1

Felix Meyer

Conlon Nancarrow Was Never in Gurs

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Conlon Nancarrow's close circle of friends
included Trimpin, a sound sculptor and inventor of musical instruments.
Born in southern Germany in 1951, Trimpin emigrated to the USA in 1979
(settling in Seattle) but was working temporarily in the Netherlands when he
and Nancarrow first met in June 1987, the occasion being a small-scale
Nancarrow retrospective organized by the Holland Festival. The two men
were soon engaged in several collaborative projects. For one thing,
Nancarrow placed all of his piano rolls at Trimpin's disposal in November
1989 in order for them to be translated into MIDI information, thus making
his music available for performance on instruments other than the player
piano(s) for which it had originally been written. And Trimpin, in addition to
presenting Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano on regular pianos (by means
of a computer-controlled Vorsetzer), also created arrangements of some of
these works for his self-built mechanical instruments. The highpoints of
their collaboration included joint appearances at the New Music America
festival in New York in November 1989 and at the first Other Minds Festival
in San Francisco in November 1993. At the former, Trimpin presented works
that included Study No. 37 in a version for piano, xylophone and
woodblocks; at the latter, he gave the world première of Nancarrow's
Contraption No. 1 (1993), which was dedicated to him and owed its title to an
invention of Trimpin's for modifying the sound of the piano ('Contraption IPP
71512').
Trimpin's commitment to Nancarrow's cause continued after his
mentor's death in 1997 and has brought him almost as much recognition as
have his own, highly original artistic explorations in the borderland between
music and sculpture. However, in his new 75-minute stage work The Gurs
Cycle, realized in collaboration with the director Rinde Eckert and given its
world première in the Memorial Auditorium of Stanford University on 14 May
2011, Trimpin the multimedia artist brings Nancarrow into play in a manner
that is at odds with historical fact, compelling us to contradict him. This
 
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work is Trimpin's monument to the prisoners of the infamous internment

camp in the French village of Gurs at the foot of the western Pyrenees in the
department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques. The French government created the
camp in early 1939 after Franco's armies had won their final victory in the
Spanish Civil War. Its initial purpose was to absorb the stream of
Republican refugees from across the border, but it remained in existence for
over six years and from 1940 onwards served primarily to intern German
Jews and others persecuted under the Nazis. (Many of them, including
several refugees from Trimpin's own home region of southern Baden, died
either in Gurs itself or were later deported to Auschwitz.) In The Gurs Cycle
Trimpin has recreated scenes from this camp by means of sound, speech,
and video projections, using not only various documentary materials such as
letters and drawings of former prisoners of Gurs, but also two of Nancarrow's
Studies for Player Piano. The reason for this inclusion is easy to explain: it is
Trimpin's belief – as he first made public in a profile published by The New
Yorker in 20061 – that Nancarrow, who from the spring of 1937 had served
in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (a unit in the 15th International Brigade of
volunteers fighting for the Republican cause), was interned in Gurs after
fleeing from Spain. However, this does not correspond to the facts, for which
reason it seems necessary here to sketch out the story of Nancarrow's return
from Spain using the sources currently available.
After the International Brigades were disbanded in September 1938,
they were officially demobilized in Barcelona on 29 October in the presence
of the Prime Minister Juan Negrin and other high-ranking Republican
politicians. But unlike a large number of his fellow fighters, Nancarrow did
not set out for home straightaway. Instead he remained in Spain for several
months longer, though his reasons for doing so remain unclear. Stephen
Schwartz has claimed that Nancarrow resisted the withdrawal order and
joined a Spanish unit,2 though he names no sources for his information.

                                                                                                                         
1 Jean Strouse, "Perpetual Motion: Trimpin’s Sound Sculpture," The New Yorker, 8 May
2006, pp. 36–43, here p. 39; reprinted in abridged form under the title "Music of the
Spheres" in: Trimpin: Contraptions for Art and Sound, ed. Anne Focke (Seattle und London:
University of Washington Press, 2011), pp. 23–33, here p. 26.  
2 Stephen Schwartz, "The Spanish Civil War in Context," in idem, Intellectuals and

Assassins: Writings at the End of Soviet Communism (London: Anthem Press, 2000), pp.151–
170, here p. 156.  

