Q: What’s your earliest memory connected with music?
Tyranny: I remember when I was going to kindergarten, I had favorite records that I would take for Show & Tell. (I think one of the teachers wrote, “Bobby really loves music,” or something like that!) There were kiddie tunes.
As far as musical sensations that I would also have in my music, I remember states of waking dreams when I was really quite young; I sleptwalked a couple of times. I was also very sick as a child, with asthma, so there are some rather unpleasant memories there. They’re not particularly musical, but they’re sort of “netherworld”-type things too.
I remember Rosie who did the house cleaning twice a week. My brother and I and the lady’s granddaughter would just hang around the house all day, so we’d turn on the Spanish (Xicano) stations – real loud – and just dance and dance around the living room.
When I was about seven or eight, I discovered that gospel music, and some New Orleans and Texas rhythm & blues, came on at 3 o’clock in the morning on the radio. (Because of the segregation of towns and everything else, I first heard gospel music through the radio.) So I kept getting in trouble with sneaking a radio into bed – a huge one, there weren’t any transistors, you know, so it was like a clock radio. And I’d write down the names of the tunes, and I’d order the records through the record store. It would take forever to get it because they were on small labels.
Q: Did you go to church regularly? Or hymns an important exposure for you?
Tyranny: Oh yeah, yeah. I was raised in the Lutheran Church, but I also had friends in the local Fundamentalist Baptist church. So sometimes I would go to the Lutheran church, and sometimes I would play for the Baptist services. The Baptists were a lot more fun, although I really loved a lot of the music in the Lutheran church, where I sang in the choir. I played piano for the Baptists, and they’d keep encouraging you to be wilder and wilder. They’d say, “Go ahead, it’s all right, it’s all right, do it!” And they’d have weird instrumentations: There’d be a marimba, a xylophone, a tambourine, a piano, an organ, and a male quartet – that would be very typical. And all this stuff going, just a wild sound.
Also, one of my original parents, I don’t know who, was Jewish – my adoptive parents’ religions were Jewish and Baptist – and so I went to a Temple Beth El to pre-kindergarten school. There’s that experience also, some of the Jewish songs and the general education there. (It was only two months out of the summer, and I never could understand what the weird writing on the wall was!) So there’s all this mix of experiences. Even now, I don’t really have a chronological image of what came at what time. These things all just happened.
Q: Were the movies a musical thing for you, but you go to them more as film?
Tyranny: Movies were very musical – very moving musically. And went to the movies a whole lot, I liked movies a lot. I remember the first time I saw Forbidden Planet: It was at a drive-in and I was on the play swing in the front, just swinging back and forth, and the movie came on, and it was like a UFO. I was utterly captivated by the electronic music: “Oh, Jesus Christ, what is that sound? It’s so beautiful.” It was the first electronic score for movies, composed by Louis and Bebe Barron, who also worked with John Cage on some of his 1950s pieces.
Q: Remember Walter Pidgeon playing a little bit of Krell music?
Tyranny: Oh yeah, oh yeah, Krell music, sure! “Creatures from the Id.” I think the main compositional problem is meeting and greeting creatures from the Id!
Q: What else would you hear? Circuses and carnivals?
Tyranny: Oh yeah. My mother took me to the Barnum & Bailey Circus, the huge three-ring circus. It was utterly spectacular. I enjoyed the spectacle, I don’t know how much I remembered all the music.
There was also a Fiesta Week in San Antonio, and every day there’d be a parade, and night parades along the river. There was a lot of music there, a lot of what they now call “border music”: a cross between certain Mexican styles and Texas cowboy music, with Western swing thrown in. There was a lot of that, and I love that music very much. You know, Southern musicians are proud of being able to play many kinds of music, something not understood very well in other places. It’s all just music.
There was another influence, an icehouse a couple of blocks from my house, with a jazz club in the cellar. And in the ‘50s, it looked like Beatnikville, USA: people playing late bebop, the low light and smoke and the whole bit. They were musicians coming mostly from the South, like New Orleans, on their way to California, and back. (It was a very standard trek.) And so the first jazz I heard was there; I didn’t really hear it so much on record or on radio.
Q: So as a boy, you heard the people who’d been influenced by the major jazz performers, rather than hearing those musicians themselves.
Tyranny: Yes, exactly. I didn’t really know the names then.
Q: When did all these musical interests actually turn into a deliberate attempt on your part to study music and learn technique?
Tyranny: The deliberate thing was more when I started hearing classical music.
Q: On the radio?
Tyranny: On the radio, yeah, and also watching Liberace with his brother George on TV. I liked the thing with the piano: It was both the music and the personal involvement. It was sort of like a sport that I could get into. And the piano was just appealing.
I was about 10 or 11 then. The parents who adopted me were very wonderful about it, although they weren’t musicians and didn’t really like the new music or classical music themselves. My stepfather liked country & western (pre-slick, the real thing), and my mother liked hymns and 1940s swing tunes – and that’s great, that was their tastes. And I like that music now too. They were supportive of my music by paying for private lessons.
