Nancarrow: Ten Years After
Conlon Nancarrow died 10 years ago today in Mexico City. Pliable has a nice writeup, and quotes György Ligeti praising Nancarrow as the most important composer of the second half of the twentieth century. I like Nancarrow but that strikes me as generous and raises the question–important to whom? To other composers? Maybe. To the small percentage of human beings who like contemporary classical music? No way.
UPDATE: Here’s the Kyle Gann link I was looking for.
Steve: While I’ve had the first two volumes of the Wergo set in my possession for years, I’ve only recently purchased the first two volumes in the
new MDG series of recordings by Hocker, which I’m so far enjoying very much. I’ve also just ordered the old 1750 Arch recordings as restored on CD from LP. I also have the Gann book on order from an Amazon merchant. My interest in Nancarrow has been renewed through my recently revived interest in Elliott Carter, through all the notice he and his music are getting in honor of his 100th birthday. Regards, Jim
Hi Jim. Sure it’s alive, as long as someone like you posts (remember: this is the web, where nothing *ever* dies!).
Thanks for that; here’s a link for easy clicking:
http://www.nancarrow.de/buch.htm
Is this thread still alive? Some good reading (also in English translation) can be found on Jurgen Hocker’s web site, especially in a long and interesting reminiscence from Nancarrow’s second wife, and also something as well from his first wife.
though I’m also allergic to the word ‘important’ I think Nancarrow’s music is due to cross over to a much wider audience. some of the more interesting works following up on the use of multiple time signatures aren’t happening as much in ‘modern composition’ as they are in electronic works — one example is Autechre’s output from 99 onward, which shares many concerns with Nancarrow once his studies really began devoting themselves to constructing harmony from multiple tempos. I play Nancarrow for kids who grew up on those records, and they get it instantly — the way music is going is shoring up his position as a pioneer.
I’ll put in a word for the new series of recordings for Studies MDG by Jürgen Hocker — instead of recording Conlon’s venerable old ticky-tacky uprights, they’re using a MIDI-retrofitted Bösendorfer. The old 1750 Arch & Wergo recordings go for room tone, the sound of the beast let loose in a space — but they also always sound like “player pianos”. There are moments on the new MDG recordings that are very subtle & expressive, and you could almost mistake them for ‘human’ — save for the occasional 200-notes-per-second sound bursts. I’m not selling my Wergo set but I’m definitely excited about the new MDG’s.
Yikes! “Important to whom”?? Nancarrow’s music has left a huge impression on some of the most respected composers working in the past few decades. Any serious musician into John Adams, Thomas Adès, Elliott Carter or György Ligeti needs to spend some time with the Nancarrow studies. It can be a rough go at first–this is a strange and difficult body of work–but there’s some amazing stuff there. It’s all good, but some of it is immediately thrilling, really astounding.
And definitely check out Gann’s Nancarrow book, too, for some useful analysis.
I love Nancarrow: dense, multidirectional, polyrhythmic, original. Fuck important, I love his player piano music because that music is stamped with the soul of the composer. It can be no one else but Nancarrow. Not only that, it is the ultimate music to listen to while drinking multiple cups of coffee.
Good dust jacket blurb: “not quite dry or boring” –S Vriezen, Sequenza 21
I’m not quite sure I read as much into the quote, but I will have to go back and listen to 48c and see/hear if I can believe it!
Well, refreshing… the book may be technically in-depth, but it’s not quite dry or boring. My point is rather that, partly because of context, such a statement is actually saying something that points to some important quality in Nancarrow.
I also used to think of that sentence as indicating a complexity that you can only believe while you hear it. Which means it’s a sublime effect.
Yes, I can imagine that in that context it would seem refreshing.
(Part, perhaps, of what made me find this striking is that it comes after many pages which are very analytic in character, also in the description of the effect of music.)
You’re right that it’s a cliché, but you have these rare cases where clichés are meaningful. I feel here it’s appropriate when talking about the complexity Nancarrow achieves here. On paper it’s already quite complex, but here you have a level of complexity to the texture that you can’t just judge on paper. The thing is that Nancarrow in that piece really seems to be pushing the boundaries of how much we know we can hear. The piece shows us stuff about our capacity for hearing things that you wouldn’t have known without the piece. And that I find very interesting in an age full of music that is complex but in a general sort of way.
“which must be heard to be believed”
surprising, philiosophical? sounds like a standard cliche of contemporary usage, “you’ve got to see it to believe it.” etc…
A lot of it sounds the same, because the gestures of his style are so well-defined and often repeated. I think it’s Kyle Gann who points out that in Nancarrow you sort of have an inversion of classical form: if classical forms use certain models that are more or less the same from piece to piece (like “four movement string quartets”) and fill them out with a great diversity of materials, then Nancarrow is often re-using the same kind of gesture, but in an enormous variety of forms.
and re: listening to it – it’s not something I do very often. I find his work exhilerating but also it can be exhausting to listen to. When I read Jeff’s “I like the idea of Nancarrow. I just can’t bear to listen to him” I think of Kyle’s book, again, where he has a little phrase about Study #48c, a surprising almost philosophical remark, that I’ve been thinking about for years. He writes that Study #48c “is a totally unprecedented noise complex which must be heard to be believed.” (my emphasis) – I think that just about gets to the heart of what great art is.
