Conlon Nancarrow eventually solved a problem that had frustrated him for years: what do you do when the music in your head is physically impossible for a pianist to play?
His answer was to stop writing for pianists.
Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1912 and initially followed a more conventional path as a composer and musician. He studied composition in Cincinnati and Boston, played jazz trumpet, and wrote for conventional instruments. He also fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. After the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, he settled in Mexico in 1940 and eventually became a Mexican citizen.
The move changed his circumstances, but another problem changed his music.
Nancarrow became increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of human performers. The pieces he imagined demanded extreme speeds and complicated relationships between simultaneous rhythms. Even excellent musicians could not reproduce them precisely. By the late 1940s, he had turned to the player piano.
That sounds like a retreat into obsolete technology. It was almost the opposite.
Nancarrow realized that a mechanical piano could execute instructions with a precision no human performer could sustain. He began composing directly onto paper rolls, punching the holes himself rather than treating the player piano as a way to reproduce an ordinary score. He even developed a specially designed punching mechanism for the job.
The result was music built around impossible tempos.
His Studies for Player Piano, more than 50 pieces created across roughly four decades, could layer different rhythmic speeds and melodies so precisely that the music seemed to accelerate, collide and separate according to rules a human ensemble could not physically maintain. Some individual rolls took as long as a year to compose and punch.
For years, almost nobody heard it. In the early 1980s, the Washington Post described his Mexico City studio as essentially the only place where his music could be heard, because the specialized equipment needed to perform it remained there.
That isolation eventually became part of the significance of the work. Nancarrow was not merely making music for a machine. He was using a machine to expand the definition of musical time.
Computers would later make precise sequencing and complex rhythmic structures commonplace. Nancarrow was exploring related possibilities decades earlier, using paper, a punching tool and mechanical pianos.
His achievement was not that he made a machine imitate a human musician.
It was that he designed music for a musician who did not exist.
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