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Conlon
Nancarrow, along with Cage, Cowell, Ives, Partch, and Ruggles, one of the
more important of 20th century America's experimental composers, was born
in 1912, in Texarkana, Arkansas, the son of the town's mayor. In 1930, he
enrolled in the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music as a trumpet student. In
Cincinnati, in addition to studying trumpet, he played in the school's orchestra
and local jazz groups. During his first year in Cincinnati, he heard the Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra play Le Sacre du Printemps and was overwhelmed by it. The
score's rhythmic complexity was a revelation to him. He also became acquainted
with the music of Bartok during this period. It was in Cincinnati that he
met and married his first wife in 1932, the former Helen Rigby. Shortly thereafter,
he and his wife moved to Boston, where he began to study composition privately
with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky. While in Boston,
Nancarrow became a political activist and joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
which fought with Republican Loyalists in Spain against Franco's fascist government.
He lived the last forty-five years of his life in Mexico City and became a
Mexican citizen in 1981.
The unique characteristic of most of Nancarrow's compositions is that most of them were notated by perforating player-piano rolls to mark the notes and rhythms and can be performed only by activating such piano rolls. This method of composition gave him total freedom in conjuring up the most complex contrapuntal, harmonic, and rhythmic combinations that no human pianist or number of human pianists could possibly perform. The method of composing itself was extremely laborious. A bar containing a few dozen notes might require an hour to stamp out on the piano roll.
Although he lived in obscurity for most of his life, his works appreciated by only a few cognoscenti, wider recognition finally came in the 1980s. His works began appear on programs of new music throughout the world, and, most significantly, in 1982, he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" of $300,000, allowing him to continue his work without concern for finances. He died in Mexico City in 1997, after battling a number of ailments for several years.
The item on display here is one of his Player Piano Etudes .