| Conlon Nancarrow |
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Information AboutConlon Nancarrow |
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Nancarrow is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the Player Piano . He was one of the first composers to use mechanical instruments as machines, far beyond human performance representations. He lived most of his life in complete introspection, not becoming widely known until the 1980s . Today, he is remembered as one of the most original and unusual composers of the 20th Century . 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. In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Francisco Franco . Upon his return, he learned that his Brigade colleagues were being denied their U.S.A. Passports as punishment for their political preferences. To escape the harassment visited upon such other left-leaning composers, Nancarrow moved in 1940 to Mexico , which remained his country until his death. He became a Mexican Citizen in 1955. It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work he is best known for today. He had already written some pieces in the United States, but the extreme technical demands they made on performers meant that satisfactory performances were very difficult to mount. In Mexico, with few 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 , ''Talking Music''.) Nancarrow later 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. Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow traveled to New York City 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 (also a result of Cowell's esthetics), which would later lead to Nancarrow experimenting with prepared piano in his Study #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'') 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. Many of these later pieces (which on the whole he called '', while the ''Study No. 37'' has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo. 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 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. Still more recently, Nancarrow's entire output for player piano has been recorded and released on the German Wergo label. Many of his studies 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). Carlos Sandoval , who was Nancarrow's assistant (1990-94), says: ::"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 and elegance: he did not see a clear border between both approaches and he never looked worried about it. This natural, organic '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 , 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." The complete Nancarrow's studio, with player piano rolls, instruments, libraries and other documents and objects are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel. The Germans Jurgen Hocker and Wolfgang Heissig are the current live-performers of Nancarrow's rolls using acoustical instruments. SOUND SAMPLES
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