"Blue" Gene Tyranny

"Blue" Gene Tyranny composed and performed avant-garde works across electronic and acoustic instruments as well as voices, producing more than fifty pieces that probe enigmatic natural and social processes. Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1945, he resided successively in all four corners of the continental United States. In the late 1950s he took lessons from pianists Meta Hertwig and Rodney Hoare, studied composition with Otto Wick and Frank Hughes, and, together with Philip Krumm, mounted new-music programs in Texas that featured several festivals at the McNay Art Institute presenting premieres by Cage, Corner, Maxfield, Ono and others. After receiving a BMI Student Composer's Award in 1961 he relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he appeared in his own pieces and in numerous programs at the historic ONCE concerts while holding jobs as a waiter, sales clerk and statistics coder. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he traveled with ensembles such as the Carla Bley Band, Iggy Pop and the Prime Movers Blues Band. From 1971 to 1982 he served as Lecturer and Instructor in Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, teaching Recording Studio Techniques, Harmony and Counterpoint at three levels, and Jazz Improvisation and Literature, while also sitting on graduate committees; simultaneously he worked as a technician at the Center for Contemporary Music, the nonprofit community-access studio housed at the college. In 1983 he settled in Brooklyn, New York, and operated thereafter as an independent composer and performer, presenting solo and ensemble concerts, supplying audio consultancy, creating soundtracks for film, video and CD-R projects, and fulfilling commissions. He appeared in hundreds of concerts across the United States, Canada and Europe as well as in Mexico, Brazil and Japan. Tyranny produced, recorded and played on numerous albums by fellow composers, among them Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels, David Behrman's On the Other Ocean and John Cage's Cheap Imitation and Empty Words, and he supplied the harmonic framework and piano improvisations for Robert Ashley's television opera Perfect Lives, broadcast by Channel Four, London. He fashioned more than forty soundtracks for film and video in collaboration with video artists Kenn Beckman and Kit Fitzgerald. His theater and dance partnerships encompassed projects with the Talking Band, performance artist Pat Oleszko (including Nora's Art and ten film scores), choreographer Timothy Buckley (Barn Fever, 1983; Breakneck Hotel, 1984; The Tourist Trap, 1985; Proximology, 1986), his own videos Endance (1988, for PBS), Do This (1985), Man with an Idea (1985) and The Sleeping Man (1996), his theater pieces A Leap in the Dark (1987) and Prisoner of Gravity (1996), Rocky Bornstein's dances Labor of Love (1988), Double Your Pleasure (1989) and Unsung Song (1991), the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's The History of Collage (1988), the Creach/Koester Dance Company's I Witness (1995), Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton's Long and Dream (1996), live electronic scores for Stefa Zawerucha's The Black Box (1993), Curve Ahead (1994), Piano Dance (1996) and Legal While Moving (1998), and multiple productions by the Otrabanda Company such as Re Room (1985), Brain Café (1987), Quasi-Kinetics (1989), Green Eyes Are Fine (1991), Simpatico (1993) and The Alien Project (1995). He earned a Composer Award at the Bessies (New York Dance and Performance Awards) in 1988, a Composer Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1989 and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1998, and he served as Artist-in-Residence at Bucknell University in 1992. His writings on contemporary music comprise the article "Music Beyond the Boundaries," written with Mark Slobin and published in Generation by the University of Michigan in 1965, and the "20th Century Avant-Garde" section of the All Music Guide issued by Miller Freeman in 1993, 1995, 1997 and 1998. Chapters devoted to his work appear in Cole Gagne's Sonic Transports (DeFalco Books, 1990), Soundpieces 2: Interviews With American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 1993), William Duckworth's Talking Music (Schirmer Press, 1995) and Kyle Gann's American Music in the Twentieth Century (Schirmer Press, 1997). His music receives analysis in Kevin James Holm-Hudson's doctoral thesis "Music, Text and Image in Robert Ashley's video opera 'Perfect Lives'" (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Tyranny translated documentary material from German into English for Kevin Lally's Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder (Henry Holt & Co., 1996), was interviewed for Paul Trynka's Lust for Life: The Iggy Pop Story (Box Tree, London, 1996) and figured as a character in Kathy Acker's "I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining" (collected in Portrait of an Eye, Pantheon Books, 1995) as well as in Mary Ashley's Truck (a dance, 1964; published as a Wolgamot-ONCE book by Burning Deck Press, 1972). Recordings of his compositions include the 25-year project Country Boy Country Dog/How to Discover Music in the Sounds of Your Daily Life for electronics, orchestra and environmental sounds (Lovely Music CD), Nocturne with and Without Memory performed by pianist Lois Svard (Lovely Music CD), The De-Certified Highway of Dreams realized by the piano duo Double Edge (on U.S. Choice, CRI Records), Somewhere in Arizona 1970 for baritone and electronics (included in Imaginary Landscapes, Elektra/Nonesuch) and a selection of live keyboard concerts issued as Free Delivery (Lovely Music CD). Additional works comprise The Driver's Son (1989–1998), an audio-storyboard for voices and orchestra commissioned by Electrical Matter and presented in progress during the 1991 Benjamin Franklin bicentennial celebration; His Tone of Voice at 37 (Empathy) (1995, 1998) commissioned and recorded by vocalist Tom Buckner; The Drifter (1994) commissioned by pianist Joseph Kubera; Spirit for muted piano and computer-edited piano using artificial harmonics (1996) commissioned by Bay Area Pianists for the Henry Cowell celebration; Holding Hands for hand movements and infrared sensors; and The Keys: Keyboard Calculation Etudes for alternate and hypothetical keyboards. Selected earlier compositions encompass Three Begins for voice and tape (1958), How Things That Can't Exist May Exist (pieces for alternative spaces), Ballad (graph score, 1960), Meditation (graph score, 1961), Diotima for flute, household percussion and electronics (1963), Just Walk on In (theater piece, 1965), Closed Transmission for IBM 7090 computer (1966), "The Bust" from Viet Rock (1967), Archaeoacoustics (1973), A Letter from Home for voices and electronics (1976), PALS/Action at a Distance (1977), Harvey Milk/Portrait (1978), The White Night Riot (1979), The CBCD Variations for Soloist and Orchestra (1980, for the Arch Ensemble), The Intermediary for piano and shadowing electronics (1982) and The Forecaster for double orchestra, decoding chorus and time-transposing pianist (1989). "Blue" Gene Tyranny died on December 12, 2020, in Long Island City, New York, at the age of 75; complications from diabetes were the cause.