Conlon Nancarrow

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Conlon Nancarrow (1987)

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

Nancarrow was known the 51 studies ( studies ) for player piano . The composer punched his compositions for electro-mechanical self-playing pianos directly into the piano rolls . The strong and wide strips of paper that Nancarrow used to control the mechanics of such pianos are roughly comparable to the punched strips or cards used in older computers . In this way, Nancarrow was able to create novel musical structures in terms of tempo , rhythm and meter that go far beyond the manual playing ability of pianists.

The turn to the player piano, previously largely ignored by composers, arose from early experiences with the poor performance quality of his difficult-to-play compositions, but also from Nancarrow's situation in exile in Mexico, where he was isolated from institutions that perform modern music or promote composers . From 1947 Nancarrow wrote exclusively for this instrument, for which he built his own tools and punching machines, and the sound of the piano was also modified.

Life

Nancarrow began a study on 1930 Conservatory of Cincinnati (trumpet). From 1934 he studied composition with Walter Piston , Roger Sessions and Nicolas Slonimsky in Boston . He was a temporary member of the US Communist Party . From 1936 onwards, Nancarrow traveled to Europe as a jazz trumpeter on a steamer. He visited London , Paris and Germany . As a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade , he went to Spain in 1937 and fought on the Republican side in the civil war . After the defeat of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Nancarrow returned to the USA in 1939, seriously injured, and moved there to New York .

Nancarrow's first works were published as early as 1938. An article by the composer Henry Cowell made him aware of the compositional possibilities of the player piano for the first time after his return to the USA.

From 1940 onwards, like many of his former comrades in the Lincoln Brigade, Nancarrow had increasingly politically motivated difficulties in the United States. When the attempt was made to withdraw his passport, he left the United States and moved to Mexico because he did not want to be treated as a "second class citizen".

In 1947, in New York, Nancarrow bought an AMPICO player piano and a device for punching the accompanying piano rolls . A year later he finally settled in Mexico. There he began composing pieces for the player piano . In 1955, Nancarrow took on Mexican citizenship.

After John Cage was introduced to the music of Nancarrow in 1960 , Merce Cunningham , with whom Cage worked a lot during this time , choreographed some studies . From 1969 the first recordings were made with the studies . The Arch Records label began in 1976 with a complete edition of the studies (Nos. 1-41 were published until 1984).

In 1982 he became a MacArthur Fellow . In the same year, Nancarrow, after mediation by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti , presented his music personally and live to the European audience for the first time. Also on the advice of Ligeti, Jürgen Hocker acquired and restored an original Ampico Bösendorfer self-playing piano in 1983 in order to make Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano performable in concerts. The first live performance of Nancarrows Studies took place in 1986 on the occasion of the Holland Festival in the presence of Nancarrows. From 1987 to 1990 Nancarrow made concert tours with the Ampico-Bösendorfer self-playing piano to Cologne, Hamburg, Hanover, Berlin, Vienna and Paris. On the occasion of the Donaueschinger Musiktage , Nancarrow's Studies for two Player Pianos were premiered in 1994 and 1997 . In 1997, Jürgen Hocker performed the complete works of Nancarrows for player piano for the first time on the occasion of the Cologne Music Triennial. In 1992 he was made an honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters , in 1993 an honorary membership of the International Society for Contemporary Music ISCM ( International Society for New Music ).

In 1997 Nancarrow died in Mexico City at the age of 84. Nancarrow's estate, including his instruments and his punching equipment, is in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel .

reception

From left to right: György Ligeti, Lukas Ligeti , Vera Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow and Michael Daugherty at the ISCM World Music Days in Graz, Austria, 1982

Even in the new music scene , Nancarrow remained largely unknown for a long time. It was not until the 1980s that his work was performed more frequently and became known to a larger circle, especially György Ligeti and Wolfgang Heisig promoted the spread of Nancarrow's work.

In 2010 the German techno artist Wolfgang Voigt released the album Freiland Klaviermusik , which was strongly inspired by Nancarrow , on which he combines pianola sounds and minimal techno rhythms.

Nancarrow's music

The style of Conlon Nancarrow differs fundamentally from that of all other composers of the European and American avant-garde. His greatest interest was rhythmic and temporal processes, and his music was almost exclusively polyphonic , i.e. That is, several voices sound at the same time, but are independent of each other. The principle of polyphonic music already existed before the Renaissance, but Nancarrow developed an independent approach: the different voices were usually not equally fast. Specifically, this means z. For example, that there is a ratio of 4: 5 between two voices: If one voice plays four beats, the other plays five beats of the same note value at the same time. He often used the form of the canon, with the faster voice, for example, starting later, so that both met at a common end point. Most of Nancarrow's compositions have a strict structure, a kind of “blueprint” that summarizes the different speeds in a frame. With his later compositions, Nancarrow created pieces of incredible temporal complexity; so he used in his Study No. 33 the square root of 2 as the ratio of the votes to each other: The result is two votes that never meet. The terms “temporal consonance” and “temporal dissonance” coined by Nancarrow are also important in this context. Consonant intervals are characterized by uncomplicated pitch ratios of the string (1: 2 for the octave, 2: 3 for the fifth ...). Accordingly, temporal consonances are also characterized by a low division ratio; the meters of the voices “meet” often. A temporal dissonance, on the other hand, would be a complicated relationship - in Study No. 33 for example 2: √2.