I studied piano first with a German-American lady in the neighborhood, by the name of Meta Hertwig. She was utterly charming. And strict. I studied with her for about two years, and then she passed away.
Then I studied basic harmony and orchestration and all that with a German-American man, Dr. Otto Wick, who was a pupil of Engelbert Humperdinck, the real one. (In fact, he passed away – it’s so mystical! – going to Austin, Texas, to hear a performance of Hansel und Gretel!) He was wonderful. His wife was the image of the Wagnerian soprano: big, twice as tall as he was. (He was a little guy, like me.) A wonderful couple, absolutely wonderful people. He got me really enthusiastic for finding out what just going on in music and really listening to lots of music. He took me up through Strauss and Debussy to the beginning of 20th-century music.
My main memory of him is so beautiful: I came over one day, and he had an enormous map of the United States spread out all over several rooms, and he was walking over each state, examining the border lines. And he said, “Ve never get dis in Europe! Look at that, there’s a square state!” And he was going on and on about the different kinds of boundaries. And I remember, it was very profoundly affecting, his idea about natural boundaries, artificial boundaries, and grids. That conception I thought a lot about, and felt a lot about, in many ways, both the physical thing and any kind of mental set – which I don’t distinguish between. One of the main things that I think is really wonderful about music – and I’ve written about this in program notes sometimes – is that you don’t have to distinguish between your feelings and your thought. In fact, to not do that makes both of them better. For me, that’s the human experience of conceptuality. You make your feelings even finer and more articulated, you find things out, and your thought leads you to do that. It’s like you can never improve an idea. The idea is there, you improve the technique for the expression of that idea. I carried that fundamental relationship from classical studies to what I do. Of course, in aural, tactile, and other non- visual thinking, there may be no idea as an image, but existing as a sound, a feeling of pressures, etc. The hands have a mind of their own.
I also studied with Frank Hughes at Trinity University. He was wonderful, super Mr. Joe American. (I don’t know if he’d appreciate me saying that.) He played me his own work, which was like the ‘30s nationalistic academic type of writing, like Aaron Copland. He was one of those persons who does what he does, but who is completely appreciative of everything else. So after my first lesson, he sent me home with a record of Harry Partch’s music and Charles Ives’ sonatas. And of course it just blew my mind. I said, “More, more.” That was the beginning of high school, and then I met Philip Krumm, who is a wonderful composer still living in Texas. The time period was amazingly short, now I think back of it: We started right away putting on theater pieces, conceptual things. And we met more and more people, some who were in the army, like Phil Corner. From him we got everybody’s address in New York: John Cage, Christian Wolff, Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins. We started corresponding, and so we were doing our own pieces plus premiering a whole lot of stuff by composers from around the nation.
Q: This is in the late 1950s?
Tyranny: Yeah, about ‘58, I think.
Q: So you were what then, 14?
Tyranny: Yeah, 14. Which is sort of weird when you think about it! You know, you get that flash, and the energy’s there, and you do it. I mean there’s so much wonderful stuff being done now by young people, 15, 16.
Anything that you really love, you somehow learn very, very fast and get good at doing it. I was doing a whole lot of things in what seems now like a very short amount of time: the Cage Sonatas and Interludes, Satie, Feldman, the Webern Piano Variations. I played theater pieces of Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young; Phil Krumm’s piano pieces, which are wonderful – I wish they were published and available for other people.
We put on several concerts at the McNay Art Institute. Phil Krumm and I also put on a festival of six different composers’ music. One was mine and one was his, of course – you gotta put it on, no one else is gonna do it! One was Richard Maxfield’s music, which was a beautiful concert; his early electronic music which is so gorgeous. I wish more of it were on record or otherwise available. One was Dick Higgins’ music, one was Phil Corner’s music, and one was John Cage’s music, where we premiered a lot of works without knowing it. There were other musicians, mostly friends of our age, who helped in the concerts, and painters and poets, who also loved the music and realized that they could perform too.
Q: And you were actually creating your own tape and theater and conceptual pieces at those tender years?
Tyranny: Yeah. What was so fascinating about the music was that it was so amazingly personal, but it also went beyond the particular circumstances of both your life and the whole history of music. I don’t like defining things as reactions to things, because in fact that’s not really what happens. The real thing that happens is, somehow you feel the freedom to open this door. Even if you don’t write anything like Cage – hardly anybody does – the important thing he did was to show everybody that you could really be free.
I’d been doing other music, but it was all like arrangements of things and compositional exercises – you know, the usual stuff that no one really keeps. I played rock & roll in elementary through high school too. And “Battle of the Bands” contests on top of the combination concession-stand/projection-booth at double-screen drive-ins, surrounded by a sea of motorcyclists and their dates. I really wasn’t playing jazz then. I didn’t know how, I didn’t have the facility to do it.
I also played a lot of the classical stuff. You have to make your decisions about your relationship to all those things. I don’t mean coldly, ‘This is my decision’ – you know what I mean: You play the classical music and you get whatever hit you get off of it, and you learn technical things, and try to appreciate what the people themselves were doing, their basic ideas about the world, their basic senses of music – and that’s all very real. I used to go to symphony concerts but I always felt awkward. I was completely ill at ease with the social behavior. I began to realize it’s like the problem with organized religion: You want to get back to the original thing that was said, and not all this other packaging.
