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Blue Gene TyrannyA Letter From Home, the branching harmonies
White Button Moon
(BMI)
Improvisation is maybe too general a word to describe the musical approach used in this concert. Thinking-with-feeling-at-the-piano (contemplating, commenting, investigating sound with and without meaning or allusions, obsessing, and so on) is perhaps more to the point. Specific techniques are being collected in the on-going piece called The Time-Transposing Pianist.
A Letter From Home (1974) is a modular composition with components -- a text concerning the development of consciousness along three timelines, sampling chorus, rhythm with and without memory, harmonic branching, drone -- which can be performed independently or in any combination. The entire ensemble can be heard on the album “Out of the Blue” recently re-released on the Unseen Worlds label, and reviewed by the New Times as a “moving masterpiece” (boy, was I surprised). In this piano (and the piano duo) realization, a spontaneous dialogue develops as the harmonically-derived chord roots re-calibrate (a new way to modulate).
The two songs written for The Talking Band’s production “Flipside” (2007), and sung by the women’s quartet known as the Smithereens (from Smith College), perfectly express the souls of the characters Frank and Daisy. “If Only”, another chromatic tune, is a song of regret, and “White Button Moon” is a song of fascination (“That’s not the moon, that’s Frank”, one of my favorite lines in Ellen Maddow’s comically surreal script).
“Blue” Gene Tyranny, composer and pianist of avant-garde music, has toured extensively in solo and group concerts throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. He also played in teenage rock bands and for a gospel church. He has composed over fifty works for electronic, instrumental and vocal ensembles, over thirty film and video soundtracks, and fifty scores for dance and theatre productions.
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