Nancarrow is best remembered for his Studies for Player Piano, being one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments, realizing their potential to play far beyond human performance ability.

He played trumpet in a jazz band in his youth before studying music first in Cincinnati, Ohio, and later in Boston, Massachusetts, with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco.

He traveled regularly in the following years[5] and lived in the current Casa Estudio Conlon Nancarrow (designed by Juan O'Gorman) at Las Águilas, Mexico City, until his death at 84.

After some exploration, they located a shop where Nancarrow was able to purchase a device that could create player piano rolls, and "worked with the owner to learn technical details, such as how to record loud and soft, and different types of notes, and improve the machine.

Nancarrow's first pieces combined the harmonic language and melodic motifs of early jazz pianists like Art Tatum with extraordinarily complicated metrical schemes.

Having spent many years in obscurity, Nancarrow benefited from the 1969 release of an entire album of his work by Columbia Records as part of a brief flirtation of the label's classical division with modern avant-garde music.

In 1987, a composer and instrument builder named Trimpin would work with Nancarrow to preserve his pieces in an early MIDI format using his piano roll reader.

The complete contents of his studio, including the player piano rolls, the instruments, the libraries, and other documents and objects, are now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

Other performers of Nancarrow's works (often in arrangement for live musicians) include Thomas Adès, Alarm Will Sound, and ensemble Calefax from the Netherlands who also recorded the Studies for player piano, hailed as 'Best CD of 2009' by Dutch newspaper Het Parool.

[13] American clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn has adapted a number of Nancarrow's player piano studies for the Bang on a Can All-Stars to perform live.

[17] In 2024, composer and sound artist Dario Acuña Fuentes-Berain ("Dario Afb") used a collection of objects contributed by artist Lenka Clayton to prepare the late Conlon Nancarrow's historic piano, then composed and performed a new work on the altered instrument in Nancarrow's Mexico City studio.

In 1993, BMG released a CD (090262611802) of works by Nancarrow (Studies for Player Piano, Tango, Toccata, Piece No.2 for Small Orchestra, Trio, Sarabande & Scherzo) played by Ensemble Modern, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher.

[20] The 4-CD set includes a 52-page booklet with the original liner notes by James Tenney, an essay by producer Charles Amirkhanian and 24 illustrations.

A recording of "Study #7", arranged for orchestra, was performed by the London Sinfonietta and included on their 2006 CD Warp Works & Twentieth Century Masters.

Feinberg also recorded the pre-Player Piano era piece "Prelude" on the 1995 album The American Innovator on Argo / Decca.