remarkable American-born Mexican composer, innovator in the technique of recording notes on a PLAYER-PIANO roll; b. Texarkana, Ark., Oct. 27, 1912;d. Mexico City, Aug. 10, 1997. Nancarrow played the trumpet in jazz orchestras, then took courses at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music from 1929 to 1932. He subsequently traveled to Boston, where he became a private student of NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, WALTER PISTON, and ROGER SESSIONS.

In 1937 Nancarrow volunteered to fight the Fascist forces in Spain. When the freedom fighters lost, he was refused a U.S. passport and moved to Mexico City, where he remained for 40 years, eventually obtaining Mexican citizenship in 1956. In 1981, with political pressures defused in the U.S., Nancarrow was able to revisit his native land and to participate in the New Music America Festival in San Francisco. In 1982 he was a composer-in-residence at the Cabrillo Music Festival in Aptos, California. He also traveled to Europe, where he participated in festivals in Austria, Germany, and France. In 1982 he was awarded the "genius grant" of $300,000 by the MacArthur Foundation of Chicago, enabling him to continue his work without financial concerns.

The unique quality of most of Nancarrow's compositions is that he composed them by cutting PLAYER-PIANO rolls to mark the notes and rhythms. They can therefore be performed only by a player piano. This method of composition gave him total freedom in creating the most complex contrapuntal, harmonic, and rhythmic combinations that no human pianist or number of human pianists could possibly perform. The method itself is extremely laborious. A bar containing a few dozen notes might require an hour to stamp out on the piano roll.

In 1984 Nancarrow gave a concert of his works in Los Angeles, in a program including his Prelude and Blues for ACOUSTIC PIANO and several of his studies. In 1988 his Third String Quartet was given its premiere performance in Cologne, Germany, by the London-based Arditti Quartet, one of the very few ensembles in the world capable of realizing Nancarrow's exceedingly complex scores.