Samuel Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912–August 10, 1997) was an American-born Mexican composer. He is best known for his work titled Studies for Player Piano, which made him one of the first composers to use instruments that play themselves. These instruments can perform music in ways that are impossible for humans to achieve. Nancarrow spent most of his life mostly alone and was not widely recognized until the 1980s.

Biography

Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. He played the trumpet in a jazz band during his youth. He later studied music in Cincinnati, Ohio, and then in Boston, Massachusetts, with teachers such as Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky. He attended the National Music Camp and later met Arnold Schoenberg during that composer's brief stay in Boston in 1933. At the age of 15, Nancarrow enrolled at Vanderbilt University School of Engineering at the insistence of his father.

In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco. He was interned by the French at the Gurs internment camp in 1939. Upon his return to the United States in 1939, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were finding it difficult to renew their U.S. passports. After spending some time in New York City, Nancarrow moved in 1940 to Mexico to escape similar harassment.

He visited the United States briefly in 1947 and became a Mexican citizen in 1956. His next appearance in the U.S. was in San Francisco for the New Music America festival in 1981. He traveled regularly in the following years and lived in the current Casa Estudio Conlon Nancarrow (designed by Juan O'Gorman) at Las Águilas, Mexico City, until his death at 84. He was friends with some Mexican composers but was largely unknown in the local music establishment.

It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work for which he is best known. He had already written some music in the United States, but the technical demands of his compositions required such proficiency in the performer that satisfactory performances were rare. According to Annette Nancarrow, Nancarrow in Mexico was still frustrated by the "technical difficulties involved with two human hands playing his compositions on a piano," which he discussed with Arthur Gregor, a friend who was a school principal. They found a shop where Nancarrow bought a device that could create player piano rolls and "worked with the owner to learn technical details, such as how to record loud and soft, and different types of notes, and improve the machine." They were following a suggestion from Henry Cowell's book New Musical Resources, which Nancarrow bought in New York in 1939. The player piano produced complex rhythmic patterns at a speed 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 clear and organized pieces and, by his twenty-first composition for player piano, he had begun "sliding" (increasing and decreasing) tempi within strata. (See William Duckworth, Talking Music.) Nancarrow later said he had been interested in exploring electronic resources but that the piano rolls ultimately gave him more temporal control over his music.

Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow traveled to New York City in 1947 and bought a custom-built manual punching machine to enable him to punch the piano rolls. 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 (in one player piano) and metal (in the other) so as to produce a more percussive sound. On this trip to New York, he met Cowell and heard a performance of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (also influenced by Cowell's aesthetics), which would later lead to Nancarrow's modestly experimenting with prepared piano in his Study No. 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). His later works were abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from his own.

Many of these later pieces (which he generally called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution (i.e. 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, such as 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 many years in obscurity, Nancarrow benefited 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 the 1750 Arch label. Thus, at age 65, Nancarrow started coming to wide public attention. He became better known in the 1980s and was lauded by many, including György Ligeti, as one of the most significant composers of the century.

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 conventional instruments, and he composed several works for small ensembles.

In 1987, a composer and instrument builder named Trimpin would work with Nancarrow to preserve his pieces in an early MIDI format using his piano roll reader. Then, from that data, the music could be converted into relevant mediums such as the cassette tape and the floppy disk.

Nancarrow was married to Annette Margolis Nancarrow (grandmother of the writer Bret Stephens).

On March 2, 1971, Nancarrow married Yoko Sugiura Yamamoto in Mexico City.

Nancarrow died in 1997 in Mexico City. The complete contents of his studio, including the player piano rolls, the instruments, the libraries, and other documents and objects, are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

Reception

The composer György Ligeti said that the music of Conlon Nancarrow is "the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives … something great and important for all music history!" He described the music as very original, enjoyable, carefully made, and emotional. Ligeti believed it is the best music created by any living composer today.

Legacy

In 1995, Kyle Gann, a composer and music writer, published a detailed book about Conlon Nancarrow's music called The Music of Conlon Nancarrow. The book was published by Cambridge University Press and has 303 pages. Jürgen Hocker, a music expert on Nancarrow, published Begegnungen mit Nancarrow in 2002. The book was published by neue Zeitschrift für Musik and Schott Musik International in Mainz and has 284 pages.

