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. October 27 is the 300th day of the year (301st in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 65 days remaining. ... 1912 (MCMXII) was a leap year starting on Monday in the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Tuesday in the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... August 10 is the 222nd day of the year (223rd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII in Roman) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The player piano is a type of piano that plays music without the need for a human pianist to depress the normal keys or pedals. ... In the field of electronic music, a sequencer was originally any device that recorded and played back a sequence of control information for an electronic musical instrument. ... The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...

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. The famous post office on state line in Texarkana TX/AR Texarkana is a city located in Miller County, ArkansasGR6, and is its county seat. ... Trumpeter redirects to here. ... Jazz is an original American musical art form originating around the early 1920s in New Orleans, rooted in Western music technique and theory, and is marked by the profound cultural contributions of African Americans. ... Nickname: The Queen City Official website: http://www. ... Nickname: City on a Hill, Beantown, The Hub (of the Solar System), Athens of America Motto: Official website: www. ... Roger Sessions (28 December 1896 – 16 March 1985) was an American composer, critic and teacher of music. ... Walter Hamor Piston Jr. ... Nicolas Slonimsky (April 27, 1894 - December 25, 1995) was a Russian-American composer, conductor, music critic, musician, and author. ... Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1938 For the American music critic and journalist, see Harold Charles Schonberg. ...

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. The Spanish Civil War (July 1936–April 1939) was a conflict in which the incumbent Second Spanish Republic and political left-wing groups fought against a right-wing nationalist insurrection led by General Francisco Franco, who eventually succeeded in ousting the Republican government and establishing a personal dictatorship. ... Francisco Franco Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde (pron. ... The title page of European Union member state passports bears the name European Union, then the name of the issuing country, in the official languages of all EU countries. ... Aaron Copland conducting. ... American composer, educator and author, Elie Siegmeister (1909-1991) had a varied musical output that was most often concerned with the development of an authentic American musical vocabulary. ... There are at least two David Diamonds David Diamond the journalist David Diamond the composer This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Mexico City (Spanish: Ciudad de México) is the name of a megacity located in the Valley of Mexico (Valle de México), a large valley in the high plateaus (altiplano) in the South of Mexico, about 2,240 meters (7,349 feet) above sea-level, surrounded on most sides...

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. Henry Cowell (March 11, 1897 - December 10, 1965) was an American composer, musical theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. ... Rhythm (Greek ρυθμός = tempo) is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time. ... Electronic music is a term for music created using electronic devices. ...

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. A piano roll is the medium used to operate the player piano or pianola, band/fairground organs, calliopes and hand-cranked organs and orchestrions and pipe organs as well. ... In music, dynamics refers to the volume or loudness of the sound or note, in particular to the range from soft (quiet) to loud. ... Modern leather-working tools Leather is a material created through the tanning of hides, pelts and skins of animals, primarily cows. ... Hot metal work from a blacksmith Look up Metal in Wiktionary, the free dictionary In chemistry, a metal (Greek: Metallon) is an element that readily forms ions (cations) and has metallic bonds, and metals are sometimes described as a lattice of positive ions (cations) surrounded by a sea of delocolised... Percussion instruments are music instruments played by being struck, shaken, rubbed or scraped, hence the percussive name. ... John Cage John Milton Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American experimental music composer, writer and visual artist. ...

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. Harmony is the use and study of pitch simultaneity and chords, actual or implied, in music. ... Look up melody in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In music, a motif is a perceivable or salient reoccurring fragment or succession of notes that may used to construct the entirety or parts of complete melodies, themes. ... Jazz is an original American musical art form originating around the early 1920s in New Orleans, rooted in Western music technique and theory, and is marked by the profound cultural contributions of African Americans. ... Art Tatum, The Great Jazz Pianist Arthur Tatum, Jr. ... Metre or meter is the measurement of a musical line into measures of stressed and unstressed beats, indicated in Western notation by a symbol called a time signature. ... Boogie woogie has two different meanings: a piano based music style, boogie woogie (music) a dance that imitates the rocknroll of the 50s, boogie woogie (dance) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

