The life and career of one-of-a-kind composer Conlon Nancarrow will be celebrated at twelve-day fest at the new Whitney (photo courtesy Charles Amirkhanian)
Whitney Museum of American Art
Susan and John Hess Family Theater, third floor
99 Gansevoort St.
June 17-28, $22 (includes admission to galleries)
212-570-3600
whitney.org
In a 1981 letter to Charles Amirkhanian, György Ligeti wrote, “This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives . . . something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional . . . for me it’s the best of any composer living today.” Ligeti was referring to the little-known Conlon Nancarrow, an American-born composer who had become a Mexican citizen and had done extraordinary work with the player piano. The recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, Nancarrow, who passed away in 1997 at the age of eighty-four, will be celebrated at the new Whitney Museum of American Art with “Anywhere in Time: A Conlon Nancarrow Festival,” twelve days of special live performances, talks, and films paying tribute to Nancarrow’s influential career. Among those taking the stage in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater will be Steve Coleman and Five Elements, dancers from the Merce Cunningham Trust Fellowship Program performing Crises (1960) (reconstructed and staged by Jennifer Goggans), percussionist Chris Froh, Alarm Will Sound, and Henry Kaiser and Lukas Ligeti with Charles Amirkhanian. Cocurated by Dominic Murcott and Jay Sanders, “Anywhere in Time” also features screenings of James Greeson’s 2012 documentary Conlon Nancarrow: Virtuoso of the Player Piano, the panel discussion “Nancarrow Deconstructed” with Froh and Murcott, and a 1921 Marshall and Wendell Ampico upright player piano on view on the veranda with Nancarrow’s “Study #36” piano roll, which will occasionally play. “Conlon Nancarrow had perhaps the most single-minded career of any great American composer, devoting his life to exploring the rhythmic possibilities of juxtaposing multiple simultaneous tempos,” notes Alarm Will Sound conductor and artistic director Alan Pierson. “The combination of Nancarrow’s catchy materials and the complex way he deals with them puts his work in a sweet spot of immediacy and complexity occupied by much of the music we love. And the challenge of performing music not meant to be played by human beings is a stimulating one.” The festival comes to a close on June 28 with the eight-hour “Complete Studies for Player Piano: A Marathon Concert Event,” presented in numerical order from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm and including appearances by Nancarrow’s wife, Yoko, and their son, Mako. Most of the events require ticketing, and it’s best if you get them in advance; the cost is the same as museum admission, and the ticket gets you into all the galleries.