All composers work in isolation to some degree.  It's a lonely business sitting at a desk or a keyboard of one kind or another, making notations in musical language of sounds heard in the mind, and thus communicating those thoughts in a coordinated fashion so that others can reproduce or recreate them in another time at another place completely removed from the original spark of imagination.

For the most part, those musical ideas get presented at least once to a public large or small by an ensemble, or perhaps even just the composer him- or herself at the piano.  Many legendary figures performed their own works, and others turned them over to conductors or small groups.  Only a few have resorted to machinery in order to have their ideas become sound.

Conlon Nancarrow's mind seemed to conjure up things which were complicated, indeed too complicated for mere humans to reproduce.  So he deliberately chose to find a way to get those ideas across by the use of a machine - the Player Piano.  By controlling the holes which are punched into the paper, he could fabricate his thoughts so that they would get heard exactly as he intended, no matter how dense or complicated or rapid they might be.  The mechanical apparatus was able to do what human fingers were unable to do, and only the device could accomplish it.

A somewhat lengthy biography (with opinion) appears at the end of this interview.  The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Nancarrow's complete Studies for Player Piano have been released on compact disc by Wergo (Germany), produced by Charles Amirkhanian.

In 1987, I noted that his 75th birthday was approaching, so I wrote to him, and he was gracious enough to accept my request of a telephone interview.  Here is that conversation . . . . .
 

Bruce Duffie:  You’ve spent much of your time in the last thirty or forty years working just with player piano.

Conlon Nancarrow:  Yes, most of it.

BD:   Is your work with player piano in any way similar to composers who work with computers or synthesizers?

CN:   Well, not really.  In fact, I started this before they were available.  In fact I started player piano really for reasons of difficulty of performance, and that was the only way I knew of to achieve it.  At that time, computers and electronic things didn’t exist.  If that equipment had existed then, I might have gone into that instead of player piano.

BD:   That was the reason for my question.  I just wondered if the player piano was an antecedent to the synthesizer in keeping all the control in the composer’s hands.

CN:   Well, yes, it’s related, although the last couple of years I’ve started writing again for live performance.  Also in the last few years, things that I wrote many years ago that were never played because, mainly, they were too difficult, have been played and played very well.

BD:   When you’re writing a piece of music, do you write it to be difficult, or is this the only way you feel that it can be written?

CN:   Oh, no, no, I have no obsession with difficulty.  It’s just that most of my ideas are fairly complex in the rhythmical sense,  mainly tempo and rhythm.  In fact, the more complex ones are literally impossible for people to play.  Some of the others, not so much.

BD:   What has prompted you to get back to writing for human beings again?

CN:   Because in the last few years the musicians I've come across—well, musicians, performers today—are enormously advanced over what they were thirty or forty years ago.

BD:   Are they advanced just technically or also musically?

CN:   Oh, both.  And they have much more understanding of the contemporary things in music and so forth.

BD:   When you’re writing a piece of music, perhaps for player piano, for whom do you write?  Whom do you have in mind?  Is there a specific audience?

CN:   No, not exactly.  I write a piece for whoever wants to listen to it.

BD:   Then let me ask a big philosophical question.  What do you believe is the purpose of music in society?

CN:   [Laughter]  It is probably like anything else.  What’s the purpose of literature?  What’s the purpose of painting?  What’s the purpose of anything?

BD:   Do you feel you are contributing to this purpose?

CN:   Well, I hope to.

BD:   With the mechanical devices that you use, is there any room at all for interpretation?

CN:   That’s a very vague term, interpretation.  In the first place, the pianos I use are what’s called reproducing pianos that have a wide range of dynamics.  In the perforated roll you can do all kinds of things with pedal and soft pedal and sustaining pedal and accelerations and so forth.  It does have its limitations, of course, but also things that a pianist can’t do.

BD:   So you are content, then, to live with those limitations rather than the limitations of any performer who would come across a piece of sheet music?

CN:   To a certain extent.  Last year I had a concert in New York of all live music.  I wrote an orchestra piece for it and they played some of my older things that had never been played.  In fact, it worked out very well.

BD:   What do you expect of the audience that comes to hear your pieces?

CN:   I just hope they like it.  I don’t know, what else could I expect?  I hope not to get hissed.  Never have been yet.

