Conlon Nancarrow

Samuel Conlon Nancarrow ( born October 27, 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas, United States; † August 10, 1997 in Mexico City) was a Mexican composer of U.S. origin.

Nancarrow was known for his 51 studies ( studies ) for player piano. The composer punched his compositions for electro- mechanical player pianos directly in the piano roll of pianos. The strong and broad strips of paper with which Nancarrow was heading the mechanics of such pianos. Roughly comparable to the tape used on older computers or cards So Nancarrow was able to achieve in terms of tempo, rhythm and meter new musical structures that go far beyond the game manual ability of pianists.

The turn to advance by composers largely unappreciated player piano resulted from early experiences with the poor performance quality of its heavy playable compositions, but also from Nancarrow's situation exile in Mexico, where he was of institutions that perform modern music or promote composers, isolated. From 1947 on Nancarrow wrote exclusively for this instrument for which he own tools and punching machines built, even the sound of the own piano was modified.

Life

Nancarrow began in 1930 to study at the Conservatory of Cincinnati (trumpet ). This was followed from 1934 to study composition with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions and Nicolas Slonimsky in Boston. He was temporarily a member of the Communist Party USA. Then Nancarrow traveled from 1936 as a jazz trumpeter on a steamer to Europe. He visited London, Paris and Germany. As a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in 1937 he went to Spain and fought there during the Civil War on the Republican side. After the defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War In 1939 Nancarrow seriously injured back to the U.S. and moved there to New York.

Already from 1938 on Nancarrow's first works were published. He was after his return to the United States for the first time aware of the compositional possibilities of the Player Piano By an article of the composer Henry Cowell.

From 1940 on Nancarrow, like many of his former comrades of the Lincoln Brigade increasingly politically motivated difficulties in the United States. When they wanted to withdraw his passport, he left the United States and moved to Mexico because he did not want to be treated as " second class citizens ".

In 1947, Nancarrow purchased the New York Player Piano by Ampico and apparatus for punching the corresponding piano roll. A year later, he finally settled down in Mexico. There he started composing pieces for player piano. 1955 Nancarrow took Mexican citizenship.

After John Cage in 1960 acquainted with the music of Nancarrow, choreographed Merce Cunningham, with the Cage worked together a lot in that time, several studies. From 1969, first recordings with the studies were produced. The label Arch Records began in 1976 with a total output of studies (No. 1-41 were published until 1984 ).

In 1982 he became MacArthur Fellow. In the same year presented Nancarrow, after mediation by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, the first time his music personally and live the European audience. Also bought on the advice of Ligeti and restored Jürgen Hocker 1983 an original Ampico - Bösendorfer grand piano auto-play to make Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano performable in concerts. The first live performance of Nancarrow's Studies in 1986 at the Holland Festival in the presence of Nancarrow. From 1987 to 1990 follow concert tours Nancarrow with the Ampico Bösendorfer self - Game Wings to Cologne, Hamburg, Hanover, Berlin, Vienna, Paris. On the occasion of the Donaueschingen Music Days 1994 and 1997, there was the premiere of Nancarrow's Studies for Player two pianos. In 1997 the first performance of the complete work for Nancarrow's Player Piano at the Cologne Music Triennale by Jürgen Hocker.

In 1997, Nancarrow died aged 84 in Mexico City. The estate of Nancarrow, including instruments and his punching device is located in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

Reception

Even in the scene of new music remained Nancarrow long time largely unknown. It was only in the 1980s, his work was listed propagated and known to a wider audience, especially György Ligeti promoted the spread of Nancarrow's work.

Published in 2010 the German techno artist Wolfgang Voigt Nancarrow strongly inspired by the album the open piano, on which he combined pianola sounds and minimal techno rhythms.

Nancarrow's music

The style of Conlon Nancarrow is fundamentally different from all other composers of the European and American avant-garde. His greatest interest was rhythmic and temporal sequences, and his music was almost exclusively polyphonic, which means multiple voices are sounded simultaneously, but are independent of each other. The principle of polyphonic music existed before the Renaissance, but Nancarrow developed a stand-alone Access: The different voices were usually not the same speed. Specifically, this means for example that a ratio of 4:5 between the two votes prevails: Plays a voice four beats, the other plays in the same time five strokes of the same note value. He often used the form of the canon, with, for example, the faster voice started later, so they met at a common endpoint. Most of Nancarrow's compositions have a strict structure, in a sense a " blueprint", which summarizes the different speeds in a frame. With his later compositions created Nancarrow pieces of incredible temporal complexity; so he used in his Study No. 33, the square root of 2 as the ratio of votes to each other: The result are two voices that never meet. Important in this context are also characterized by Nancarrow concepts of " temporal consonance " and " temporal dissonance ". Consonant intervals are characterized by simple division ratios of the string from (1:2 at the octave, 2:3 at the bottom ... ). Accordingly, temporal consonances are characterized by a low partition ratio; "meet" the metrics of votes so often. A temporal dissonance, however, would be a complicated relationship - in the Study No. 33 example 2: √ 2

Operation

For the player piano to write and create the role, which is read by self-playing instrument pneumatic, required an immense amount of work and great precision, allowing for a few minutes of music were taken several months to complete. Nancarrow was here before in several steps:

After Nancarrow had made a plan about the temporal relationships of a piece, he drew on the whole, still empty roll markings that indicated the meter a respective voice. So it was later possible to see where had to be punched. For the marks he made stencils, which he kept in a cabinet in his studio. Marking the role was a very expensive process because the role could be more than ten feet long, and often many voices are involved simultaneously.

In a second step, he transferred all the markings on conventional music paper. The marks here had not be as precise as on the roll. He then began to compose - but he used this shorthand that only he himself could fully decipher. This method was specifically designed for the role from the score he could then punch the role.

The stamping of the role was an incredibly tedious process because a hole in the role only produces a single staccato sound. For the generation of longer notes, it was necessary to punch many holes directly behind the other. At the beginning of his work with the player piano Nancarrow could always punch only one hole at once, which also influenced his pieces at a very pointillist style back. Later he was able to punch several holes at once what it opened up new possibilities. It is particularly noteworthy that the long work process that did not stop him to write pieces with incredible speeds and fast sequences of notes.

Nancarrow has made ​​and conventional scores of his Studies for Player Piano for those interested. Studies for Player Piano was added to the list Wire The Wire 's " 100 Records That Set The World On Fire (While No One Was Listening ) ".