Conlon Nancarrow was born in Texarkana in 1912. He showed great interest at a young age in reading about diverse subjects and became self-taught from a very young age. He started learning how to play the violin when he was 10, but it wasn’t until college, when he was studying for an Engineering Degree in Vanderbilt, that he trained himself in musical composition and interpretation (he studied with Roger Sessions, Nicolas Slonimsky and Arnold Schoenberg). He grew closer to jazz while studying music, choosing the trumpet as his instrument of choice.
Nancarrow traveled to Europe in 1936 as the trumpeter of a jazz band. During that trip he visited London, Paris, Austria, Nazi Germany and Spain. In Spain, he enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It should be mentioned that Nancarrow had been a member of the Communist party since 1933. At the end of the Civil War, Nancarrow went back to France and then to the US. During that time, even though his music started earning greater appreciation, when he returned to his home country he was harassed politically, leading him to immigrate to México. A few years later, he even lost his US citizenship and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1955.
Stories have been told about Nancarrow as a soldier in Spain. They say that, apart from his single-handed cigarette-making skills, he was known among the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for how he used to play the trumpet on calm mornings in the trenches. While it seems that his political affiliations were not evident in his compositions, his transgressive, rebellious spirit was imprinted in the invention of a new aesthetic he developed of an unprecedented musical language.
Already as a Mexican, when he was living in this home-studio on Calzada de Las Águilas (designed by his beloved friend Juan O’Gorman), Nancarrow used to listen to Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and Pérez Prado’s music.
Julio Estrada’s perspective of Nancarrow capture his iconclasm in the following:
Before listening to his music, the character seemed somewhat eccentric to me for the mere fact of belonging to the American underground culture, with which we had very little contact in Mexico. His unique “cave” and his rare vocation for music made from piercing rolls seemed to repeat his fighting ability, as if this man, who was around 60 years old at the time, was still entrenched in a fight; alone this time. On that occasion, the music that he made me hear gave me the joy of listening to the feats that he achieved with his instruments.
[…] that method for producing music, associated with a technology that at that time did not seem as rudimentary as it does today, seemed to me that was only achievable for those who possessed a certain degree of self-sufficiency. That first meeting allowed me to understand a part of the musical value of the character, in whom the musician and the technician merged, whose expert knowledge of the composition and the entrails of the mechanical piano had made him an autonomous artist-craftsman who creates the precise execution of his own work.
In Mexico, the reputation of Nancarrow is similar to that of Revueltas. Both are finally understood for their musical genius. They are beginning to be unanimously recognized outside and inside the country as great musicians of the 20th century though the mainstream acknowlegement of both composers still faces resistance that is not over yet.
Today, nonetheless, it is clear that Conlon Nancarrow was ahead of his time. He solved unprecedented problems in tempo and rhythm by devising genuine solutions that later emerge in other styles and schools of music, such as minimalism in the sixties or electronic and digital music in the seventies. Both can be now understood as offshoots predicated by Nancarrow’s music one or two decades before.
Without going into specific detail, Nancarrow’s music gradually developed within the very field of composition which can be fairly understood as a summa musicalis. The novelty of Nancarrow’s music has already been highlighted by others: his use of canonical poly-tempi, the discontinuous-continuous duality resulting from the massive superposition of discrete textures or the timbre musical tempo resulting from extreme accelerations that exceed the limits of temporal perception.[1]
Nancarrow made compositions for the Pianola, an analog machine using piano rolls because performers could not play his delirious musical tempos. Having first composed for orchestra, he was soon annoyed by human error and the inaccuracy of the musicians. His discovery of the player piano grew out of his independence and courage of his conviction to write music that could be performed correctly.
For many, the player piano does not perform miracles and Nancarrow’s well tamed player pianos seem to obey only him. That is why its influence cannot be measured in direct references, quotes or unleashed prestissimos. His studies for the player piano are deeper and more premonitory than any of that because each one comes from deep and serious reflections on the relationship between the human being (and his slippery notion of time) and the machine (with no slippery notion at all).[2]
1969 – Columbia Records llevó a cabo el lanzamiento de un álbum completo de su trabajo.
1976 – 1984- 1750 Arch Records releases four volumes of the Player Piano Studies, up through No. 41.
1978 – Premio MacArthur.
1982 – Beca Guggenheim para las artes creativas, EE. UU. y Canadá.
1986 – Piece for Small Orchestra #2 Commissioned by Betty Freeman for the Continuum Ensemble. Premiere on April 16, 1986, New York. Smith Publications, 1988.
1987 – Holland Festival, Amsterdam NL performances String Quartet # 3, commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Premiered on October 15, 1988, by the Arditti String Quartet in Cologne.
1991 – 1997 – El gobierno de México le otorgó una beca anual para fomentar su producción artística.
1996 – Miembro de la Academia de Artes de México.
2017 – Premio de creación Conlon Nancarrow (en honor a Nancarrow). Con el propósito de incentivar el interés de las nuevas generaciones en la música de Nancarrow, la Facultad de Música convocó a sus estudiantes de composición a un concurso de obras breves dedicadas al compositor.