BD:   [Laughter]  Well, that’s good.  Do you feel that the audience can grasp all of the intricacies of your music?

CN:   I don’t know.  Maybe it’s a fairly limited audience, but I will say that probably an audience of today is much more likely to than an audience of thirty or forty years ago.

BD:   Is that because the audiences in general have expanded their musical horizons?

CN:   Yes, I think so.  Also they have more knowledge of, or acquaintance with, modern trends in music.  They also have an acquaintance with various ethnic musics, especially African and Indian music, which have many rhythmical things which I work with.  More and more people are becoming aware of that, too.

BD:   These are all good trends?

CN:   Yes, I think so.

BD:   So where is music going today?

CN:   I have no idea.  I don’t think anyone else does.

BD:   Well, what direction is it heading?

CN:   I don’t know.  As a matter of fact, I think that probably in the arts in general, maybe even a little more so in music, there’s a different sort of a crisis.  Well, there’s a crisis in society too, but that’s something else.

BD:   Are you optimistic about the future of music?

CN:   Yes, of course.  I don’t think it’s going to die out.

BD:   [Laughter]  You never know.  Occasionally composers I chat with are very pessimistic.

CN:   Well, yes, I guess so.  Of course music is not going to stop.  The very, very worst that can happen is that contemporary  movements may reach a dead end.  In fact, some of them already have in some senses.  All that’s left is music of the past and people will play it.  They’ll always have music—if there’s a society left.  That’s a bigger problem.

BD:   And one I’m not going to get into.

CN:   Well, no, I’m not either.

BD:   When you’re writing for the player piano, do you notate the ideas on regular music paper, or is it something that you just hear in your head and can only put into the piano roll?

CN:   It’s a little complicated.  When I first started with player piano, I just simply wrote a piece on regular music paper and then punched it out.  But the music got more and more complicated.  Now I use a technique where I take a blank roll of paper and draw out a series of temporal relationships that I know I’m going to use in the piece.  I also have more or less an idea of what the piece is going to be like, but they’re just marks of temporal relations, nothing else.  Then I transpose that back to standard music paper.  I mark out all of those divisions, and write the piece of music.  Then I go back and punch it onto the roll that’s already marked out in divisions.  It’s a little complex.

BD:   What would happen if a player, or a number of players, could adequately reproduce what you have put on the roll in a live concert?

CN:   By now several people have arranged and played some of my earlier player piano pieces.  Some of the later ones would be just impossible, but the early ones can be performed.

BD:   Will these later ones always be impossible?

CN:   I’m afraid some of them will be, or very near it, or so near impossible it’s not worthwhile trying.

BD:   Then on the ones that have been played by human beings, do you want any kind of interpretation at all, or must they be exactly the same as they are on the roll?

CN:   Not exactly, but I’d like it as near that as possible.  Because I work with the limitations, I make the music within that limitation, and if it’s reproduced some other way, I’d like it similar to what I did, in sound.

BD:   Are you still working with piano rolls?

CN:   Oh, yes, but now I’m branching out.  In fact, I just finished a string quartet that’s going to be played next year in Germany, and now I’m working on a concerto for pianola and orchestra.  That’s a very primitive form of player piano, but I happen to know a virtuoso of the pianola.  He performs on it.  I have to make the roll, but he controls all of the things with the roll.  In other words, he can go along with a conductor, which my standard rolls cannot because they’re rigid the way I’ve made them.

BD:   So there is a little more interpretive power in that.

CN:   Yes, yes.  That’s what I don’t understand with many musicians and music lovers.  They always want something different, and they never say that they would like to have War and Peace different each time or Rembrandt’s this or van Gogh’s that or the Shakespeare sonnets different each time.  It’s there!  But they insist that each time a piece of music is played, it should be different.  I don’t understand why.

BD:   That’s interesting.  You’re the first composer that I’ve ever heard express that feeling.

CN:   As a matter of fact, most composers have that same "block."  I remember years ago, Roger Sessions said that if he had the perfect recording of his favorite piece of music and the sound was as good as live, and it was his favorite performance of it, after he’s heard it once, he’d throw it away.  I think that’s kind of crazy.  If I had something like that, my favorite piece of music played the way I like best, that’s what I would keep to listen to.

