Conlon Nancarrow is considered one of the most influential contemporary avant-garde composers and musicians of the twentieth century through his infamous Studies for Player Piano and the significant alterations in music’s tempo and time. Nancarrow says, “Time is the last frontier of music,” suggesting that the music of the twentieth century has moved away from other musical intricacies towards pitch and time. In this way, music would meet the needs of more advanced musical instruments and technologies, such as the player piano. Despite the isolated nature of technological instruments like the player piano, Nancarrow (1984) could contemplate the spirit of music and envision an alternative direction for jazz and avant-garde music. Nancarrow developed powerful rhythmic strategies, tempo proportions, and metric synchronicity. This resulted in an almost meta-analytic revision of music, suggesting that music should be a step towards an emerging frontier (Thomas, 1993, p. 4). Reviewing his biography and those who influenced him will be essential to conceptualise Nancarrow’s influence. Following Nancarrow’s biographical analysis, it will be necessary to review his most complex contributions to music: rhythmic strategies, tempo proportions, and metric synchronicity. This will be done in the context of the importance of temporal dissonance throughout his music scores. Finally, analyzing some of the pieces on a player piano will provide some intriguing background to his musical talents.

Born in Texarkana, Arkansas, Conlon Nancarrow was raised by a father who was, at the time, the city’s mayor. He had a successful childhood trumpeting and later joined several jazz bands in his youth. Music developed an air of complexity during his youth, which compelled him to study at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music from 1929-32. After completing his studies, Nancarrow perfected his counterpoint with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Nicolas Slonimsky from 1933-36. During this period, there was intense political turmoil between the French and Spanish revolutionaries in Spain. Nancarrow joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the Spanish forces in 1936, affecting him so heavily that he became a Communist. He aligned increasingly with Communist values in the United States (Gann, 1995, p. 12). He was recognized for his aggressive musical orientation, playing jazz and easy-to-understand music to develop soldier morale. Even during this period, he continued to compose music despite the political scene he was in. He also faced a lack of appropriate accommodation for his political views. He avidly worked on compositions until there was little he could not understand. He created complex polyrhythmic works that obliterated any chance current musicians of the 1940s-50s could perform.

Interestingly, in an interview with Roger Reynolds, Nancarrow (1984) stated that during the 1930s, he performed chamber music. His studies in counterpoint led him to create his first and only work for a symphony orchestra with a combination of winds and piano, including various other instruments, which, in 1941, to his surprise, was performed in New York (Nancarrow, 1984). However, as his music became more complex, so did the nature of music; his studies in counterpoint led him to mutate musical forms, structures, pitches, and rhythms. He was primarily interested in jazz music, suggesting that “very seldom do you get any rhythmic aspects of jazz” (Nancarrow, 1984, p. 4). While developing a rhythmic format for jazz music, unhappy with its harmony-melodic dependence and improvisation, he was sure that metrically complex systems would generate just as much of an impression on the audience as an orchestral arrangement. Although not made too difficult “for reasons of performance,” Nancarrow stated in his interview with Roger Reynolds (Nancarrow, 1984).

A historical timeline shows that Conlon Nancarrow (1984) suffered severe economic and political repercussions for his political beliefs. When he returned to the United States following the Lincoln Brigade, he made friends with John Cage and Elliot Carter. Carter was considered one of the pioneers of rhythmically complex orchestral, instrumental and vocal music in the 1930s (Gann, 1995, p. 6). John Cage and Elliot Carter’s influences on Conlon Nancarrow are evident due to his unique fascination with jazz music and its requirement for more complex rhythms. This is perhaps Elliot Carter’s instruction. When he felt a strong kinship with Communist beliefs after the crusade against the French and Spanish revolutionaries with the Lincoln Brigade, he felt a profound alienation in the US, which led to the denial of his passport upon application in 1940, resulting in permanent migration to Mexico City where he continued his musical endeavours (Gann, 1995, p. 13).

During his counterpoint sessions with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Nicolas Slonimsky, he encountered Henry Cowell’s (1930) New Musical Resources, in which (Cowell, 1930) frequently mused polyrhythms and polymers that had a powerful influence on Nancarrow’s future path (Gann, 1995, p. 10). Cowell (1930) stated, “[s]ome of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer, but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player piano roll.” Throughout his musings, Cowell (1930) stated that without human physical contact with instruments, the effect of emotion and expression would be lost by the overt mechanical nature of devices such as the player piano. However, with the Great Depression during the 1930s, piano manufacturing ceased, for it could not be purchased and was not economically feasible. The player piano was forgotten until World War II.

