Chasing The Melodies Of Conlon NancarrowWhen people think of the player piano, they usually think of Sting-era ragtime music. But during that era, a composer named Conlon Nancarrow created incredibly ...

To anyone who met Conlon Nancarrow in the 1930s — or ‘40s, or ‘50s — he must have seemed like a bit of a lost sheep. A thinly educated trumpeter whose father was the mayor of Texarkana, he drifted ...

At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was the first time all 51 studies had been performed in public in one go. And ...

As far as dead technologies are concerned, the player piano is pretty low on the list of tragedies. Long ago virtually killed by the arrival of recorded music, the instrument, which plays itself with ...

Composer Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic studies for player piano are mathematically intricate creations, yet they often provoke a smile - not only on account of their buoyant inventiveness, but because ...

The American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow worked in near-obscurity for most of his life, living in seclusion in Mexico City from 1940 until his death in 1997. It was there that he composed the ...

There was a moment during the Southbank’s weekend celebration of Conlon Nancarrow — pioneer of mechanical music created for the player-piano — when I thought my enthusiasm for him (extravagantly ...

Critics of modern music often describe it as fundamentally inhuman. They say it prefers dissonance and ugliness to beauty, anxiety to joy, and cages the simple urge to sing and dance in musical ...

It's only in the last 20 years or so that Conlon Nancarrow has been installed in the pantheon of 20th-century American music, and because his achievement is founded upon the 50-plus studies he ...