SONIC TRANSPORTS: “BLUE” GENE TYRANNY ESSAY, PART 6

“BLUE” GENE TYRANNY and ROBERT ASHLEY in “The Bar,” Episode 4 of Ashley’s *Perfect Lives*.

Robert Ashley’s “Blue” Period

“From Bob I learned to take my time playing the piano, because of his style of playing. He would just simply take his time,” claims Tyranny. “And he has shown me how to trust my first impulse, and to make a composition be direct about its character, without a lot of stewing of complications and abstractions. And to be doggedly persistent.” The Bob is Robert Ashley, and Tyranny isn’t the only artist who owes a debt to this extraordinary composer. Ashley’s contributions to the development of music theatre, video art, electronic music, singing, and methods of performance collaboration have been so valuable and forward-looking that I hesitated to write about him at all in this book: Better to say nothing than to make just a few sidelong glances at his amazing work. But I couldn’t write about Tyranny’s music without going into his participation in Ashley’s operas Perfect Lives (Private Parts) and Atalanta (Acts of God) – he’s played some very special stuff in these ensemble-of-soloists works.

Perfect Lives (Private Parts) is best known as the landmark, seven-part, 3-1/2-hour video opera that Ashley completed in 1983. But in 1977, Lovely Records released “The Park” and “The Backyard” on the LP Private Parts, and these episodes differ drastically from their dense, circus-like versions in Ashley’s video. Private Parts has an unsettling intimacy, with Ashley calmly describing his characters’ idiomatic qualities and limitations by telling stories, citing language, reflecting on what he’s saying, falling silent, going on… There is a calm unblinking gaze in the tone of that voice, which I hear as a profound compassion. Ashley’s detachment is an urge to accept and heal, with no implication that he can or should change anyone. There’s awe in his singing as well, I think; because whatever else they are, these songs are his testimonies to the integrity, the inviolability of these people.

For the stripped-down music of Private Parts, all there is is Ashley reciting his text; the constant but variegated tablas of the cryptically credited Kris; and Tyranny on piano, clavinet, and polymoog. Ashley says that, after recording the vocal tracks, “I did a kind of chamber setting for them. I asked “Blue” Gene to invent with me a special kind of piano playing – what everybody calls ‘cocktail style.’ It’s not really cocktail style at all; it’s a different style of ‘recorded’ piano sound.”[1]

When people hear these pieces, they ordinarily concentrate on Ashley’s voice. Tyranny’s playing is registered – consciously, at least – as just some mellifluous keyboard noodling, and so it gets filed away as his impression of a bar room tinkler. But what he does on this record sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard in any bistro: It may be tonal and consonant, but it’s non-referential, as far as allusions to pop standards are concerned. To my ears, it’s basically non-melodic as well – or more precisely, Tyranny is playing elaborate variations on original unstated melodies. To Tyranny’s ears, his piano playing “sounds like brief melodies, each 16 long beats in duration. The nearest thing to atmospheric ‘filigree’ would be a few arpeggios at structural-change places, and even these were played in a staggered, rushing manner, sort of lunging. I remember that was very deliberate.”

His music fades in and out of Ashley’s vocals – you overhear it more than hear it, as though it was someone else’s conversation and you’re never catching their subject, only fragments of what they’re saying about it (a sensation that feeds into the “cocktail” image). It’s an almost-speech music that perfectly complements Ashley’s almost-song talking, entering the same paradoxical realm of dispassionate compassion. The distancing effect demanded by Private Parts’ objectivity is in Tyranny’s polymoog: periodically swelling cords, as permanent and uninvolved as the surf, in “The Park”; oscillations between various pairs of chords, glimpses of private cadential exchanges, in “The Backyard.” The other side of the coin, the emotional resonance, is in his keyboard monologues (piano on “The Park” and clavinet on “The Backyard”): long, detailed, yet dreamy descriptions of recollected and or imagined feeling.

But if someone else were to say that the emotion is in the shifting harmonic planes of the polymoog, and that Tyranny is dampening those feelings in a blanket of keyboard chatter… well, I wouldn’t disagree. It’s that kind of piece.

Tyranny says, “Bob asked me to make harmonies and keyboard melodies that I could play the piano to, and to begin investigating the character of exactly who I thought Buddy, ‘The World’s Greatest Piano Player,’ is in the piece, and how he plays the piano. But it is important to note that my independent working on the part of the character was not the same as the idea of writing accompanying melodies and harmonies to the words.”[2] Tyranny has no interest in illustrating a text – for him, making that sort of music means moving “in the direction of reactive cartoons (or a cartooned reactionary).”[3] Similarly, Ashley wasn’t looking to be illustrated by someone else’s music; what he wanted from Tyranny was another soloist for Private Parts’ ensemble. And that’s just what he got.