Some of Nancarrow's piano studies were adapted so musicians can play them on different instruments.

German musician Wolfgang Heisig has performed Nancarrow's piano rolls live. Jürgen Hocker also performed them until his death in 2012. Both used instruments similar to those Nancarrow used.

Other musicians who perform Nancarrow's works include Thomas Adès, Alarm Will Sound, and the Dutch ensemble Calefax. Calefax recorded Nancarrow's piano studies on a CD that was called "Best CD of 2009" by the Dutch newspaper Het Parool. American clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn adapted some

Recordings

Columbia Records MS 7222 (released in 1969, removed from sale in 1973) includes Studies Nos. 2, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, and 33. These recordings were made at the composer’s studio and supervised by him. The original version of Study #10 is included on this release.

New World Records’ "Sound Forms for Piano" (LP released in 1976, CD released in 1995) includes Studies Nos. 1, 27, and 36. These were recorded in 1973 at the composer’s studio using two Ampico player pianos and equipment described as "old but in good condition."

1750 Arch Records (recorded in 1977) was produced by Charles Amirkhanian and originally released on four LPs between 1977 and 1984. These recordings are the only ones made using Nancarrow’s original instruments: two 1927 Ampico player pianos. One piano had hammers covered with metal, and the other had hammers with leather strips. These instruments most closely match what Nancarrow used in his own studio.

All of Nancarrow’s compositions for player piano have been recorded and released by the German Wergo label between 1989 and 1991.

In 1993, BMG released a CD (090262611802) featuring works by Nancarrow, including Studies for Player Piano, Tango, Toccata, Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra, Trio, and Sarabande & Scherzo. These were performed by Ensemble Modern and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher.

In March 2000, Other Minds Records released a CD titled Lost Works, Last Works, which includes previously unrecorded compositions by Nancarrow, such as Piece for Tape and Nancarrow’s own recording of a study for prepared player piano. The CD also includes an interview with the composer.

In July 2008, Other Minds Records released a remastered version of the 1750 Arch Records recordings on four CDs. The set includes a 52-page booklet with original liner notes by James Tenney, an essay by producer Charles Amirkhanian, and 24 illustrations.

A version of "Study #7" arranged for orchestra was performed by the London Sinfonietta and included on their 2006 CD Warp Works & Twentieth Century Masters.

An arrangement of "Player Piano Study #6" for piano and marimba was recorded by Alan Feinberg and Daniel Druckman on Feinberg’s 1994 album Fascinating Rhythm. Feinberg also recorded the pre-player piano era piece "Prelude" on the 1995 album The American Innovator on Argo / Decca.

List of works

• Note: For a complete list of the player piano studies, refer to Kyle Gann's Conlon Nancarrow: Annotated List of Works.
• Note: For an updated list (January 2008) of all works, arrangements, and editions, refer to Monika Fürst-Heidtmann's Dated and commented list of the works, premieres, and arrangements of the music of Conlon Nancarrow.

• Studies #1–30 (1948–1960) (#30 for prepared player piano)
• Studies #31–37, #40–51 (1965–1992) (#38 and #39 renumbered as #43 and #48)
• For Yoko (1990)
• Contraption #1 for computer-driven prepared piano (1993)

• Blues (1935)
• Prelude (1935)
• Sonatina (1941)
• 3 Two-Part Studies (1940s)
• Tango? (1983)
• 3 Canons for Ursula (1989)

• Sarabande and Scherzo for oboe, bassoon, and piano (1930)
• Toccata for violin and piano (1935)
• Septet (1940)
• Trio for clarinet, bassoon, and piano, #1 (1942)
• String Quartet #1 (1945)
• String Quartet #2 (late 1940s) incomplete
• String Quartet #3 (1987)
• Trio for oboe, bassoon, and piano, #2 (1991)
• Player Piano Study #34 arranged for string trio

• Piece #1 for small orchestra (1943)
• Piece #2 for small orchestra (1985)
• Study for Orchestra, canon 4:5:6 (1990–91), Original C.N. orchestration: 3 flute, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, a bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 3 French horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 vibraharps, 2 xylophones, marimba, one computer-controlled piano, piano, 6 violins, 2 cellos, 3 double basses. In two movements. Based on Study 49 a-c.