SONIC TRANSPORTS: “BLUE” GENE TYRANNY ESSAY, PART 4

Real Life and the Movies, Vol. 1

How postmodern cannot guide get? Well, Tyranny’s 3 Begins is a textbook example of appropriation and deconstruction. He made this short (3’39”) tape piece to accompany “a reading of Dick Higgins’ poem of the same name […] something about ducks and milkmaids and staircases.”[1] 3 Begins is “two readings of three proportional cuttings of hundreds of samples […] their interplay and mixings describing the resultant illusion (no resolution) of complementary internal and external time.” Which means that this fascinating, lively work takes its sample sounds – violin playing, kitchen implements, people talking, ragtime piano, a radio pitchman, orchestral music, who knows what else – and splices and dices them, plays them backwards and forwards, and shoots them out at different speeds.

But what’s really wild about 3 Begins is that it was made in 1958, when postmodernism was barely a gleam in anyone’s eye – and when Tyranny was 13 years old. From a composer of any age today, it would be a respectable achievement; from a 13-year-old then (in San Antonio yet, working with “only a crusty reel-to-reeler”), it’s positively visionary. And you can hear that audacity and newness in 3 Begins, regardless of what you know about its history – this music is plainly more than just someone fooling around with distorted sounds. Beyond its musical quality – of which it has plenty: It easily holds your attention, indeed gets more interesting with repeated listenings – 3 Begins is striking for its unexpected oases of silence. They’re there to define durational proportions, sure. But they also reflect a Cageian disposition to shut up and listen. (Young Bob Sheff gave the Texas premiers of several Cage pieces – in 1961, three years after 3 Begins.)[2]

Tyranny says that 3 Begins’ “central image/idea is that of a procedure where you would see something different each time you scanned ‘reality’ because of the difference in the scanning method (its rate, etc.) – the begin again idea of looking it over yet one more time.” (He even rescanned 3 Begins, giving it some reprocessing in 1981.) Like every other good idea the man has had, begin again led Tyranny to all sorts of new insights and musics, including such major pieces as The Intermediary, Harvey Milk (Portrait), and Country Boy Country Dog (re-scannings of his own piano playing, Harvey Milk’s speech, and life, respectively).

3 Begins is available from Fun Music as part of Tyranny’s Real Life and the Movies, Vol. 1, a cassette of ten short pieces covering the years 1958 through 1981. Some were created for films and videos; others are pure compositions: “the music that walks with the symbols (movies) […] the situation before the symbols happen (real life).”[3] After hearing this tape, a friend of mine remarked, “I’m beginning to see what’s interesting about him – he doesn’t sit still.” Couldn’t give him an argument there; Real Life and the Movies is an excellent cross-section of the different media and genres that Tyranny has used. But then, this is 23 years, from age 36 back to 13. There’d have to be a certain amount of variety. Frankly, what amazes me about Real Life and the Movies is the consistency of Tyranny’s vision – virtually the entire collection, one way or another, is about the begin-again idea. In 3 Begins, it’s just right up front, with all the charming bluntness of true teenage enthusiasm.

The second part of 3 Begins is another reading, only at much faster speeds, of the material of the first part. Tyranny underscores the wild headlong feel with an electronic pulse of answering high/low tones and echoey metallic timbres. There’s a vaguely ominous quality to it, partially from its forward momentum, its sense of something coming toward you. Within the context of the piece, its purpose is to set up another time-frame reference in contrast to both the high-speed repeat and the listener’s own ‘objective’ sense of time. But by holding it about 20 seconds after the second read ends, Tyranny also provides a perfect segue into The White Night Riot (1979). This explicitly ominous work rescans not only the San Francisco riot, but also television’s re-scanning of the riot, making the piece a new reference in contrast to both the event itself and the news media’s ‘objective’ documentation.

The White Night Riot is one of the strongest of the ten pieces; it’s also the work truest to the anthology’s title, because it’s about both real life and the movies: “Except for the TV audio, this recording was made on the run from the cops who were beating up on anyone – an older man was kicked by cops after he fell, another man helping him had his hip broken, and fire trucks deliberately charged into crowds, not in pursuit of a fire.” Along with the state’s physical violence, The White Night Riot also scrutinizes its doppelganger, the intellectual violence of TV news. The latter is heard first, “making the mistake of trying to come up with a reasonable, or filtered, description of the situation.” As the Straight White Press attempts to turn the situation into symbols while it’s still unfolding, Tyranny mocks it by shadowing the voices of various newscasters with a goofy, rubber-band-like obbligato. But when a chunk of real life appears in TV’s movie, he lets you hear it loud and clear. A rioter’s voice is picked up by the polymorphous mic of an on-the-scene reporter: “We are in revolt! We are angry!” And what follows is so appropriate to the spirit of this piece, that it could only have happened by itself: Another, equally disgusted rioter calmly says, “Don’t interpret it, man.”

