Conlon Nancarrow: The Man Who Fired the Musicians

There is a particular loneliness in being on the right path too early. Not the ordinary kind, where the world eventually comes round and you get to say you told them so, but the harder kind, where you make the thing anyway, and the world only comes to understand it once you're gone.

Conlon Nancarrow made his life's work exactly that: the idea of complex modern electronic music, punched into paper by hand in a Mexico City studio in the middle of the twentieth century, by a man almost nobody would listen to. Fifty years later his name turned up on a Warp record. He did not live to see most of what came after.

He was born in Texarkana in 1912, the son of a family comfortable enough to send him to military academy and a summer music camp. He played trumpet in jazz bands, studied composition in Cincinnati and then Boston, under Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky, and in Boston he joined the Communist Party, which is the decision that determines everything that follows.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out he sailed to Europe, paying his way across by playing jazz trumpet, and enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco. He came home to a United States that had started to treat men like him as a problem. When he tried to get a passport to travel again, he was refused. The reason was his politics, and the refusal was, in effect, a door closing on the country of his birth.

In 1940 he left for Mexico City, and he stayed for the rest of his life. He was running from a place that no longer wanted him. But the exile turned out to be the making of him, because it put a wall between Nancarrow and the entire apparatus of the music world (the performers, the institutions, the expectations), and behind that wall he was free to stop compromising.

The problem had been there from the beginning. Nancarrow's rhythms, even in his early written pieces for human players, were already past what performers could manage, and, worse, past what they were willing to attempt. The music didn't fail because it was bad. It failed because the people who were supposed to play it looked at the page, concentrated furiously, and lost the life of the thing, or simply refused. A composer whose ideas outrun every possible interpreter is a composer with nowhere to go.

The way out came from a book. In New York in 1939 he bought a copy of New Musical Resources, written by the American composer Henry Cowell, and in its pages Cowell had laid out an idea that would reorganize the rest of Nancarrow's life. Just as there is a scale of pitches, Cowell suggested, there might be a scale of tempos: music running at several different speeds at once, accelerating and decelerating in layers, tempo relationships as precise and as complex as the intervals in a chord.

And Cowell added, almost in passing, that such rhythms would be very hard for humans to play, but that it would be interesting to hear them cut onto a player-piano roll. Cowell floated the idea and moved on. He never did it.

"He talked in there about these rhythmical problems," Nancarrow said years later, with a kind of grim satisfaction. "Said of course it could be done on a player piano, but he never did it. Well, I did it."

Those diagrams from Cowell's book stayed pinned to the walls of Nancarrow's studio until the end of his life.

In 1947 an inheritance from his father gave him just enough money and just enough freedom, and he went back to New York, the country that had refused him a passport now grudgingly letting him in, to build his instrument: the machine that would let him bypass the piano's human problem entirely. He acquired a player piano, and he had a punching machine built, an adaptation of the equipment used in the commercial manufacture of piano rolls, the same trade that had once churned out popular tunes for parlour instruments.

In Nancarrow's hands it became something else. He would take a roll of blank paper and, following a score he'd worked out in advance, punch the holes into it by hand: every note, every layer, one perforation at a time. It was punishing, slow, physical work. A few minutes of finished music could cost him months of punching.

He also went into the player pianos themselves and rebuilt them, hardening the felt hammers with leather in one and metal in another so the attack would cut through, so a hundred notes a second wouldn't dissolve into mush.

What he had made, in the end, was not a labour-saving device. It was an instrument that demanded far more of him than writing for an orchestra ever would. But it gave him the one thing no performer could: total control over time. On paper, at the punching machine, he could set two tempos running against each other at a ratio no ensemble on earth could hold. He could stack twelve independent voices, each moving at its own speed, and know that the machine would render every one of them precisely.

He had told an interviewer, plainly, what he'd been after the whole time. Ever since he'd been writing music, he said, he'd been dreaming of getting rid of the performers.

His pieces are called Studies. He wrote around fifty of them across four decades, and they contain complex patterns: canons where the voices chase each other at speeds related by irrational numbers, tempo ratios drawn straight from Cowell's overtone scale, the first ones still carrying the fingerprints of the jazz and boogie-woogie he'd grown up on before the later ones spiralled off into pure abstraction.

For years the audience for Conlon Nancarrow's life's work was Conlon Nancarrow, in a room in Mexico City, feeding paper through a machine. His first public concert of the player-piano works finally happened in 1962, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Then his pianos fell silent to the public again; they would not make another concert appearance until 1989, twenty-seven years later.

The recognition came, but it came slow, and it came from elsewhere. The composer György Ligeti heard the studies and called them the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives, and said they were the best music being written by anyone alive. In 1982 the American genius grant found him. By then he was seventy. He had been right, alone, for forty years, and the world was finally catching up.

In 2006, by which time Nancarrow had already left the earth, Warp Records, the Sheffield label that had spent the nineties defining what people meant when they said intelligent dance music, home to Aphex Twin, to Autechre, to Squarepusher, released a double CD of live performances by the London Sinfonietta. It was called Warp Works & Twentieth Century Masters, and its whole premise was a family tree: the electronic experimentalists on the Warp roster placed alongside the twentieth-century avant-garde composers who were, as the label put it, their sonic grandfathers.

On that record, arranged for orchestra, sits Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 7. It shares the tracklist with Ligeti, with Cage, with Reich and Varèse and Stockhausen, and with instrumental arrangements of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. The man who punched holes in paper by hand in the 1950s, dreaming of a music his own century could barely contain, ended up filed exactly where he belonged: as an ancestor of the machines.

He didn't predict electronic music, not literally. He said himself that if the electronic tools had existed in his day he'd probably have used them; they didn't, so he built his own analogue workaround out of paper and a punching machine. Nancarrow imagined a future of music that the technology of his time could barely hold. He spent his life hand-punching a rough draft of it into paper, dedicating himself to it because no one would play what he heard.

Decades later that vision hardened into a whole genre, and his name was there on the record, in the company he'd been keeping in his head the entire time.

Conlon Nancarrow. Born October 27, 1912; died August 10, 1997.