There are few greater joys for a music aficionado or indeed, any art lover than to serendipitously stumble onto a hitherto undiscovered pleasure in the course of listening to another artist.  

The same thing happened to me when I heard the woefully unknown second solo album by Shawn Lane, The Tri-Tone Fascination. There was a track on it called Kaiser Nancarrow which was, quite frankly, unlike anything I had ever heard in my life before. There were bits on it that twisted the ear inside out, turned in directions completely alien to any musical culture I was aware of, and yet stopped short of being so avant-garde that it was incomprehensible. The title, too, was intriguing: Who was this Nancarrow guy? 

Further research led me to one of the best-kept secrets of 20^th century music: the pianist and composer, Conlon Nancarrow. Born in Texarkana in 1912, Nancarrow was one of the pioneers in mechanical music and laying the foundations for electronic music; almost all of the work he is remembered for today was written for the player piano. Born into the jazz milieu that was inescapable at the time, he moved on to study music with the piano greats of the time in Cincinnati and Boston, particularly influenced by the chromaticism of Arnold Schoenberg, who was staying in Boston at the time. He began to write pieces for piano and other instruments, but, discouraged by the poor performances of these technically challenging pieces, began to write for what would become his hallmark: impossible, or as he put it, “post-performer” music. Around the same time, under pressure for his communist leanings, he moved to Mexico and remained a citizen until his death.  

His primary interests lay in polytonality and polyrhythm, or the issues involving melody lines that move independently of each other, and the playing of several rhythms and time signatures at the same time. The problems performers had in playing these pieces increased his interest in the player piano, an early mechanical musical instrument which played a pre-written score on a standard piano by way of hitting the keys through mechanically-operated bellows.  

Much of this early work is an attempt to play a hybrid of Art Tatum-style jazz and Bartok without the training to do so, a problem further compounded by the difficulty musicians (especially those in Mexico) had in playing the pieces. Studies 3a and 3d (part of the Boogie-Woogie suite) are atonal, terrifyingly fast 12-bar blues pieces, while study 12 is a polyrhythmic Flamenco tour de force.

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Later pieces evolved into expositions of mere than mere ‘impossibility’ dealing with the fundamental issues of how the human ear processes and assimilates music. One of his pet theories was of a scale of tempi, suggesting that just as there are scales of notes of increasing and decreasing pitches, the human ear also perceived superimposed tempo and rhythm in the same way. An example is Study 20, where small motifs and notes repeat at different octaves, becoming smaller and smaller as the piece grows more abstract. The ear, however, latches on to the repeated motifs and continues to hear them even when they do not repeat! Most of these later works are in the classical Canon format which deals with melodies in which the lengths of the notes are increased (augmentation) or decreased (dimunition), thus altering the feel of the piece. However, unlike the canons of composers like Bach, where the ratios of augmentation or dimunition are simple, such as 2:1, Nancarrow’s canons were more complex, such as Study 40, which is in e:pi, or Study 37, in which twelve different melodies move at different speeds and rhythms. 

Having spent much of his career in obscurity, he began to find some public interest in the 1970s, with a brief revival in avant-garde music. A flood of commissions followed in the 1980s, when he also worked with electronic percussion instrument maker Trimpin, who came to notoriety for his compositions for tuned wooden shoes.  

Even after Nancarrow’s death in 1997, his legacy remains, as one of the originators of music not played by or written for humans, as an explorer of atonal music in the tradition of Webern and Schoenberg, as an “American original”, and in the words of Hungarian composer György Ligeti, “the greatest discovery since Webern and Ines….something great and important for music history! His music is so utterly original, perfectly constructed and yet at the same time emotional.”

You owe it to yourself to check him out.