The second part of The White Night Riot is Tyranny’s on-the-scene recording of some of the actual riot: rhythmic clapping and whistle blaring; catcalls against the horsebacked police; sirens and more sirens; charging fire engines and the roars of protesters; talk, screams, singing, yelling. Throughout the pandemonium, Tyranny was fascinated by “the amazing flux of how people were moving en masse up the street: going up the street this way, and how the police would try to surround this thing, and how they would move another way, and how the energy would go. It was just amazing – masses of people and things happening.” And that comes through with scalding clarity. All he adds are some electronic tones, “low-frequency peaks, heard as untranslated signals.” At certain moments, they lose their neutral periodicity, and vibrate and keen to the shifting intensities of the riot. But despite all the helter-skelter action, he ends with an image of apocalyptic paralysis: autohorn on top of autohorn, mashing together in a dense immobile clot.

In the third part, Tyranny reflects on the aftermath of the riot – or rather, he reflects on a reflection of its aftermath, once again casting electronic shadows of television: “the almost cornball thing of […] reverberating the buzzwords.” Corn is a desperate measure, but that’s what desperate circumstances require. And far from sounding corny, this second re-scanning of TV audio is the most frightening segment of the entire piece: a montage of grief, glad-handing, speculation, smugness, and confusion, pockmarked by testimonies of post-riot gay bashing committed by cops. Tyranny’s response to this awfulness is part four, The White Night Riot’s second and last slice of life: Harry Britt at a rally on the anniversary of Harvey Milk’s birth, telling the crowd, “Yesterday afternoon, 12 people did something very stupid, and for a few hours the spirit of Dan White was alive in our streets. Tonight, 15,000 people have gathered to demonstrate with their love that the spirit of Harvey Milk will always be alive in our streets!”

Real Life and the Movies’ other political piece, The Bust (1967), also rescans violence and repression, only a lot more tunefully. Its context is around the time of 3 Begins: “I’m 14,” says Tyranny, “and the drunk cup shines the light in my eyes and says [sic] ‘wher’yew goin’ thiss time a night… maybee I oughta runyain.’ (Sorry about the dialect.) Cop drives off, laughing, to join his good ol’ cop buddies for beer and poker at midnight in the back of the icehouse on the corner of the block where I live […] below the icehouse is a really underground jazz club which I sneak into when I can get away with it.” This begin-again piece launches with a shave-&-a-haircut-two-bits knock on the door, and a cop voice announcing, “OK buster, this is a bust.” The drums keep up this rhythm, backing a simple jaunty tune that Tyranny repeats over and over, in ironic counterpoint to recurrent fragments of Lyndon Johnson’s voice. (A redneck killjoy is a redneck killjoy – some just make more notches on their holsters than others do.) By splicing automobile sounds into the presidential voice, the bust depicts LBJ as he “streaks across the Texas plain [and] scares the cows in his caddy, crazy frustrated drunk (not the friendly kind), thinking ‘why oh why can’t people unnerstan’… why oh I say why oh why can’t some people…’”

There’s a definite stuck-in-the-groove quality to LBJ’s bleary lamentations, but Tyranny didn’t just loop Lyndon; you need more of a cut up than that if you want some of the truth to leak out. His musical landscape of electronic barnyards, those frightened, animal-like eruptions through which the bathetic “why oh why” travels, are actually further manipulations of the voice track. The Bust puts Johnson through the begin-again meatgrinder and comes up with a scathing montage-portrait of a man who just wants to hailp is all, but some people… And as LBJ goes on his unmerry way, generating his own nightmare environment, he never notices the imperturbable melody cruising alongside him: a flying saucer in the night sky, filled with partying Martians who puzzle over one more oddball.

One more oddball who wants to bring ‘order’ out of ‘chaos’ and only makes things worse because he doesn’t unnerstan’ things for what they really are. You have to let go of that defensive egotistical confrontation with reality if you want to realize what Tyranny calls “other solutions […] solutions of communication, of individual character.” Describing and encouraging such solutions is what Tyranny and his music are all about, and the same year as The Bust he completed its flip side, the graph score Sound Module from “Back in Texas Again”: “Artifacts from your home state, home/state; the distance and the patterns you have covered and uncovered since then. For Texas, I remember the lightning storms on a cloudless midday which would rattle the house like a cannon blast in your very own backyard… the funky rainy day and my uncle’s ranch (away somewhere).”

