mexican citizen in 1955.
It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work he is best known for today. 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.
Cowell had suggested that just as there is a scale of pitch frequencies, there might also be a scale of tempi. Nancarrow undertook to create music which would superimpose tempi in cogent pieces, and by his twenty-first composition for player piano, had begun "sliding" (increasing and decreasing) tempi within strata. (see: William Duckworth, Talking Music.) 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. 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. Later works tend to be more abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from Nancarrow's.
Many of these later pieces (which he generally called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution or prolation canons. While most canons using this device, 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.
His music has a mathematical beauty and elegance that happily coexists with musical expressiveness and a puckish sense of humor. Nancarrow did not see a clear delineation between the two approaches and he never worried about it.
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.
Having spent many years 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.
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.
Still more recently, Nancarrow's entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the German Wergo label. In 1995, composer and critic Kyle Gann published a full-length study of Nancarrow's output, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. Jürgen Hocker, another Nancarrow specialist, published Begegnungen mit Nancarrow (neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schott Musik International, Mainz 2002, 284 pp.)
The complete contents of Nancarrow's studio, including the player piano rolls, the instruments, the libraries, and other documents and objects, are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. The Germans Jurgen Hocker and Wolfgang Heisig are the current live-performers of Nancarrow's rolls using similar acoustical instruments.
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