Composer Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic studies for player piano are mathematically intricate creations, yet they often provoke a smile - not only on account of their buoyant inventiveness, but because ...

Mr. MAYNER: Conlon Nancarrow was writing the early version of a mash-up -combining different melodies and different time signatures. He knew this was too hard for just about anyone to play so he ...

If you wanted to conjure up the quintessential reclusive unsung genius of the musical world - an artist to make Emily Dickinson look like a celebrated glad-hander by comparison - you could not do ...

The American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who died in 1997, must be a tantalizing presence for performing musicians. He wrote some of the 20th century's most dazzling and inventive music, but he didn't ...

There was a moment during the Southbank’s weekend celebration of Conlon Nancarrow — pioneer of mechanical music created for the player-piano — when I thought my enthusiasm for him (extravagantly ...

To anyone who met Conlon Nancarrow in the 1930s — or ‘40s, or ‘50s — he must have seemed like a bit of a lost sheep. A thinly educated trumpeter whose father was the mayor of Texarkana, he drifted ...

LONDON (Reuters) – Avant garde rock star Frank Zappa said his music sounded like “bionic ragtime”, the U.S. government considered him an unwelcome communist and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s ...

Critics of modern music often describe it as fundamentally inhuman. They say it prefers dissonance and ugliness to beauty, anxiety to joy, and cages the simple urge to sing and dance in musical ...

At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was the first time all 51 studies had been performed in public in one go. And ...

The eyes are bolder than the ears: cultural consumers more readily embrace the visual avant-garde than they do the musical equivalent. The audience for Kandinsky and Picasso greatly exceeds the one ...