Conlon Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow was the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives... something great and important for all music history! The appreciation belongs to another genius of modern polyphony, György Ligeti.

A great musician with a dramatic biography, who composed almost exclusively for a very unusual instrument, a titan of modern polyphony who remained unknown for almost all of his life, this was Nancarrow. Born in 1912, he was discovered by the musical world when he reached his late sixties.

A Southerner from Arkansas, Conlon Nancarrow played trumpet in a jazz band before starting some musical studies in Cincinnati and then in Boston (where he met briefly Schoenberg, in 1933).

In Boston Nancarrow entered the Communist Party and interrupted his studies to join the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. His fellows from the front were totally unaware of his musical preoccupations: after years they would remember their comrade as a guy very knowledgeable in how to prepare a good cigar.

Returned to US in 1939, Nancarrow found out that, due to his Communist positions, he would have troubles in renewing his passport. Nancarrow decided to move to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his life (he would pass away in 1997).

It was in Mexico that Nancarrow devoted himself totally to music. He had in his mind huge polyphonic structures: but in order to create orchestral works of such an amplitude he would have needed large orchestras at his disposal, which was no way, as nobody knew him. On the other hand, to write his works for a single instrument, they were so ample that it would have been impossible for a human to perform them.

The solution found by Nancarrow was an astounding one: to compose for the player piano! He bought a manual punching machine to prepare the piano rolls and started to make his compositions. What followed were tens of years of painstaking work. My soul is in the machine would once say Nancarrow: punching the rolls again and again to get the right combination of holes made necessary one year of effort for five minutes of music. But the result was overwhelming: Nacarrow created Das Wohltemperierte Clavier of the twentieth century!

And all this in absolute obscurity! His work was discovered in the eighth decade of the century. Since then he has been considered one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century.

Well, you shouldn't now believe that all musical world is enthusiastic about Nancarrow. Here is an opinion against him (as it was expressed in a change of emails with me): I like his jazz works, not the other ones; his systematic opposition to any piano performers (considering them error prone) is pure egocentrism; of course, it's impossible to not admire his asceticism; he was probably very shy, while a great personality, no question about it; as for the player piano, it's too mechanical, too cold, too perfect! It's not my opinion, I consider the music of Nancarrow a fascinating world. As for the player piano, I would compare it rather with a harpsichord than with a piano.

It's up to you now to decide whether my friend was right or not: I will try to post on the blog several of his studies for player piano that I found on youTube. I have many of them on CDs in my bookshelf at home.

• Study # 1 for Player Piano
• Study # 2a for Player Piano
• Studies # 3a-e for Player Piano
• Nancarrow Played by Calefax
• Study # 4 for Player Piano
• Study # 5 for Player Piano
• Study # 6 for Player Piano
• Study # 7 - the Original and a Trumpet Version
• Study # 7 again - Nancarrow and Vertov
• Study # 8 for Player Piano
• Study # 12 for Player Piano
  
• Study # 9 for Player Piano
• Study # 10 for Player Piano
• Study # 11 for Player Piano
• Study # 12 for Player Piano
  

(Musica Nova)