Outside the Feedback Loop: A Nancarrow Keynote Address

[1] There is a point in an artist's life, I think, when quality of lifestyle begins to be more important than career issues. Conlon Nancarrow was not a great model for a composing career, but he was a great model for a life. My last visit to Conlon was in 1993, when he was 80, and the previous week he had been visited by a German film crew that was making a documentary about him. He was still complaining about how much of his time they had taken up, how they had dragged their equipment all through his house and made him play the Study No. 21 on the player piano over and over again while they got the lighting and the sound right. If a German film crew came to make a documentary about me, I'd think I had finally hit the big time. Most composers tend to consider exposure and publicity the greatest possible good, and for a composer to remain undiscovered until the age of 65, as Conlon did, sounds like a harsh fate, a recipe for bitterness. For Conlon, however, such celebrity as he enjoyed seemed merely a distraction from his tequila and fresh papayas.[2] Conlon taught me to drink tequila. I had never thought much about tequila, though I enjoyed margaritas and tequila sunrises. Once, upon arriving at his house, before even taking my bags to the bedroom he immediately poured me some El Jimador tequila in a tall, exquisitely thin glass, and taught me how to savor it. That was an education that nearly led me down the primrose path to degradation. I rarely indulge in straight tequila at my age, but when I do, I insist on El Jimador, and drink it slowly the way he showed me.[3] Conlon also had a basket in his dining room in which he put the papayas and mangos he grew in his backyard. The papaya, as we know it in the United States, is a third-rate fruit with a pulpy texture and cloying, artificial taste, jammed into jars in thick, sour syrup. But upon visiting Conlon I learned that an absolutely fresh papaya, coral pink on the inside instead of garish orange, is the king of fruits, more delicious and succulent and tastefully sweet than bananas, strawberries, cantaloupes, or anything else. I have never tasted anything like it before or since. Conlon had a housekeeper who routinely prepared fabulous meals. Two years in a row, 1988 and 1989, I happened to be there on September 16, Mexican Independence Day, and got to enjoy the national dish of red, white, and green chiles de nogada, as beautiful as it was delicious. In addition, Conlon and Yoko took me and my wife to Tepoztlan, where we had what I still consider the best meal of my life, enchiladas in a mole sauce that contained nineteen ingredients, many of them unavailable north of the border.[4] What I mean to suggest with these reminiscences is that Conlon Nancarrow lived the good life. Yoko told me once that she asked Conlon what she should do with his player piano rolls after he died; he shrugged and replied, "Burn 'em." I really think that he wanted to hear what certain tempos would sound like if you played them at the same time, and once he'd heard them, the purpose of the experiment was fulfilled. His manager of the early 1980s Eva Soltes tells me that he was reluctant to tour Europe with his music, and that she convinced him to go with the argument that it would convince his son that he had done something worthwhile with his life.[5] Recently, the daughter of a communist harassed by the government during the McCarthy era told me that she had found aversion to publicity a common attribute among people who had been through that experience, that they forever afterward shied away from public attention. I don't know whether there was anything like that in Conlon's case; it sounds very much like what Conlon said about Henry Cowell after Cowell's San Quentin experience, that he never got over being nervous that someone was out to get him. But last April at the Nancarrow conference in London we heard from both Yoko and Conlon's stepson Luis Stephens, who had known Conlon since the 1940s. …