I like the idea of Nancarrow. I just can’t bear to listen to him.
In some ways, that was my opinion of his stuff in the 80’s as well. As I indicated, I’ve since warmed up considerably to his music, particularly Study #32, which is amazing. But on first listen, yes, his stuff does sound a bit frenetic, and a lot of it just sounded the same to me.
Bach also seems, thus far, to have been more “important” than Philip Glass, but who knows …
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This important Sequenza21 discussion finds its counterpoint in the New York Times critical heavies discussing “…Mimimalism” in today’s paper:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/arts/music/10mini.html
An excerpt: “Among admirers of Philip Glass’s work, Music in 12 Parts has long been considered his rough equivalent of Bach’s “Art of Fugue.” Written from 1971 to 1974, the extensive cycle is a four-hour compendium of Mr. Glass’s early compositional concerns. Fragmentary melodies and pulsating rhythms repeated at length evoke something of a trance state, so that tiny shifts in pitch or meter feel like major events. …” (Steve Smith)
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If you are talking about quantity, there is also Josef Matthias Hauer, who, like Giacinto Scelsi, is now enjoying renewed attention in Europe:
http://aeiou.iicm.tugraz.at/aeiou/musikkolleg/hauer/
Hard to know what important means exactly. Nobodyelse’s music sounds like Nancarrow’s (except people who’s come after him and have been -intentionally or unintentionally– imitating him), but you can also say that for Ruth Crawford, Virgil Thomson, and Percy Grainger, all of whom seem to me to be pretty important composers–important to me, I guess I mean– (as does Nancarrow).
There is an interesting parallel to Bach (J.S.) in that they both were close to being unknown in their lifetime’s (or most of his life time, in Nancarrow’s case), and they both became important–influential, if you like– later on, to people who were reading their own (different) meanings into the music and valued it on the basis of basically seeing their own reflection in it. The comparison has it’s limits, as, thus far, Bach seems to have been more “important”, but who knows….
I like the idea of Nancarrow. I just can’t bear to listen to him. 😉 He was a big influence on my Acid Bach pieces, I’ll admit.
I used to open my Tulane New Music Show (which I had for years in the 80’s before I became a Tulane student) with 41a. Blistering… but these days to me, his pieces seem hollow and filled with mayhem without reason. Reminds me of noise punk as much as anything. Assaultive…
Just to clarify, it’s Conlon (not “Colin”) Nancarrow. I’m not a composer, just a dedicated listener, and I have no opinion one way or the other on who’s most important–as has been pointed out, that question can’t exist without some follow-ups: important to who? Important for what purpose?
Nonetheless, I’ll say that as a listener I love Nancarrow. This may not be a property valued equally by everyone, but for sheer exuberant zaniness, it’s hard to find anything in the repertory to match some of the Studies.
I also agree that it’s meaningless to say who is the “most important” composer overall. In terms of innovation, nancarrow is certainly up there, but so is Partch (I mean, he built his own instruments, understood the native music of the wandering hoboes of the depression, and was microtonal to boot). And Young. And Cage. And Scelsi. And many others.
Nancarrow with me was an immediate hit as I started listening to contemporary music seriously at age eighteen.
As I see it, the biggest problem with your problem, Jerry, is the whole notion of an ‘important’ composer. You can’t talk important – never mind the most important – without being clear as to important for what.
I would say, if you’re interested in music that is truly innovative – not merely novel in form, not merely novel in sound, but new in what composing is and what listening is – or if you’re interested in people that have led truly extraordinary lives and managed to make an impossible vision come true, then you’d not easily find somebody more important than Nancarrow.
Thanks—I somehow came across it yesterday myself. Scelsi was another 20th-century composer who was extraordinarily innovative and utterly neglected. Naturally, his music is also occupying tons of space on my iPod (1.05 GB of his music and growing)
Washington musicologist and critic Charles T. Downey has a very nice blog entry on Giacinto Scelsi, who died nineteen years ago yesterday:
http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2007/08/ombra-mai-f-giacinto-scelsis-palm-tree.html
I wrote something about the (then) upcoming 10th anniversary of Nancarrow’s death. You can read it for yourself, but the short answer to your question Jerry is that in my opinion, he wasn’t perhaps the “most important” composer of the last century. But I’d certainly rank him up there with the other US innovators such as Ives, Partch, Cage, Young and a few others. As I note in my blog piece, it took me a while to warm to his music. I always respected it, particularly since I empathized with his being isolated and having to write music to be played by non-humans, just as the majority of my music exists in MP3 only because I was lucky enough to use software that can play it, albeit sometimes not as well as I’d like.
But the majority of people won’t know Nancarrow or his music. And if some of them do encounter his music, it will be more as a curiosity than anything else. Also, while I have certainly warmed up to his studies for player piano (which occupy a good chuck of real estate on my iPod), his works for other instruments have never grabbed me that much. Even worse are the transcriptions of his Studies for chamber ensemble rather than for player piano—they’re well intentioned, but I just don’t think this music works as well when played by real people on non-keyboard instruments. But that’s just my personal taste.
though this might not be helpful for discussion, the answer is clear: important to ligeti!