Rain and thunder, and even – shades of Lyndon! – an auto taking off for somewhere launch this more hopeful re-scanning of Texas. To describe the suspendedness of adolescent Texan life, as well as its capacity for sudden flashes of awareness, the musicians play countrified music with what sounds like only a general consensus regarding melody, tempo, and key; the music is in a plasma state, somewhere between solid and liquid. It’s funny and skillfully done, with a real sense of breadth and integrity to its composite character. And the finale is just superb, as the wild harmonies of Tyranny’s vibraphone (the first time he’d ever played that instrument with other musicians) mix it up with the unpredictable rhythms of a recording of jangling bells.

Only they aren’t simply bells: They’re huge test tubes, six or seven feet long, discards from the University of Michigan’s Physics Lab. By suspending them from a hat rack, Tyranny made himself the world’s weirdest wind chimes. And the wind there chiming to is, naturally enough, the gusty storm heard at the start of Sound Module. Which is yet another way in which this piece employs an ensemble of soloists, because it’s two independent tracks sandwiched together: The musicians were recorded in 1966; the storm and its musical repercussions, in ‘67.

Tyranny takes this approach even further by superimposing his 1976 synthesizer score for David White’s film 33 Yoyo Tricks over his computer-generated Closed Transmission in Several Widths of 1966. ”Lonely computers and slightly nuts computer talk across a universe scaled in various sizes by the size of its self-referential feedback loop.” And what he gets is a piece that, like The World’s Greatest Piano Player, is fast and slow at the same time. The stasis of his film score, where distant electronic tones drip into a sea of lush hazy harmonies, cools off the sporadic frenzies of Closed Transmission (which is itself a duet, with glissandoing tones and a rapid-fire, stick-in-the-spokes tremolo chattering at each other like feuding electronic birds).

A lot of Tyranny’s real life is worked into Real Life and the Movies, but its most personal work may be its last, One Track from a Time Travel Piece (1974; 1981). This experiment in memory, perception, and communication focuses on his voice as he speaks fragments of events, impressions, and sensations, trying to remember the image of a friend’s face. Focuses in an extreme close-up, that is – you hear wind whistling through every nasal cavity, and the rippling gurgles of every swallow. Tyranny also tempers the intimacy of his memory re-scan by electronically distorting the vocal track, making his speech give off ricocheting shards of itself, until you are left hearing only fragments of his fragments. By electronic processing, he heightened the attack of the sounds while feeding them into a cross-modulating matrix that made their occurrences unpredictable. The quasi-random output was fed into a second stage of electronics that shifted, steadily and predictably, the basic frequency of the signal. This combination produced an effect reminiscent of the inflections of emphasis and feeling in speech, the spontaneous and uncensored stresses and exclamations, the common nuances of character.

But this re-scanning of vocal feeling is also a process: an exercise in memory. A commentary on the process as well, because that voice is also observing and clarifying how to revisualize someone. And as you strain to uncover what the voice is straining to uncover, One Track’s mind talks a second realization into being, right before your very ears: You hear it perceive that straining is unnecessary. “Trying not to and you’re better off. Try not to think of it at all. Yeah… Oh there, there it is. Oh yeah, there’s his picture, yeah.”

This strangely exciting, quietly joyous piece is, says Tyranny, a study in “spoken and internal language, and the Doppler shift in-between.” Another dialogue across a universe, another ensemble-of-soloists song of communication. Tyranny’s desire “to find ways that we can really just live and communicate and – if it’s possible – to evolve into other levels, to keep moving on that way” has kept him going since he first started making music. The begin-again idea has remained one of the most fruitful methods for finding those magical solutions. Above and beyond its chronological survey, Real Life and the Movies offers a superb cross-section of Tyranny’s artistry, the dazzling range of forms and expressions that articulate his unequivocal attitude and values. And it’s only Volume 1 too.

FOOTNOTES

1. Says Tyranny in his notes to Real Life and the Movies, Vol. 1. All other undocumented quotes in this section are from these notes or from my own conversations with Tyranny.

2. On 14 May 1961, at the McNay Art Institute, Tyranny played Water Music, with Philip Krumm; 19’52.477″ worth of 31’57. 9864″ for a Pianist; excerpts from the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano; three of the Six Melodies for Violin and Keyboard, with Richard Delgado; and Variations I, with Chris Pappas.

3. Says Tyranny in the Fun Music catalog.

4. The last 2’27” of One Track from a Time Travel Piece is also available on disc (deprived of some of its power, alas, by this abbreviation) as Remembering, in the various-artists Music from Mills (1986). See Tyranny discography in this book.

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Essay, part 5

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…