SONIC TRANSPORTS: “BLUE” GENE TYRANNY ESSAY, PART 3

The World’s Greatest Piano Player

The World’s Greatest Piano Player (1981) is a perfect example of how “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s music can be emotional, pop, and non-representational, seamlessly and simultaneously. Working backward from that list, Piano Player is of course non-representational insofar as it’s not projecting a text or depicting a situation. More than that, it’s not even about a specific musician or group of musicians. It’s of course the product of a specific musician, but its minutiae, its multitude of lines, have been mixed and overlayed to de-emphasize the habits and mannerisms of the performers. Despite its title, the piece is in praise not of a piano player but of piano playing.[1] Tyranny has cooked up a density in which you can never really latch onto the personality of a pianist. Instead, what stays with you from Piano Player is its almost nonstop swirl of keyboards (sometimes so hectic that it reminds me of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, where there’s no pianist at all, only piano playing).

There are four Tyrannys all playing away in this particular ensemble of soloists, plus Bill Laswell on bass and David Van Tieghem on drums. And what everyone’s playing is essentially pop – Piano Player uses familiar instrumentation and gestures from jazz and rock. But Piano Player makes a fundamental postmodern distinction in that pop is its idiom rather than its genre; nothing could be less pop-ish than Tyranny’s layering of lines away from a clear delineation of the performers.

With Piano Player, Tyranny explores the feeling of playing, the emotional release – the ecstasy of playing, if you like.[2] To illuminate that emotion, he includes occasional paroxysms in the music, which are highlighted by unexpected collaborators. In the pivotal C section, he tears at a trill like a rivetter gone berserk, hammering so manically that a second piano gets sucked in, spinning its own out-of-phase trill.[3] (Nancarrow’s specter hovers even closer here.) The second B section erupts with colossal full keyboard glissandi that leave wakes of chirping electronics. And there’s that exquisite moment just before the third B, when a piano that’s been reiterating a single tone finally ascends to state and keep on stating a simple phrase. Yet you hear the obsessive reiteration still going on – a second piano invisibly joined the first a few seconds earlier, and now blindly continues that music, broadening the pathos and intensity of the new gesture.

Intensity is what makes The World’s Greatest Piano Player such a knockout – Tyranny is focusing on the excitement, the drive, the hotness of performance. That C-section trilling is like a blast of steam suddenly valved out to keep his perpetual-motion machine from blowing altogether. But just as he distinguishes the music’s idiom from its genre, he’s also made Piano Player a meditation on its feeling rather than a statement of that feeling. Intensity fuels the music, but it isn’t the music. At certain moments in The Intermediary, when you’re hearing some of Tyranny’s greatest piano playing, you’re plugged directly into an individual and can get a jolt of that unique electricity. But Piano Player has no individual musician or instrumental line for you to relate to or feel through. The principal character, the piano, is actually two pianos that travel side by side throughout the piece. And by mixing one voice more prominently than the other, Tyranny moves the music away from counterpoint and toward the situation of listening to a text and its commentary simultaneously – the m.o. for Out of the Blue, Harvey Milk (Portrait), and The Intermediary.[4]

And that’s only one of the ways Tyranny frees you to observe, as well as feel, the heat of this music. He also pulls the rug out from under the first two B sections, unexpectedly quieting them down and hollowing their sound. He tempers the driving intensity of his Great Piano(s) by giving a timbral (if not dynamic) edge to the electric keyboards. Even the length of the piece (10’44”) contributes to its objectivity, thanks to the grid-like repetitions of its different sections. But Piano Player never becomes monotonous, because its materials are too hot and busy and just plain beautiful; rather, there are powerful cumulative effects in the piece. When it shifts into different sections – most notably the end of the first A after C, and the B that follows – the sensation is almost majestic, as though you were standing at the prow of a ship that’s sweeping onto a new course. Ultimately, The World’s Greatest Piano Player is a curious combination of propulsion and stasis: The moment-to-moment activity is feverish and exciting; the overall shape, the basic attitude, is serene and dispassionate. This weird balance is Tyranny’s own special atmosphere, and he’s explored it in pieces as dissimilar as his songlike instrumental David Kopay (Portrait) and his noisy, larger-than-life tango for piano and tape The More He Sings, The More He Cries, The Better He Feels (1984).

FOOTNOTES

1. The title is a joke suggested by Peter Gordon. It isn’t an allusion to Tyranny’s character of Buddy, “the world’s greatest piano player,” in Robert Ashley’s opera Perfect Lives (Private Parts).

2. Tyranny told me that he’s indebted to Peter Gordon’s mixing for making this sensation so clear. Gordon brought out the character of a lot of piano gestures that are normally relegated to the background or to coloristic effects – glissandi, trills, etc. – but which are basic to the physicality of piano playing.

3. Looking at the piece as A, B, A, B, A, C, A, B, A, B.

4. The parallel piano lines can also be seen as metaphors for the neither-attached-nor-separate voices of the conscious and the unconscious. The periodic addition of different electric keyboards would then represent the interjections of a related, higher consciousness, whose participation is released by their cooperation. Got it?

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Essay, part 4

SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on “Blue” Gene Tyranny, see:

AGAMEMNON – The Opera

Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition

Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers

Music Essay: You Can Always Go Downtown

Music Essay: 88 Keys to Freedom: Segues Through the History of American Piano Music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny

Music Lecture: “Intense Purity of Feeling”: Béla Bartók and American Music

Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…