By the time of the Lovely recording of “The Bar” (episode four of the opera), Private Parts had expanded into Perfect Lives (Private Parts), with an ensemble that included Peter Gordon, Jill Kroesen, and David Van Tieghem. Working with so many lively Lovely people, Ashley came up with a torrent of music, most of which is more pop-inspired than anything in Private Parts (but still not “cocktail”!). Because of “The Bar”‘s whirlwind of activity, Tyranny’s playing is less prominent than it was in Private Parts, but his overall contribution is even greater: Besides creating the harmonies and keyboard melodies, he shares credit with Ashley and Gordon for the chorus parts and orchestration. His chops are more up front in his prepared-piano playing on The Lessons, a work Ashley derived from Perfect Lives (and which he subtitled “Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo)”). But in all these pieces, you’re not supposed to hear everyone whenever they’re performing – obscuring overlappings are fundamental to Ashley’s use of the ensemble of soloists. As composer Philip Perkins points out, in Ashley’s operas “plot and melodic movement are not important anymore, or are sublimated to nuance, which is served up by the bucketful, leaving the listener to decide for himself what to listen to and how to structure the experience.”[4]

That’s one of the ways in which Ashley explores freedom in Perfect Lives (Private Parts) and Atalanta (Acts of God). Lovely released a three-record set of Atalanta’s 1985 performances in Rome, and despite its quality, I wish more people could hear one of Atalanta’s later American realizations. Tyranny had by then taken over some of the singing choices as well and was performing the long “Bud” Character Reference in an outburst as clear and fast as lightning. Sometimes he’d fall into grooves where the words spilled out of him in great chains – releases often triggered, in a dazzling jazz-like dialogue, by the quickening rhythms of Big Black’s drumming. At the Chicago performances of Atalanta (September 20–22, 1985), their duos rivetted the audiences and were received – quite justifiably – as one of the high moments of the piece.

Atalanta also had its low moments in that series of concerts, just as it has on the recording. Such lulls are almost inevitable when you consider that Ashley didn’t construct Atalanta to be like any of those performances. His operas aren’t so much compositions as game plans, sets of circumstances and ideas which can accommodate and release different sounds and atmospheres in every realization. Ashley has bigger fish to fry than constantly manipulating an audience; he’s developing methods for inspired communal musicmaking. All the participants, musicians and listeners alike, have to be open to the risks as well as the rewards of his approach – quite a bargain, really, because the rewards are far more interesting than any grand edifice a composer could predetermine and erect. With Ashley’s music, you aren’t sitting still for someone trying to shovel ideas into your head; you’re sharing in the deconditioning released by musicians who have, as Tyranny would say, “raised themselves to another type of communication.”

Ashley’s attitude is similar to that of Morton Feldman, who said, “I’m not interested in the aspect of completing, or satisfying a need to make what we think is that terrific integrated piece of music. I agree with Kafka: We already know everything. So there’s no need for me to finish the piece in terms of anyone’s expectations, which include my own.”[5] Ashley’s music is a series of investigations into spontaneity, improvisation, theatricality, and the ebb and flow of a group’s dynamics. By shredding the experience of jazz through Cageian ideas of freedom and no-mindedness, he’s come up with some of the most vital and exciting stuff being made today.

Tyranny, who has equally deep roots in jazz and the music of Cage, has been working with ideas similar to Ashley’s since he was a kid in Texas. It isn’t his wizardry at the keyboards that makes him an ideal collaborator for Perfect Lives and Atalanta; it’s the fundamental attitudes that he and Ashley share. And those attitudes are pretty strong medicine. Taking them into more personal directions in his solo works, Tyranny has cracked open surprises that make him, at the very least, the equal of any composer/musician of his generation.

FOOTNOTES

1. Nicole V. Gagné and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982, p. 27.

2. “Blue” Gene Tyranny, “The Roots and the Shoots” (unpublished manuscript). The emphases are Tyranny’s.

3. Tyranny’s program notes to his 19 October 1985 performance at Long Island’s Islip Art Museum.

4. Letter to the author.

5. Gagné and Caras, Soundpieces, p. 172.

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Essay, part 7

SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on Robert Ashley, see:

Music Book: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers