Episode Details

Conlon Nancarrow wrote music no human could play, so he bypassed the performer entirely and spent decades in Mexico City punching holes into player piano rolls by hand. This episode traces his path from a jazz-obsessed teenager in Texarkana forced into Vanderbilt's engineering school at fifteen, through classical studies with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky, to fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and his internment at the Gurs camp in 1939.

We cover his relocation to Mexico City in 1940 after passport harassment by the US government, the influence of Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources and its idea of a scale of tempos, and his 1947 purchase of a manual punching machine in New York. We explain how he stripped felt from piano hammers and replaced it with leather and metal for clarity, how his prolation canons used ratios like e to pi, and how recognition finally came through a 1969 Columbia release, recordings by Charles Amirkhanian, Ligeti's praise, and a 1982 MacArthur grant.

• Why the human nervous system cannot execute five or six independent fast rhythms at once
• How distance on a paper roll becomes time, letting him map irrational tempo ratios in millimeters
• The jazz roots audible in his early Boogie-Woogie Suite and Art Tatum-style runs
• How Trimpin digitized the rolls into MIDI in 1987 to preserve the music
• His influence on ensembles like Alarm Will Sound, black MIDI, and Jaron Lanier