To anyone who met Conlon Nancarrow in the 1930s — or ‘40s, or ‘50s — he must have seemed like a bit of a lost sheep. A thinly educated trumpeter whose father was the mayor of Texarkana, he drifted ...

Mr. MAYNER: Conlon Nancarrow was writing the early version of a mash-up -combining different melodies and different time signatures. He knew this was too hard for just about anyone to play so he ...

Composer Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic studies for player piano are mathematically intricate creations, yet they often provoke a smile - not only on account of their buoyant inventiveness, but because ...

At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was the first time all 51 studies had been performed in public in one go. And ...

The American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow worked in near-obscurity for most of his life, living in seclusion in Mexico City from 1940 until his death in 1997. It was there that he composed the ...

As far as dead technologies are concerned, the player piano is pretty low on the list of tragedies. Long ago virtually killed by the arrival of recorded music, the instrument, which plays itself with ...

If you wanted to conjure up the quintessential reclusive unsung genius of the musical world - an artist to make Emily Dickinson look like a celebrated glad-hander by comparison - you could not do ...

As an English major, Web editor, and gearhead, my favorite literary metaphor of the 20th century comes from William Gaddis’s two essays on the player piano — Stop Player. Joke #4 and “Agape Agape: The ...