Furthermore, World War II (1939-1945) also devastated Nancarrow’s musical views as well as those of his friend John Cage, who, in 1940, composed Bacchanale (John Cage’s first work on the player piano) (Carlsen, 1988, p. 8). For Nancarrow, this was her first start. In 1947, he began the Studies for Player Piano. Realizing that the acoustic piano can be effectively utilized, as John Cage’s Bacchanale shows, Nancarrow is set on a journey to push music to its limits. He will add new aspects to the counterpoint.

Nancarrow quickly realized the difficulties and deficiencies of the player piano. James Tenney (1977) says, “The limitations of the player piano are obvious enough—surely no one is more painfully aware of them than Nancarrow himself: it is fixed tuning, its timbral homogeneity, and the sheer practical difficulties involved in punching a roll” (p. 2). Timbral homogeneity implies that the acoustics generated by an instrument must be on the same plane throughout the musical piece, from the minor sections to the largest. This has always been an issue for Nancarrow. Nancarrow built his player piano to counteract timbral homogeneity (Gann, 1995, p. 16). Realizing that the technology of the period would not provide him with a solution to his technological issues with the player piano, he utilized this as an opportunity to convey what Cowell (1930) felt the player piano lacks, “the human element of personal expression” (Cowell, 1930, p. 171). For example, in his attempt to fix the player piano by creating another one, he made the timbre problem even more poignant. His final solution to the problem was putting tacks on the hammers of one of his two-player pianos while stripping the leather interior of the other. He achieved “greater rhythmic clarity and more incisive attacks” (Carlsen, 1988, p.26). With Nancarrow’s efforts, he was able to create an extremely powerful timbral sound with many expressive elements that almost produced a modernistic soundscape, obliterating any sense of nostalgia and releasing a new sound never seen before on the player piano (Drott, 2004, p. 536). In an interview with Reynolds throughout his compositional career, Nancarrow stated, “Ever since I wrote music, I dreamed of getting rid of the performers” (Nancarrow, 1984, p. 3). Now that the player piano had become his main instrument, there was little he required of performers lest they not even attempt to play his music. Most of Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano exceed the ability of human performability (Drott, 2004, p. 535); this suggests that Nancarrow’s work has a strict kinship with the overall capabilities of the player piano. In his studies, he demonstrates powerful experiential techniques and abilities, including layered patterns of independent work that are almost hyperactive. However, Nancarrow’s work reflected his influences from Cowell (1930) and Elliot Carter (Gann, 1995, p. 9). Furthermore, while conducting his pieces for the Studies, Pierre Boulez began his experimental works, followed by Stockhausen, of which Nancarrow had a great deal of knowledge.

During the 1940s-50s, the period of intense experimental techniques was on the rise, showcasing influential works by John Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen, and a strong movement away from neoclassicism towards modernistic soundscapes that challenged Schonberg’s perceptual experiences of music in general (Mumma, 1995, p. 4). With the end of World War II and the subsequent Cold War period, Communists in North America were targeted, but also in other countries. This led to an unsettling climate of contradictions, hypocrisy, and revolutions in ideas and political practices. They struck a monumental chord during this period with composers such as Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, Schonberg, and Nancarrow. Essentially, their music results from the experimental nature of their environment. This is not just in terms of physical aspects such as discoveries but also terms of ideas and progress.

Furthermore, as science progressed and discoveries were made, the destruction became rampant. The US is persistently attacking drug trafficking. Perhaps the symbolic end of the previous era was depicted by the launch of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in its obliteration. This was an invitation to the modernist landscape politically charged through a cacophony of ideas, beliefs, values, and ideologies.

In his earlier works, particularly Study No. 37, Nancarrow was heavily focused on temporal ideas, playing with layered tempi to ensure maximum conflict and playing with the sequence and succession of pitches, sounds, and tones to ensure full effect (Gann, 1995, p. 76). While his transition to temporal dissonance came later, Study No. 37 (the most extended piece he has ever done) showcased his intricate understanding of canonic music, devising layered independent sections with different rhythmic patterns yet keeping the same canonic backdrop. As his studies developed, so did their complexity. His later pieces focused on realising tempo clashes (temporal dissonance) rather than Canon or pitch imitations. Nancarrow says, “One of the reasons I suppose I concentrate more on tempo relationships is that I have no melodic or harmonic invention” (Nancarrow, 1984, p. 6). Though he did not define “temporal dissonance” in detail, his music showcases the effect of clashing tempos and intricate layers that converge and diverge.

