Driving rhythms, superhuman speeds Alarm Will Sound tackles the music of a true visionary

From: The Boston Globe (Boston, MA) | Date: February 15, 2007| Author: | Copyright information

Great composers are musical visionaries who change how we hear the world.

The greatest composer whose work you may never have heard could be Texarkana, Ark., native Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), the maker of quintessentially American music who nevertheless spent most of his life as an exile in Mexico City, having fled the persecutions of the McCarthy era. Spend enough time with his music and it just might rewire your brain.

Nancarrow's influential compositions have been called the most rhythmically complex ever written. So much so, with their multiple layers of tempos and often superhuman ...

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