Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was a U.S.-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1955.
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 composer's brief stay in Boston in 1933.
Upon his first subsequent return to the U.S., in 1981 (for the New Music America festival in San Francisco), he consulted a lawyer about the possibility of returning to his native country, since the pollution in Mexico City was worsening his emphysema. He was told that he would have to sign a statement swearing that he had been "young and foolish" when he embraced communism, which he refused to do. Consequently, he continued living in Las Águilas, Mexico City, until his death at age 84. Though he had a few friends among Mexican composers, he was largely ignored by the Mexican musical establishment during most of his lifetime.
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[when?] 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.
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 Nancarrow's.
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 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.
Composer Gyorgy Ligeti described the music of Conlon Nancarrow as "This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives...something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed, but at the same time emotional...for me it's the best music of any composer living today."
Columbia Records (1969)
Nancarrow's entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the German Wergo label. Some of his Studies for Player Piano have also been arranged for musicians to play. 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, 303 pp.). Jürgen Hocker, another Nancarrow specialist, published Begegnungen mit Nancarrow (neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schott Musik International, Mainz 2002, 284 pp.
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