If you know the name, no explanation necessary. If not, he was a big
influence on electronic music (albeit indirectly), working almost
exclusively with an early and cumbersome sequencer called the -player
piano-.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 07:28:48 -0800
From: Herb Levy <herb@eskimo.com>
To: silence@realtime.net
Subject: Conlon Nancarrow
I just returned home from the east coast to find a message on my answering
machine from Trimpin saying that Conlon Nancarrow died over the weekend in
Mexico City. Nancarrow would have been 85 in October.
The American expatriate composer was best known for his series of studies
for player piano, composed and hand-punched on a custom machine, the medium
in which he worked almost exclusively for much of the last fifty years.
These works were really wonderful extensions of the sound world of the
piano timbrally altered by extremes of tempo, tempo ratios, and unusual
canonic structures. His few works for live performers (either early works
composed before Nancarrow began focusing on player piano or quite recent
pieces commissioned by performers & ensembles like Ursula Oppens & Arditti
Quartet) have been more rarely heard.
All but the three most recently completed of Nancarrow's Studies for Player
Piano are recorded on Wergo, his other works have been recorded by Arditti
Quartet, Ursula Oppens, Continuum, Joanna MacGregor, and others. In 1995,
Cambridge University Press published a book length study of his work by
Kyle Gann.
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com