Conlon nancarrow biography sampler

Samuel Conlon Nancarrow composed innovative music and produced a body of work largely for player piano. His father, Samuel Charles Nancarrow, was a businessman and mayor of Texarkana from to His mother was Myra Brady Nancarrow, and he had one brother, Charles. While there, his interest in music blossomed, and he attended the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, the following summer.

He began listening to jazz and composing. Already proficient on the trumpet, he was still a teenager when he left Texarkana in to study at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory.

The American/Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow (–) is widely recognized as a prominent figure in the history of twentieth-century Western art music.

He played jazz there in a German beer hall. In , he married Helen Rigby, a singer and contrabass player, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She divorced him in Later marriages were to Annette Margolis, a painter, from until their divorce in , and Yoko Seguira, an anthropologist, in , with whom he had a son, David Makoto, in Upon his return to the United States in , he discovered that Slonimsky had arranged for publication of two of his compositions.

In protest, he moved to Mexico City in , Mexico being the only country other than Canada where he could go without a passport. He lived there the rest of his life, becoming a Mexican citizen in His only return visit to Arkansas after moving to Mexico was in , when he dealt with family matters. As he continued composing, he realized that the complex rhythms he envisioned could be cut on a player piano roll.