Review of Jürgen Hocker; Steven Lindberg trans., Encounters With Conlon Nancarrow (Lexington Books, 2012)

Abstract

[1] Encounters With Nancarrow (the English translation of Begegnungen mit Conlon Nancarrow, 2002), describes the author's experiences with Conlon Nancarrow while presenting his player piano Studies in concerts across Europe in the late 1980s. While it is intended for a general audience and is neither a biography nor a musicological study, it does include information from eyewitnesses that help fill in some of the gaps in what was known of Nancarrow's life and the contemporary music scene. Hocker approached Nancarrow's music as a layperson and made it clear from the outset that he was not a musical theorist. The characterizations of the Studies in the Catalog of Works are just thumbnail sketches and do not rely on the reader having an academic background or access to scores and recordings. Music theorists will find more in-depth analysis in Kyle Gann's The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (1995).[2] Instead of dividing the book into two parts, one with information on Nancarrow and his music, and a second documenting their work together, the author chose to interleave the account of their "encounters" with a series of intermezzos-digressions in which he inserted information on a wide range of topics, such as how a player piano works; Nancarrow's hardening of his pianos' hammers to intensify their attacks; Peter Garland and Soundings Press; James Tenney's analysis; Igor Stravinsky and the Pianola; Nancarrow's friendship with John Cage; and his percussion orchestra. The intermezzos, despite having the character of "added" material, actually occupy approximately 75% of the book's pages and contain most of the material of historical value. They are printed in a smaller font, presumably to help the reader switch from the author's personal frame of reference to the background information collected from his research. The German version of the book included an index of the intermezzos which was omitted in the English edition. I have compiled an expanded table of contents with a list of subheadings and a description of figures to make it easier to locate topics of interest.(1) The book's appendices contain a chronology of Nancarrow's life and work, catalogue of works, list of over 100 concerts Hocker presented with his piano, discography, and bibliography.[3] The 25% of the book covering Hocker's "encounters" consists of reports of the European tours they went on together with his piano to Amsterdam (1987), Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg and Hannover (1988), Vienna (1988), and Paris (1991), meetings with many of the people who were instrumental in bringing Nancarrow's music to the public's attention (including Monika Furst-Heidtmann, Charles Amirkhanian, and Gyorgy Ligeti), and the author's visits to Nancarrow in his studio in Mexico. While Nancarrow himself is not always the focus, we learn about his reactions to presenting his music in public, and of its reception by European audiences and press.[4] Despite the book's largely anecdotal nature, there is a great deal of information of interest to the scholarly community. For example, Ligeti was one of Nancarrow's most committed supporters, and the Intermezzo chronicling their friendship details Ligeti's reaction to Nancarrow's music: "The music was of incredible beauty and freshness, contemporary but not indebted to any school, American but with no echoes of Ives or Cages, written rather in the tradition of Bach, Stravinsky and jazz" (43). Ligeti was surprised how similar Nancarrow's Study No. 20 was to his own Monument for two pianos written in 1976. For his part, Nancarrow found Ligeti's 2nd String Quartet to be one of the high points of the twentieth century (45). Ligeti helped Nancarrow find a publisher, and proposed Nancarrow for the MacArthur Fellowship, providing the composer with welcome financial support in his later years. (Ligeti also wrote the Foreword to EWN, which I will discuss below.)[5] In another section, Hocker outlines the parts of Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources (1930) that particularly caught Nancarrow's attention, beginning with the tracing of all musical parameters-including duration of notes, meter, and tempo-to the harmonic series and frequency ratios of the chromatic scale. …