Dies sind alles nur Versuche!!!!
- Kindheit und Jugend
- Studium
- Krieg in Spanien
- Heirat mit Annette
- Erste Erfolge
Geboren am 18. Oktober 1912...
Versuch: Einfügen einer großen Datei.
Preface
I first encountered the American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow and his music in Cologne in 1982. On that occasion his works were reproduced on tape, because there was no player piano available anywhere in the world suited to performing these extremely complex compositions. My curiosity about this concert resulted as much from my interest in the music as from the fact that for several years I had been interested in player pianos. The enthusiasm for Nancarrow’s music that the concert inspired in me led to a desire to have it played on an original player piano. I succeeded in acquiring an appropriate player piano and in modifying it to reproduce Nancarrow’s compositions. On several concert tours with the composer to Amsterdam, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna and Paris, I had the opportunity not only to get to know Nancarrow’s personality but also to gain detailed insights into his working method. Because at the time little was known of the composer, who lived a very secluded life, I began to record our experiences together and my conversations with Nancarrow in the form of journal entries. During several visits to Mexico I also had the unique opportunity to document the contents of Nancarrow’s studio. That seemed to me to be an important task, since at the time it seemed inevitable that Nancarrow’s papers would someday gather dust in an archive inaccessible to the public. There was no way to know then that the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, would show an interest in this material and acquire it. The present book may seem a little unusual to some readers as it can be classified neither as a biography nor as a rigorous work of musicology. My primary idea was to write a book that would be easy to read and accessible for a general audience, despite the diverse information it contained, in order to make this important composer known to as large a circle of readers as possible. That was not an easy task: in my journal entries I had documented the weeks I spent with Nancarrow as completely as possible. It was inevitable, on the one hand, that many of the details they contained would be of little interest to a general audience and would not be included here. On the other hand, I had a great deal of information that was important to the reader but was taken from other sources, some of which had already been published, that had to be assessed as well. Finally, it became evident that there were a not a few “gaps” in Nancarrow’s biography—events that he did not wish to discuss himself or had simply forgotten or repressed. Filling in these gaps meant finding eyewitness still alive and asking them for information.
I would like to thank all those who contributed to the success of this book: above all, my wife, Beatrix, who accompanied me on nearly all the concert tours and trips to Mexico, who provided essential information for this book in the long conversations with Nancarrow and his wife, Yoko, who was always at my side with advice and assistance during its writing. I would also like to thank Yoko Nancarrow for many weeks of pleasant company and for her constant willingness to talk about Conlon’s life. I also owe thanks to all those who told me about their experiences with Nancarrow: his brother, Charles Nancarrow (†); his first wife, Helen Zimbler; his teacher and patron, the Nicolas Slonimsky (†); his second wife, Annette Margolis (†) and her sons, Charles and Luis Stephens and her daughter, Cherry Kaneff; and the publisher Minna Lederman (†). I am grateful to György Ligeti (†), without whose commitment to Nancarrow I might not have met the composer at all and without whose dedicated motivation Nancarrow’s Studies for Two Player Pianos might not have been presented. Finally, I wish to thank Peter Hanser-Strecker of Schott Musik International, who always had an open ear for my preoccupations with Nancarrow. My thanks go out to Hans-Günther Langer and my daughter, Sonja, for reading the proofs and offering helpful comments, and to Heinrich Mehring for his support with many photographic tasks. For generous support that made the publication of the book and CD possible, I wish to thank the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel; Pro Musica Viva—Maria Strecker-Daelen-Stiftung, Mainz; the labels col legno, ECM and WERGO and the radio stations Deutschlandfunk and Südwestrundfunk. I wish to thank Rolf W. Stoll for his extraordinary commitment during the editing of the manuscript, which was surely not always a simple process. Jürgen Hocker
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| Überschrift | List of Works
Studies for Player Piano The Studies for Player Piano are merely characterized briefly below. Detailed analyses may be found in Kyle Gann, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995 |
|---|---|
| No.1 | Circa 1949–50. Published in New Music in 1951 under the title Rhythm Study No. 1. Polyrhythmic composition with more than two hundred time changes. |
| 2a | Circa 1950. Slow blues with two bass parts in tempo ratio of 3:5. |
| 2b | 2b (x): Didactic Study of 2a. Same melody line but bass parts in tempo ratio of 5:9, 1980. |
| 2c | 2c (y): Didactic Study of 2a. Same melody line but bass parts in tempo ratio of 4:7, 1980. |
| 2d | 2d (y): Didactic Study of 2a. Same melody line but bass parts in tempo ratio of 5:7, 1980. |
--PlayerpianoJH 19:40, 1. Apr. 2011 (CEST)