This just came in...
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 Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 07:28:48 -0800
 Subject: Conlon Nancarrow

I just returned home from the east coast to find a message on my
answering machine from Trimpin saying that Conlon Nancarrow died over
the weekend in Mexico City.  Nancarrow would have been 85 in October.

The American expatriate composer was best known for his series of studies
for player piano, composed and hand-punched on a custom machine, the
medium in which he worked almost exclusively for much of the last fifty
years.

These works were really wonderful extensions of the sound world of the
piano timbrally altered by extremes of tempo, tempo ratios, and unusual
canonic structures.  His few works for live performers (either early
works composed before Nancarrow began focusing on player piano or quite
recent pieces commissioned by performers & ensembles like Ursula Oppens &
Arditti Quartet) have been more rarely heard.

All but the three most recently completed of Nancarrow's Studies for
Player Piano are recorded on Wergo, his other works have been recorded by
Arditti Quartet, Ursula Oppens, Continuum, Joanna MacGregor, and others.
In 1995, Cambridge University Press published a book length study of his
work by Kyle Gann.

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Colin Hinz * ASFi Music Works * asfi@interlog.com * (416) 516-8686 *