Editing Conlon Nancarrow (section)

===As a composer===
It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work for which he is best known today. He had already written some music in the United States, but the extreme technical demands of his compositions required great proficiency in the performer, which resulted in there being only rare satisfactory performances. That situation did not improve in Mexico's musical environment. According to Annette Nancarrow's recollections, Nancarrow was frustrated by the "technical difficulties involved with two human hands playing his compositions on a piano," which he discussed with Arthur Gregor, a friend who was a school principal. After some exploration, they located a shop where Nancarrow was able to purchase a device that could create player piano rolls, and "worked with the owner to learn technical details, such as how to record loud and soft, and different types of notes, and improve the machine."<ref>https://www.nancarrow.de/Memories%20engl.htm</ref> Taking a suggestion from [[Henry Cowell]]'s book ''New Musical Resources'', which he bought in New York in 1939, Nancarrow found the answer in the [[player piano]], with its ability to produce extremely complex [[rhythm]]ic patterns at a speed far beyond the abilities of humans.

Cowell had suggested that just as there is a scale of pitch frequencies, there might also be a scale of tempi. Nancarrow undertook to create music which would superimpose tempi in cogent pieces and, by his twenty-first composition for player piano, he had begun "sliding" (increasing and decreasing) tempi within strata. (See [[William Duckworth (composer)|William Duckworth]], ''Talking Music''.) Nancarrow later said he had been interested in exploring [[electronic music|electronic]] resources but that the [[piano roll]]s ultimately gave him more temporal control over his music.<ref>{{cite web | title=An Interview with Conlon Nancarrow |publisher=Other Minds Archives | author= Charles Amirkhanian | date=April 28, 1977 | url= https://archives.otherminds.org/index.php/Detail/objects/5667 | access-date=Feb 15, 2024}}</ref>

Temporarily buoyed by an inheritance, Nancarrow traveled to New York City in 1947 and bought a custom-built manual punching machine to enable him to punch the piano rolls. The machine was an adaptation of one used in the commercial production of rolls, and using it was very hard work and very slow. He also adapted the player pianos, increasing their [[dynamics (music)|dynamic]] range by tinkering with their mechanism and covering the hammers with [[leather]] (in one player piano) and metal (in the other) so as to produce a more [[percussion instrument|percussive]] sound. On this trip to New York, he met Cowell and heard a performance of [[John Cage]]'s ''[[Sonatas and Interludes]]'' for [[prepared piano]] (also influenced by Cowell's aesthetics), which would later lead to Nancarrow's modestly experimenting with prepared piano in his Study No. 30.

Nancarrow's first pieces combined the [[harmony|harmonic]] language and [[melody|melodic]] [[motif (music)|motifs]] of early [[jazz]] pianists like [[Art Tatum]] with extraordinarily complicated [[Metre (music)|metrical]] schemes. The first five rolls he made are called the ''[[Boogie-Woogie]] Suite'' (later assigned the name ''[[Studies for Player Piano (Nancarrow)|Study No. 3 a-e]]''). His later works were abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from his own.

Many of these later pieces (which he generally called ''[[etude|studies]]'') are [[canon (music)|canon]]s in [[augmentation (music)|augmentation]] or [[diminution]] (i.e. [[prolation canon]]s). While most canons using this device, such as those by [[Johann Sebastian Bach]], have the [[tempo]]s of the various parts in quite simple ratios, such as 2:1, Nancarrow's canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio ''[[e (mathematical constant)|e]]'':[[pi]], while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.

Having spent many years in obscurity, Nancarrow benefited from the 1969 release of an entire album of his work by Columbia Records as part of a brief flirtation of the label's classical division with modern avant-garde music.
[[File:Michael Daugherty et al at ISCM World Music Days 1982.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|From left to right: [[György Ligeti]], [[Lukas Ligeti]], Vera Ligeti (György Ligeti's wife), Conlon Nancarrow, and [[Michael Daugherty]] at the [[International Society for Contemporary Music|ISCM World Music Days]] in [[Graz, Austria]], 1982]]