BD:   Is there any corollary with the record-buying public which will buy a record and play it over and over and over again?

CN:   I think even the record-playing public has a tendency to have one of their favorite pieces of music and like the way it’s played, and after a while I think they’d like to hear it played by someone else.  I don’t know.  I have that impression.

BD:   This is the thing.  We can’t get your player piano pieces played by anyone else.  They are there always exactly the same.

CN:   Well, that’s true, yes.

BD:   In music, either in general or your own music, where is the balance between the artistic achievement and the entertainment value?

CN:   Well, it depends on how you define both of those.  Entertainment can be just simply having a good time at a party or something like that.  But you could say that enjoying music is entertainment.  I don’t know.  I don’t know really what your definition is.

BD:   I’m looking for the definition of the creator.  That’s why I asked.

CN:   Yes, well, I don’t know.

BD:   Do you find composing fun?

CN:   It’s my main occupation.  I wouldn’t do it otherwise, I guess.  Well, I don’t know if I'd use the word “fun,” but it’s very important.

BD:   Should music be important for everyone’s life?

CN:   Well, no, of course not.  For some people it means nothing.

BD:   How do we get more people interested in new music, either yours, or other new music?

CN:   The only thing I think, which is happening gradually, is that music groups are playing more and more contemporary things, and I guess more and more people are hearing different things.

BD:   Is this a good idea, that we have so much available to us?

CN:   Oh, I think so.  It’s better to have too much than too little, no?

BD:   What advice do you have for young composers coming along?

CN:   Nothing special.  There are several movements, now, in contemporary music which, in a way, seem to me they’re regressing, going back.  I mean the neo-Romantics, the minimalists, the various other groups.  It’s sort of a retreat in a way.

BD:   Is there ever a chance that we would have too many composers in the world?  Here in America there seem to be just so many young composers.

CN:   That’s true.  It becomes a problem mainly for the composers, themselves, surviving and getting their works performed.  If there are too many, there’s just not enough opportunity.  The development of electronic music and computer music means a composer in his own home can produce these things, similar to what I do on player piano.  Whether he has an audience or not, that’s something else.

BD:   When you’re writing for player piano, do you ever miss the interaction with the interpreters or the performers?

CN:   Well, yes, except then I’m a little nervous about what they’re going to do.  I’m not nervous about my player piano because I know what it’s going to do.

BD:   There’s only a mechanical failure, and that’s out of your hands.

CN:   Well, yes.  I remember many years ago I had an argument with Copland about this whole thing of performers.  He was saying that he liked it.  I think it was partly a fact that he liked the whole atmosphere of going to a symphony concert, but he used the analogy of the first horn missing his high note.  Not that he wanted it to happen, but possibility made the tension.  My argument was I want to be sure he hits the note.  It’s just a point of view.

BD:   I’m glad that someone has brought up this other idea.

CN:   Yes, but it’s not a very common idea, I’m afraid.  [Laughter]

BD:   Have you enjoyed the performances that you’ve heard of the pieces you've written for live musicians?

CN:   Some of them, not all.  As a matter of fact, most of them, yes.  There were a few that weren’t very good.

BD:   What about the recording of the String Quartet played by the Kronos.

CN:   Oh, that's very good, yes.  They’re the first.  I wrote that over forty years ago.  They played it for the first time a few years ago.  It had never been played before.  Of course, since then it’s been played in quite a few places by different people and played very well.  It’s not all that difficult, today at least.  At that time, it seemed like people thought it was too difficult to play.

BD:   As you approach your seventy-fifth birthday, what is the most surprising thing you have noticed in that time in the art of music?

CN:   I can’t think of anything surprising.  It’s been a gradual process of things happening.  I don’t know of any one special thing that’s surprising, no.

BD:   Is there anything that is happening now that you didn’t think would happen years ago but has come to pass?

CN:   Maybe, maybe.  Years ago I didn’t think there was going to be this regression I was telling you about that’s happening to a certain extent in music.  No, that I didn’t look forward to, but it’s happened.

BD:   Is there anything you thought would happen that hasn’t?

CN:   No.  From way back, even before it came out, I was hoping and thinking that electronic music would develop, and it has.  Who knows where it will go?  I don’t know.

BD:   When you first started tinkering around with the player piano, did you assume that you would get performances of these pieces?

