Outside is not a question of degrees. The outsider holds some secret knowledge, a private solo joke which only old age will articulate. It is a happy and special position on the edge of a city.
Conlon Nancarrow was a dissenter, an inventor, an exile, an outsider. It is no coincidence that one of the greatest composer’s of the past century was an American exiled to Mexico. For during this period, America’s greatness was marked by sharp individualism adjacent mass collectivism; the tyranny of the majority Rousseau had called it–or the race to the bottom. It is the American contradiction.
Born in the small town of Texarkana, Arkansas, Nancarrow was driven out during America’s McCartney era. It was around this time he read Henry Cowell’s famous book on instrument building which would serve Nancarrow well. Nancarrow’s particular method for composing music was to punch tiny holes into rolls of paper. A specially adapted player piano (or pianola) converted them into sounds. Steel finger ran across the rolls feeling for tiny holes. One finger for every key of the piano. Nearly Nancarrow’s entire output was composed in this way. It provided exactitude. It is a contract between Nancarrow and instrument. One note written is one note played. The note D written for 1.2 seconds is a D played for exactly 1.2 seconds. Once written, an ascending D minor scale accelerating half upon half upon half with each note is played with precision. This guarantee freed Nancarrow from his performers’ physical abilities and also their mental capacity. In music, as his foil we might imagine the virtuosity of Brian Ferneyhough. In architecture, we might imagine the draftsmanship of Lebbeus Woods or Yakov Chernikhov. Nancarrow’s contract gave him freedom.
The composer wrote a piece in which two lines exactly cross in the middle, pieces that slow down and speed up, pieces with moments where clusters of textured sounds arising from the rapid playing of notes too quick for the ear to differentiate. His output reminds us of Calvino’s catalogue of cities, a Sol Lewitt and Bach’s Goldberg variations.
Tape music has a similar mechanism. It has precision. But, tape has the flexibility to record. It strove to expand the boundaries of music by encompassing new sounds. Nancarrow dismissed tape because its agenda was too broad. It is an agenda begun with the imaginative onomatopoeia of the Italian futurists: a ratter tat tat. Cage, partly misunderstanding Erik Satie’s idea of boredom, took up the same cause expanding music to include life. Then La Monte Young would entwine life with music with never ending sounds. The composer we are concerned with had no time for these formal debates. He had his contract.
Had Nancarrow stopped composing for player piano at a half dozen pieces, his music would be a half forgotten oddity. Instead, this body of work represents one of the most significant achievements of human culture. Art, philosophy and intellectual endeavours are not in themselves useless, but they are born from activities that are essentially frivolousness. This is one of the contradictions Orwell faced. The committed socialist, Orwell was a champion of the working class but himself of the leisure class. He had known poverty but also travel, journalism, British private school. Though his essays (which are conceptually more rich than his famous novels) are preoccupied with the working class, they are preoccupied with explaining their plight to the leisure class. This is Orwell’s greatest intellectual achievement, but be sure, it is one born of leisure.
Nancarrow’s work is truly frivolous in the best sense. Leisure is a necessary quality of the outsider.
If there was a way to prove that things exist outside of culture, to disprove Martin Heidegger, Nancarrow’s music is our chance. Nancarrow’s inventiveness with his tools is his gift. My confusion with Heidegger’s philosophy is he presupposes stability. The world, which is the background to our existence, is culture. And, this culture we only notice when it fails to operate as normal. We notice the lock on the door only when it fails to unlock. This is Heidegger’s starting point. What happens when the idea of what everything is in flux? The ancient Romans, following the Greeks, built cities around a central square grounded by two main axis: the roads Cardo and Demumanus spiritually orientating–stabilising–the city with the sun and facilitating trading in and out of the city. Our cities no longer look like this. We have multiple centres, sprawling suburbs, airports, train stations, roads and mass transport systems creating various access points. Our concept of the world should also reflect this instability. In Nancarrow, there is no presupposing a stable concept for of what a pianola is. Nor, do we need to reach towards a Platonic archetypes.
But, philosophy practiced well has more to do with usefulness and imagination that correctness and proof. There are infinite descriptions of reality. The easy option is to say that musical culture is different from door culture ignoring that the two must be connected. Both everyday things and concert hall music are equally culture.
Nancarrow was outside the heated debate that cast a shadow over the twenty and twenty first century about what music is. His music prefigures algorithmic composition, the analogue synthesisers, tape music, composer music.
What more would we like to know about this man? He lived in suburban Mexico. He worked in relative obscurity until fame found him in his later years like the great South American writer Borges. He was not a futurist, a modernist, a post modernist. He was an outsider.
