Samuel Conlon Nancarrow was born on 27 October 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas, the city where his father, also Samuel Nancarrow, had been transferred by his employer, Standard Oil. Samuel Nancarrow served as mayor of the town from 1925 to 1930, and it is still possible to find his name, doubtlessly of Welsh origin, on plaques and monuments there. A defiant and headstrong child, Conlon was sent to military school by his parents in the hope that this would instil a sense of discipline in him. The result, instead, was that he became “infected by the virus of music,” taking up trumpet and performing in jazz ensembles. Conlon’s father then sent his son to Vanderbilt University to study engineering. However, Conlon attended few classes, and promptly dropped out in order to study music at the Cincinnati College Conservatory. While there, he heard the Cincinnati Symphony in one of the first North American performances of The Rite of Spring, an experience that would leave him with a deep interest in the music of Stravinsky and, more significantly, an indelible fascination with complex rhythms.

He then moved to Boston, where he studied privately with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, and Nicolas Slonimsky. While there, he may have met Arnold Schoenberg, who had recently settled in the United States (Nancarrow always insisted that he had no memory of any such meeting, but his first wife maintained that she and her husband spent an evening in Schoenberg’s apartment in Brookline). At the time, Nancarrow, like many other artists in the 1930s, was a member of the communist party. In 1937-38, he served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. While there, he was struck in the neck by a piece of shrapnel; by pure luck, he was able to be evacuated on board a plane transporting olive oil, and returned to Arkansas to a hero’s welcome by people who believed that he had been in Spain to combat Catholicism.

During a subsequent period spent in New York, he met Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, John Cage, and Wallingford Riegger. However, upon learning that his colleagues were deeply concerned about the consequences of their communist party membership, he expatriated himself to Mexico in 1940, taking with him a copy of Henry Cowell’s book, New Musical Resources that he had bought in New York. This work—providing detailed descriptions of new forms of rhythmic complexity and recommending the use of the player piano to automate performance—was to have a deep influence on Nancarrow. In 1947, he received a sum of money from a trust fund that his father had set up for him. He used it to return to New York City to buy a player piano. While there, he also visited QRS House, a company in the Bronx that produced player piano rolls. It was there that he discovered a device which made it possible to punch holes in the rolls by hand; he subsequently hired an engineer to duplicate the machine for him. Between 1930 and 1945, Nancarrow had composed fewer than twelve short works for standard instruments, including a few pieces for piano, a Septet, a String Quartet, a Toccata for Violin and Piano, and the four-movement Piece No. 1 for Small Orchestra; most of these works made use of multiple simultaneous tempi, or at the very least, complex rhythms. On the rare occasions in which Nancarrow had sought performances of his works, he had been deeply disheartened by the poor technical standard of the result. Upon his return to Mexico City, in a studio built using money from his second wife (a painter who also worked as a model for Diego Rivera), Nancarrow worked for the majority of the remainder of his career on a series of studies for player piano which he hoped would be the catalysts for his explorations of rhythmic complexity.

Nancarrow sent a score of his Rhythmic Study No. 1 to Elliott Carter, who cited an extract of it in his article “The Rhythmic Basis of American Music”. This article was published in the magazine The Score in June 1955. Towards 1960, a tape recording of Nancarrow’s first Studies fell into the hands of John Cage. Parts of this recording would subsequently be used by Cage’s collaborator, Merce Cunningham, in a dance performance, the soundtrack of which was released (albeit in small numbers) by Columbia Records in 1969.

Besides these two events and a commentary by Aaron Copland on his early works, Nancarrow would receive no recognition for his music until 1975 (when the composer was 63 years old). In the following year, Charles Amirkhanian released recordings of Nancarrow’s studies on his label, 1750 Arch. In 1981, Nancarrow obtained a visa and travelled to the United States for the first time since the 1940s (having earlier renounced his American citizenship). Over the following years, he would be received as a guest artist at the Cabrillo Festival (in southern California), at the ISCM Festival in Graz, and at events in Innsbruck, Cologne, and at IRCAM. In such appearances, he was often accompanied by György Ligeti, who lauded his music as “the biggest discovery since Webern and Ives… so original, seductive, perfectly constructed but also full of emotion… For me, this music surpasses anything written by any other composer alive today.” (excerpt from a letter to Charles Amirkhanian, dated 4 January 1981; Vienna).

With this burgeoning recognition, Nancarrow started to receive commissions, and once again composed works (for the first time since 1945) for live performers, including Tango? and Three Canons for Ursula (both for piano), Piece No. 2 for small orchestra, Trio No. 2, and, for the Arditti Quartet, the formidable String Quartet No. 3.

In the final years of his life, Nancarrow suffered from emphysema, a condition that was exacerbated by the pollution in Mexico City. Plans to return to the United States amounted to nothing due to the demand from the authorities that he sign a declaration renouncing his “infantile and foolish” adherence to communism, a concession that was unacceptable to him. He died in Mexico City on 10 August 1997.