CN:   Performances?  You mean recordings?

BD:   Either recordings that are made for the public or performances where the public can come and listen to the player piano.

CN:   These player pianos are not very portable.  Even from the beginning a few friends came to my studio to listen, but it was hardly a big audience.  It was only later that recordings were made and the public was built up.  It was this year that I attended the festival in Amsterdam where someone in Germany had repaired an old Bösendorfer piano with the system that I have for performance.  I took some rolls there and they played them at the concert.  It was what they called live.  No one was playing it; it was the player piano, but it was live there.

BD:   But at least it was in an auditorium where others could hear it, rather than just your studio in Mexico City.

CN:   Yes, although long before that, people had made very good tapes of my music in the studio and played those at concerts with good equipment, and the sound is very good.

BD:   So you don’t find it one step removed to hear a tape of your piano rather than a different piano playing the same roll?

CN:   No, no.  As a matter of fact, in general I prefer the tape because it’s exactly the way I wanted it from my studio.  It’s a good recording.

BD:   There was something mentioned in one of the articles about a record being issued in 1960.  What is that old record?

CN:   That was a Columbia record and was the first one that came out.  Incidentally, it’s a very bad recording.

BD:   The others that I’m aware of are the ones on 1750 Arch Records, and there are three studies on a New World Record.

CN:   Yes.  That’s also a terrible recording.  That New World record has my pieces, a few of mine and a few of Cage, a few of Cowell.

BD:   And you don’t care for that recording?

CN:   No, it’s a very bad recording.  The recordings they used of mine were done by some amateur on the tape machine.  But it’s not just my recordings; the sound on the whole record is not very good.  Have you heard it?

BD:   Yes, and I found that it wasn’t nearly as good as the 1750 Arch record.

CN:   Yes.  Well, that’s it.  It’s not a very good recording.

BD:   Do the 1750 Arch records have all of the studies?

CN:   Well, they’ve gone out of business.  In a few months I’m doing some recordings for the Wergo in Germany.  It’s going to be those four and another two, so it’ll be six records when they do that.

BD:   So the four records on 1750 Arch will be there?  Everything on there will be contained in the new Wergo records?

CN:   Yes, with two new ones.  They’re going to record it, I think, beginning next year.  There’s a lot of red tape involved before it comes out.

BD:   It will be good to have those available again.

CN:   Yes.  I want them to [record them again] also, because, oddly enough, when the 1750 Arch company finally went out of business, my discs were just beginning to sell.  There was some demand for them.

BD:   I hope there continues to be a demand.  You are a unique personality in the world.

CN:   [Laughing modestly]  Oh, really?

BD:   Yes, and very special.  I want to thank you for being a composer.

CN:   Oh well, that’s what I am.

BD:   But it seems like you have stuck with it despite all kinds of nearly insurmountable odds.

CN:   That’s true.  At the beginning, it was a little hard going.

BD:   Is that what it takes to be a composer, being someone that completely believes in himself no matter what?

CN:   Well, maybe.  I don’t know.  Some people completely believe in themselves and there’s nothing to believe in.  I used to think that, too, maybe.  Some people are doing all these things, making tremendous sacrifices thinking it’s important to do it, and it turns out that it’s not important.  Sometimes in the past I used to think that also, or a possibility of that.

BD:   Who is the one that makes the judgment whether it’s important or not?  Is it the public?  Is it the critic?  Is it the composer, himself?  Who?

CN:   Well, importance is a very vague term.  It’s hard to say because there’s been music in the past that didn't seem important.  For one thing, Bach wasn’t recognized for over a hundred years except at the moment when he was just doing his music for practical presentation.

BD:   I certainly appreciate being able to chat with you and have a conversation with you.

CN:   I hope I’ve been some help.
 
 

Interview © 1987 Bruce Duffie

This interview was recorded on the telephone on October 12, 1987.  I was in my studio in Chicago and he was at his home in Mexico City.  Portions of the conversation, along with musical examples, were broadcast on WNIB later that year, and in 1992 and 1997.  A copy of the unedited conversation has been placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University, and a copy with digitally improved sound has been placed in the Oral History American Music Archive at Yale University.  The transcript was made at Yale, and this slightly edited version was posted on this website in 2007.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

*     *     *     *     *

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.