Working method

Writing for the player piano and generating the role that is read pneumatically by the self-playing instrument required an immense amount of work and great precision, so that just a few minutes of music took several months to complete. Nancarrow proceeded in several steps:

After Nancarrow had drawn up a plan for the temporal relationships of a piece, he drew markings on the entire, still empty roll that indicated the meter of each part. So it was later possible to see where the punching had to be done. For the markings, he made templates that he kept in a cupboard in his studio. Marking the roll was a very complex process, as the roll could be over ten meters long and often many voices are involved at the same time.

In a second step, he transferred all the markings to conventional music paper. The markings didn't have to be as precise here as on the roll. Then he began to compose - however, he used a shorthand for this that only he could fully decipher himself. This method was specially tailored to the role, and he could then punch the role from the score.

Punching the roll was an incredibly tedious process as a hole in the roll only creates a single staccato tone. To create longer notes it was necessary to punch many holes in a row. At the beginning of his work with the player piano, Nancarrow could only punch one hole at a time, which also influenced his pieces to a very pointillist style. Later he was able to punch several holes at once, which opened up new possibilities for him. It is particularly noteworthy that the long work process did not prevent him from writing pieces with unbelievable speeds and rapid note sequences.

Nancarrow has also made conventional scores of his Studies for Player-Piano for those interested. Studies for Player Piano was included in The Wire's “100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)” .

literature

  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: The music of Conlon Nancarrow. In: Otfrid Nies, Klaus Marx, Rainer Berger (Hrsg.): Program for Documenta July 7th - September Kassel 1982.
  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: Conlon Nancarrow. An old-fashioned avant-garde? In: FonoForum. 7. Munich 1983, pp. 69-71.
  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: Conlon Nancarrows Studies for Player Piano - Time is the last frontier in music. In: Melos. 4. 46th year. Mainz 1984, pp. 104-122. (Correction of printing errors in Melos. 5, 1985, p. 82)
  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: “When composing, I only followed my wishes”. Conlon Nancarrow in conversation. In: MusikTexte. 21. Cologne 1987, pp. 29-32.
  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: Conlon Nancarrow and the emancipation of the tempo. An overview of the Studies for Player Piano. In: New magazine for music. 7/8. Mainz 1989, pp. 32-38.
  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: Conlon Nancarrow and the emancipation of the tempo. In: Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller (Ed.): Report on the boarding school. Symposium “Charles Ives and the American Music Tradition to the Present”. (= Cologne contributions to music research. Volume 164). Cologne 1988, Regensburg 1990, pp. 249-264.
  • Kyle Gann : The Music of Conlon Nancarrow. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  • Monika Fürst-Heidtmann: Sensual-vital and intellectual-structural. Conlon Nancarrow - a strange eccentric. In: MusikTexte. 73/74, Cologne 1998, pp. 90-93.
  • Thomas Phleps: "Complex, but simple". Conlon Nancarrow's tempo-dissonating Boogie Woogies and Canons for player piano. In: Constantin Floros , Friedrich Geiger, Thomas Schäfer (eds.): Composition as communication. On the music of the 20th century (= Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft. 17). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2000, pp. 175-205. (PDF)
  • Jürgen Hocker: Encounters with Conlon Nancarrow. Schott, Mainz 2002, ISBN 3-7957-0476-6 .
  • Hanns-Peter Mederer: “Experiment and Form.” Observations on Conlon Nancarrow's “study no. 20”. In: Music & Aesthetics. 10th year, issue 38, April 2006, pp. 102-108.
  • Gregor Herzfeld : Nancarrow's sublime time games. In: Archives for Musicology . 64/4, 2007, pp. 285-305.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Honorary Members: Conlon Nancarrow. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 17, 2019 .
  2. ^ ISCM Honorary Members
  3. ↑ De: Bug 144, Jul./Aug. 2010, p. 80.
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Voigt - Freiland Klaviermusik at discogs.com, accessed on June 30, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Nancarrow, Conlon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nancarrow, Samuel Conlon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mexican composer
DATE OF BIRTH October 27, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Texarkana , Arkansas , United States
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1997
Place of death Mexico city