Question: When you compose for the player piano, do you try to avoid writing something that a live pianist could realize?

Nancarrow: Oh, no, not at all. I just write a piece of music. It just happens that a lot of them are unplayable.

—From a 1980 interview

The visitors who made it to Conlon Nancarrow's home in Mexico City noticed that the composer had extremely muscular forearms, the result of decades of using a stiff mechanical hole punch to perforate old-fashioned pianola rolls. Nancarrow wrote compositions so rhythmically complex that seemingly no musician could execute them. For almost 40 years, his orchestra was an Ampico Player Piano, mechanically reproducing scores he "wrote" by punching thousands of holes in pianola paper rolls. Most of his works last less than five minutes, perhaps due to the physical labor involved in their creation. Nancarrow once estimated it took ten hours to punch out ten seconds' worth of music.

Nancarrow's works are counted among the most intriguing efforts in modern American music, but it's their sheer difficulty that makes them irresistible to Alarm Will Sound (AWS), an innovative 20-member band that plays music from Aphex Twin to Frank Zappa, on everything from conventional stringed instruments to the electric marimba. AWS comes to Hertz Hall on Sunday, March 11 to perform some of the most complex—and most accessible—experimental music of the 20th century.

"It's like Mount Everest," says AWS managing director Gavin Chuck of Nancarrow's work. "It's there, so you want to climb it. Nancarrow believed musicians couldn't perform his pieces correctly, which may have been true at the time he wrote them. But we want to take on the challenge. To capture the thrill of performing live something that was created for machines."

And then there's the fascination with Nancarrow himself, whose identity coils around twin helices of musical and political radicalism. Given his ornery iconoclasm combined with an obsessive interest in form, his seemingly congenital disgust with the U.S. government, even his vertical hair and prophetic mien, Nancarrow feels like music's answer to Ezra Pound, another gentile modernist who turned an old art form upside down and shook out something new.

Born in Texarkana in 1912, Nancarrow grew up in a conservative household that happened to have a player piano. He hated school and, starting at age ten, secretly used his allowance to buy educational pamphlets published by the International Workers of the World. He briefly took up piano but hated his teacher and switched to trumpet instead. Later, while attending Cincinnati College-Conservatory, he heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring for the first time and realized he wanted to be a composer.

Nancarrow moved to Boston to study music seriously and joined the Communist Party, even organizing a concert to commemorate the death of Lenin. And he truly walked the Red talk: When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he made passage across the Atlantic by playing in a cruise ship's band, and immediately joined the anti-fascist Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Interviewed in the 1980s by William Duckworth, the composer's response to questions about his wartime experience is classic Nancarrow: matter-of-fact, unsentimental, no quarter for fools.

Duckworth: Did you see a lot of action in the Spanish Civil War?
Nancarrow: Two years of it.
Duckworth: I mean, were you in the thick of things, so to speak?
Nancarrow: Of course.
Duckworth: Being fired at and all that?
Nancarrow: Well, naturally! That's what wars are about.

After the defeat of the Spanish Republicans in 1939, Nancarrow barely made it back to the States, smuggled out in the bowels of a freighter carrying olive oil. Then two documents changed his life forever. In New York, Nancarrow bought Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources, which proposed that "highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could be easily cut on a player-piano roll." And in 1940, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, driving a fed-up, poor Nancarrow into exile in Mexico, where he would live and write, virtually unknown, for nearly 40 years. He came back to the States just long enough to purchase an Ampico Reproducing Piano and a custom-made punching machine to create his own piano-roll scores.

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