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. An etude (from the French word étude meaning study) is a short musical composition designed to provide practice in a particular technical skill in the performance of a solo instrument. ... This article is about the musical use of the word canon. For other uses, see canon (disambiguation). ... In music and music theory augmentation is the lengthening or widening of rhythms, melodies, intervals, chords. ... Diminution, from Italian diminuimento, is a musical term used to mean different things in the context of melodies and intervals or chords. ... Johann Sebastian Bach (21 March 1685 O.S. – 28 July 1750 N.S.) was a prolific German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and solo instruments drew together almost all of the strands of the baroque style and brought it to its ultimate maturity. ... In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for time) is the speed or pace of a given piece. ... ex is the unique function f, such that for any real number x, ex = f(x) = f(x). ... Lower-case π (the lower case letter is usually used for the constant) The mathematical constant π ≈ 3. ...

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). Steve Reich Steve Reich (born Stephen Michael Reich, October 3, 1936; last name pronounced []) is an American composer. ... Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer. ... Terry Riley - (Portrait by Betty Freeman) Terry Riley (born 24 June 1935 in Colfax, California) is an American composer associated with the minimalist school. ... Max Neuhaus (1939 in Beaumont, TX) is a renowned percussionist and composer of numerous sound installations. ...

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 eventually 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. The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ... György Sándor Ligeti (born May 28, 1923) is a Jewish Hungarian composer (now living in, and a citizen of, Austria), widely seen as one of the great composers of instrumental music of the 20th century. ... Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945) was an Austrian composer. ... This photo from around 1913 shows Ives in his day job: he was the director of a successful insurance agency. ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution. ...

Still more recently, Nancarrow's entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the Wergo label. Many of his studies have also been arranged for musicians to play, and Joanna MacGregor has used multitracking to record several pieces on a normal piano. In 1995, composer and critic Kyle Gann published a full-length study of Nancarrow's output, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge University Press). Joanna MacGregor, a popular classical pianist, was born July 16, 1959 in England. ... A grand piano A piano is a keyboard instrument, which is widely used in western music for solo performance, chamber music, and accompaniment, and also as a convenient aid to composing and rehearsal. ... Kyle Gann (born November 21 1955) is a composer and music critic born in Dallas, Texas. ...

Carlos Sandoval, who was Nancarrow's assistant (1990-94), says: Composer Carlos Sandoval studied classical guitar and composition at the National School of Music, in Mexico. ...

"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: he did not see a clear border between both approaches and he never looked worried about it. This '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."

Semiotics (also spelled Semeiotics) is the study of signs and sign systems. ... In mathematics, extrapolation is a type of interpolation. ... Electronic music is a term for music created using electronic devices. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... Look up system in Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the Macintosh operating system, which was called System up to version 7. ... Look up melody in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for time) is the speed or pace of a given piece. ... Rhythm (Greek ρυθμός = tempo) is the variation of the duration of sounds or other events over time. ... ...

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.

Vorbis is an open and free audio compression (codec) project from the Xiph. ... Vorbis is an open and free audio compression (codec) project from the Xiph. ... Glissando (plural: glissandi) is a musical term that refers to either a continuous sliding from one pitch to another (a true glissando), or an incidental scale played while moving from one melodic note to another (an effective glissando). ...

External links

• CompositionToday - Conlon Nancarrow article and review of works
• Composer & musicologist Kyle Gann's Nancarrow Page Gann, author of "The Music of Conlon Nancarrow," is one of the current authorities on the composer's work.
• Hocker's Life and Work of Conlon Nancarrow. Invaluable information, photos and letters, in German By Jurgen Hocker.
• Carlos Sandoval's site Specific information on Nancarrow's studio, music library (databased) and other very specific issues.

Listening

• Art of the States: Conlon Nancarrow many works by the composer
• Conlon Nancarrow on KPFA's Ode To Gravity series from 1987, including interviews from Mexico City and New York by Charles Amirkhanian, recorded in 1977
• A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Conlon Nancarrow (Helen Borten, writer/producer/narrator; 28 January 1994)
• Conlon Nancarrow: Otherworldly Compositions for Player Piano a radio article produced by Minnesota Public Radio a few months after Nancarrow's death; several works are excerpted in the article itself, and several others can be found on the accompanying page