 
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However, judging from Nancarrow's own, fragmentary reminiscences offered

in an interview with Vivian Perlis, it would appear that he ended up in the
southern part of the Republican territory by mistake, spending his time
there out of combat.3 Be that as it may, in January 1939 he finally managed
to escape from Valencia to Barcelona in the hold of a freighter.4 While up to
this point we have to rely largely on Nancarrow's own testimony, we have
quite detailed information about his further movements in January and
February 1939, thanks to the diary entries of his fellow fighter Sidney
Kaufman. Excerpts from these were published in The Volunteer,5 the journal
of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and their content is
confirmed by Nancarrow's own reminiscences as well as by other sources. (In
the following account these secondary sources will be given in the footnotes.)
According to Kaufman's notes, Nancarrow had missed an evacuees' train in
Figueres and turned up on 26 January 1939 – the day that Barcelona fell to
Franco – at the demobilization station of Cassà de la Selva near Girona. He
and Kaufman then set off for the north on foot, together with John Murra
(later a well-known anthropologist) and other ex-Brigade members. Their
initial intention was to cross the French border at Port-Bou, but their
request for a salvoconducto was rejected because the French government,
uncertain as to what to do about the surging mass of refugees from Spain,
had first closed the border altogether and then, on 28 January 1939, had
opened it up again for women, children and old men only. So Nancarrow and
his group set off on another route that took them some 30 kilometers inland
towards the mountain village of La Jonquera, chancing along the way upon a
large cache of food stored in a military depot and sating themselves on it.6
The border having been reopened for troups and men of military age on 5
                                                                                                                         
3 See Perlis, Interview with Conlon Nancarrow, New York City, 18 April 1986 (Oral History of
American Music Project, Yale University Library). Typescript photocopy in the Conlon
Nancarrow Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, pp. 31–32, here p. 31.
4 See Perlis, Interview (see note 2); Conlon Nancarrow, letter to Peter Garland, 18 September

1979, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel; and Peter Garland, "Conlon Nancarrow: Chronicle of a
Friendship," in idem, Americas: Essays on American Music and Culture, 1973–80 (Santa Fe:
Soundings Press, 1982), pp. 157–185, here p.182.
5 Sid Kaufman, "The Flight," The Volunteer 5/3 (December 1983), pp. 13–15 and 24.
6 Nancarrow himself remembered this episode; see Garland, "Chronicle" (see note 2), p. 182.

The story is also recounted in some detail in the reminiscences of John Murra; see Joe
Doyle, "John Murra's War in Spain & France," The Volunteer 32/2 (June 2010), online
edition, http://www.albavolunteer.org/2010/06/john-murras-war-in-spain-france/,
accessed December 2011.  

 
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February, Nancarrow and his group (now suitably stocked up with

provisions) finally entered France via La Jonquera and Le Perthus in the
early morning of 7 February 1939 – only two days after Girona had fallen to
Franco's troops. They then began their descent to the Mediterranean coast,
guarded by the French police. Their goal was Argelès-sur-Mer; there,
refugees from Spain were kept on a stretch of beach, surrounded by barbed
wire, guarded by Senegalese sharpshooters, and mercilessly exposed to the
cold and damp until wooden huts and barracks were hastily constructed to
house them (see Robert Capa's photos on
http://museum.icp.org/mexican_suitcase/gallery_capa2.html). The Camp
d'Argelès was just one of several such detention camps in the department of
Pyrénées-Orientales, but it alone was soon filled with tens of thousands of
refugees, all of them struggling to survive in the face of catastrophic hygienic
conditions and a precarious supply situation. Many of them died within days
of their arrival, while others were imprisoned for months on end or were
shunted off to other camps. Nancarrow arrived at the camp of Argelès on 8
February 1939, but was spared such a fate: as a US citizen his nationality
was deemed "unproblematic," and so together with a group of other internees
including the journalist Robert Swire and his wife Lorna Wood Swire he was
able to organize a car, borrowed from United Press, to get to the station in
nearby Perpignan on 12 February 1939.7 From there he took the night train
to Paris where he stayed for several days, recovering from the ordeal of his
flight and celebrating his newly won freedom with others recently returned
from Spain, including the journalists Robert Okin and Robert Allen. (The
latter, like Nancarrow, later moved to Mexico City and became one of the
composer's closest friends in the early 1950s.) Nancarrow then boarded the
"President Roosevelt" in Le Havre, crossing the Atlantic to arrive in New York
on 25 February 1939.
Nancarrow was thus never in the camp at Gurs, which in any case was
only set up in March 1939, by which time he was back in the USA. Instead,

                                                                                                                         
7 Regarding the car journey to Perpignan, see also Lorna Swire's letter to Nancarrow of 11
June 1985; Conlon Nancarrow Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel. Lorna Swire had
started a career as a pianist and writer before she went to Spain with her husband; she later
made a reputation for herself as an author of children's books.  