Nancarrow explained temporal dissonance in terms of rhythmic proportions resulting from simultaneous tempos. Nancarrow scholars have noted that the player piano allowed him to utilize tempo as a significant element of his entire musical structure (Drott, 2004, p. 535). Furst-Heidtmann says, “tempo is Nancarrow’s life’s work, and his music-historical feat consists in developing this factor into a structural medium” (34). Similarly, Roger Reynolds contends that Nancarrow’s “progressive step” was “to use tempo as a ‘thematic’ element in constructing musical experiences. Only freedof its normal supportive role—not taken for granted but insisted upon—can it become an element to be used in an ordered combination” (Drott, 2004, p. 535). For example, in Study No. 5 (Figure 1), Nancarrow begins with a soft open, illustrating little tension between pitch and rhythm:

Not only is it clear that this piece would severely challenge a potential performer’s abilities, but Study No. 5 reflects the overall power of Nancarrow’s techniques. It combines almost supernatural rhythmic activity coupled with layered parts that are powerfully interdependent to achieve his ultimate contribution to music: temporal dissonance.

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Despite all of Nancarrow’s complex polyrhythmic layered rhythmic dissonant techniques imbued throughout all his hundreds and perhaps thousands of piano rolls, it is ultimately an experience of perception that Nancarrow wishes to alter or create (Drott 538). In essence, Nancarrow’s goal was to facilitate a transition away from repeated rhythmic scales and tempi towards an almost alien phenomenon of musical distortion. He intentionally positions his music as temporally dissonant, using multiple tempo relations, often featuring many simultaneities (Gann 45). Nancarrow believed that temporally discordant notes would have their most significant impact as simultaneity increased (Nancarrow 8). Simultaneity in music can be characterized by an influx of layers dependent or independent of the section that, once combined, can create a powerful temporally dissonant piece of music whose note relations often appear disjunct and out of place (see Figure 2 on page 8) (Drott 545). Upon reflection, this alien phenomenon implies the depiction and introduction to a strange world for Nancarrow; simply put, the layers upon layers of sections achieving a temporally dissonant but blissful state can be characterized as the direction of experimental music, a cacophony of ideas about music constantly clashing against one another to illustrate a movement away from neoclassicism to a new order of sound manipulation.

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Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) was one of the most significant contributors to avant-garde and experimental music. His technique of polyrhythm and temporal dissonance has become not only musical illustrations of the myriad of thoughts persistent in his generation. It is also a musical texture further exemplified by Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, and other avant-garde composers (Carlsen 15). With his history of jazz and his acute understanding of jazz music limitations, primarily rhythm, Nancarrow sought to create a rhythmic system that would give order to an otherwise improvisational genre of music, which led him to Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, further inspiring him to delve into new music (Furst-Heidtmann 33).

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Works Cited and Consulted

Carlsen, Philip. The Player Piano Music of Conlon Nancarrow: An Analysis of Selected Studies. New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1988.

Cowell, Henry. New Musical Resources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930.

Drott, Eric. “Conlon Nancarrow and the Technological Sublime.” American Music 22.4 (2004): 533-563.

Furst-Heidtmann, Monika. “Conlon Nancarrow und die Emanzipation des Tempos.” Neue Zeitschriftfur Musik 7.8 (1989): 32-38.

Gann, Kyle. The Music of Conlon Nancarrow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Mumma, Gordon. “Briefly about Nancarrow.” Conlon Nancarrow Selected Studies for Player Piano. Ed. Peter Garland. Cambridge: Soundings Press, 1977. 1-5.

Nancarrow, Conlon. Collected Studies, Volume V. New York: Schott Musik International, 1984.

Nancarrow, Conlon. Conlon Nancarrow: Interviews in Mexico City and San Francisco Roger Reynolds. American Music, 21 June 1984.

Tenney, James. “Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano.” Conlon Nancarrow, Selected Studies for Player Piano. Ed. Peter Garland. Cambridge: Soundings Press, 1977.

Thomas, Margaret. “Conlon Nancarrow’s ‘Temporal Dissonance’: Rhythmic and Textual Stratification in the Studies for Player Piano.” Ph.D Dissertation (1996): 1-29.