Oddlet: Conlon Nancarrow Β· 1 min read
Aug 20, 2026
Ten Hours, Ten Seconds
He calculated that ten hours of punching holes produced ten seconds of music, and he kept punching for forty years.
Conlon Nancarrow studied composition in Boston under Roger Sessions and Walter Piston. He fought Franco with the Lincoln Brigade. The State Department refused to renew his passport, so in 1940 he moved to Mexico City and stayed.
He wanted music humans couldn't play. A clarinetist had once refused a piece on the grounds that audiences would assume he was making mistakes. So in 1947 he bought a manual roll-punching machine, adapted from one used by a ragtime arranger, and took it back to Mexico.
The lever was so stiff that visiting men couldn't move it. His forearms thickened like a blacksmith's. By his own arithmetic, ten hours of punching produced ten seconds of music. He kept punching.
He modified two 1927 Ampico player pianos to suit the work, gluing leather to the hammers of one and driving metal tacks into the other so the counterpoint would stay legible. Then he wrote a canon, Study No. 40, in the ratio e to pi. Two transcendental numbers. By definition they can never align. You can listen for the resolution as long as you like; mathematics has already told you the answer.
He did this, alone, for forty years.
When his wife Yoko asked what to do with the rolls after he died, he shrugged. Burn 'em.
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- Wikipedia: Conlon Nancarrow β Comprehensive biographical entry covering birth/death, education, Spanish Civil War service, move to Mexico, citizenship in 1956, the Ampico pianos, the Studies, tempo-canon ratios (e:Ο), and the Paul Sacher Foundation archive.
- Kyle Gann β A Conlon Nancarrow Chronology β Detailed year-by-year chronology by Nancarrow's principal biographer (author of 'The Music of Conlon Nancarrow'), covering Communist Party membership, Lincoln Brigade enlistment, purchase of the punching machine, MacArthur Award, and death.
- Encyclopedia.com: Conlon Nancarrow β Biographical entry including direct quotes on his reasons for adopting the player piano and his estimate of hours-per-second of music produced.
- Bruce Duffie interview with Conlon Nancarrow β Primary-source interview with Nancarrow including his statements on musicians who 'couldn't or wouldn't' play his music.
- Encyclopedia of Arkansas: Samuel Conlon Nancarrow (1912β1997) β Regional biographical reference covering his Texarkana birth, family background, and career arc.
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