 
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he spent five days – albeit five days under conditions of general deprivation –
in the Camp d'Argelès at the other end of the Pyrenees.
It is a matter of regret that Trimpin was not aware of these facts when
he conceived The Gurs Cycle. For although the musical evocation of
Nancarrow only plays a very subordinate role in The Gurs Cycle, it has
served – not least through the various statements that Trimpin made in
connection with the première of his work – to bring considerable new
attention to the idea of Nancarrow's supposed imprisonment in Gurs.8 And it
is ironic that this fictitious story should have been revived in the context of a
work that relies heavily on documentary materials and whose creator has
attested to being motivated by an urge to establish historical truth in writing
The Gurs Cycle, more specifically by his "curiosity to find out what
happened."9 This by no means lessens the credibility of Trimpin's primary
concern, namely to use the example of Gurs as a means to keep alive the
memory of the victims of violence and fascist persecution. But in future, the
fate of Nancarrow will have to be considered differently from that of the
prisoners of Gurs. Nancarrow's participation in the Spanish Civil War was
brave and honorable, but we must nevertheless differentiate between the
progress of a man who for several days was caught in the wheels of an
incompetent military bureaucracy and the veritable via dolorosa of innocent
deportees who were wrongfully imprisoned for months on end.
All the same, Trimpin's mistake is to a certain extent understandable.
For the details of Nancarrow's biography up to the early 1970s are anything
but clear, especially regarding the years before his emigration to Mexico in
1940. For one thing, even before the drastic deterioration of his memory after
a serious health crisis in early 1990, Nancarrow's own recollections of these
early years seem to have been quite sketchy. This, combined with his strong
sense of privacy and the self-protective reticence of an ex-radical who had
experienced political harassment both in the U.S. and later in Mexico, made

                                                                                                                         
8 See, for example, Rebecca Wallace, "Instruments of Memory: The Artist Trimpin Visits a
Painful Past with the Help of His Original Musical Instruments," Palo Alto Weekly 32/1 (29
April 2011), pp. 40–41 and 43–44, here p. 41; Georgia Rowe, "Trimpin and The Gurs Cycle,"
San Francisco Classical Voice, 3 May 2011, San Francisco Classical Voice,
www.sfcv.org/article/trimpin-and-the-gurs-zyklus; and Ivy Nguyen, "Trimpin Previews
Upcoming Show," The Stanford Daily, 6 May 2011, p. 2.  
9 Trimpin, quoted in Rowe, "Trimpin and The Gurs Cycle" (see note 8).  

 
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him very reluctant to speak about his life, even to his close friends. (Trimpin
has also mentioned this10 – and since he never said expressly that
Nancarrow named the place of his internment, it seems likely that Trimpin
drew an incorrect conclusion from an answer to what might have been a
leading question). Moreover, very few written documents from that period
have survived in Nancarrow's personal papers, and so far not much
biographically relevant material has come to light in other libraries and
archives. But as the above summary of the events of his return from Spain
may show, the situation is by no means hopeless, even if we grant that the
existence of such an elaborate contemporary record as Sidney Kaufman's
diary entries – which, incidentally, Nancarrow read when they were
published in The Volunteer, and indirectly confirmed in his correspondence
with his friend (and fellow veteran) Albert Prago11 – may be an exceptional
case. There is thus no need to indulge in biographical speculation. There is
good reason, however, to suggest that Nancarrow studies, which up to now
have focused primarily on analytical and technological aspects of the music,
should make a stronger effort in future to engage with biographical matters
and in particular to secure those early traces of the composer's biography
that are as yet so scant. For it is not only through the the works but also
through the biography that we gain access to an artist's thinking, and there
may well be closer ties between Nancarrow's life and his music than is
generally assumed. The year 2012, when we shall commemorate the
composer's 100th birthday, could be a suitable occasion to intensify a more
historical approach to Nancarrow research.

(Translated from the German by Chris Walton)

                                                                                                                         
10Ibid.  
11Conlon Nancarrow, letters to Alberto Prago of 2 January 1984 and 9 October 1986;
carbon copies in the Conlon Nancarrow Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.