Q: How did you get from Texas to Michigan and the ONCE Group?
Tyranny: I’d written a piano work, like a sonata. (It was four movements and they contrasted and all that, but it really had nothing to do with sonata form.) It won a BMI student-composers prize of 500 bucks, which was a lot then, and at the same time I was accepted for an audition at Juilliard. So that was the plan. I just wanted to get out of Texas, frankly!
William Bergsma had heard me play. I had gone to Houston with a friend who was applying for Juilliard on a French horn thing. He played one of the Richard Strauss horn concertos, and I accompanied him on the piano. And I sightread it. (I’m pretty good at sightreading.) And Bergsma said, “Holy shit. Have you bothered to apply?” I said no, so I applied.
So after I graduated from high school, I got on a plane for the first time, leaving Texas in 110-degree weather, with my girlfriend crying at the airport because the marriage plot between our two families didn’t hatch (God, I was only 16 and confused), and went to the Juilliard interview. Bergsma was very talkative and direct and understanding, very supportive, actually, but the other people… At the time, I didn’t realize the enormous political thing between the Cageites, as the academics would say, and the academics themselves. It was very, very strong, and I just walked into it, like this dumb kid from Texas. I just got off the plane, and I said, “Hi! How y’all? How ya doin’?” And they had their guns ready. I couldn’t believe it.
I had sent them graph music I had written, because it seemed a very natural thing to do. (I still think that, with the graph pieces I wrote then, the choice of notation was proper for the musical idea; it wasn’t just “pretty notes.”) I had sent them a couple of tonal works, a couple of pieces for organ, and the piano sonata. They asked me to play one of the movements of the piano sonata, so I did, and there was really no comment. I never really got back anything. And they said, “Well, how about this ‘graph’ music stuff – you know you really can’t do that kind of thing around here.” I don’t remember the exact words, something about burning it, but the idea was that they wanted me to abandon the work that I’d been doing and again start the whole study of ear training and counterpoint, which I already had from my other teachers. And I wasn’t about to do that. I got a card in the mail the next day that I had been accepted, but I had already made up my mind to catch a bus with the money I had left and go to Ann Arbor. So I just hopped the bus.
Phil Krumm had gone up to Michigan the year before I graduated from high school, and he’d said, “Look, you really gotta come up here, because there are all these crazy wonderful composers who are outside of the university.” And this was Bob Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Don Scavarda, George Cacioppo, and Roger Reynolds, and they had done the first ONCE Festival that year. Phil said, “They’re doing stuff up here like we did in Texas.” So how could I possibly resist? So I got up there in September of ‘62, and that December we gave a ONCE Friends concert, and I had a piece on that. We just started right away. I heard Gordon Mumma said to Bob, “Well, Bob Sheff came to town, let’s give a concert!” They were really great.
Q: Did you try to get into the university there?
Tyranny: I went for an interview with the piano guy, and I played him part of the Ives First Sonata, and he said, “Well that’s good, but do you play Bach?” I said, “Do you have any?” So he took some out and I played it for him, and he said, “Well. Go talk to the composition guy.” So I went to talk to Ross Lee Finney, and he was very nice and everything. I don’t really remember what his attitude was toward the music, although he always seemed to be pretty open. So he said, “Why don’t you wait six months? You’ll be a resident of Michigan, and then you can get in for $90 a semester.” I waited six months, working as a waiter and then as a clerk-typist. But at the end of six months they changed the rules, that you had to be 21 and had to have lived in the state for six months. That was another three years, and so I said, “Well I don’t think I’m going to go to college.” I couldn’t afford it – I’ve been on my own economically since I was 16 – and I really wasn’t interested. I was more interested in doing the music and playing with the ONCE guys on the Festival and doing other concerts with other performers apart from the Festival. I guess you could say I was a junior member; several of the young people who came up from Texas were known as Mary’s Crowd, because Mary Ashley kept getting us involved. (I was never a member of the ONCE touring group, which grew out of the ONCE Festivals in the second-half of the ‘60s, except for in ‘65 when we came to New York and did those exchange concerts at the Judson Theater.)
Q: When did you finally leave Michigan?
Tyranny: In 1970, and that was specifically to go to Mills. Bob had been offered the co-directorship of the Center the year before, and he decided to accept it. He went out with Nick Bertoni, an artist friend of ours, who had also participated in the ONCE things and is an amazing technician. Then he asked me to come out and be a technician and a recording engineer. (He also asked a terrific composer named Jon Weiss, who was working with Bob Moog in Trumansberg at the time.) That’s why I went. Also, we’d done a lot by then and I wanted to change. There was still this social division between pop music and electronic music and new music, which didn’t really stop until ‘73 or ‘74, when a lot of the electronics started to get into pop and vice versa.
Q: And more composers became active as performers.
Tyranny: Exactly, yes. When I came to the Center, a lot of the people coming in as graduate students had had the same experience I’d had of playing both pop music and new music. It was wonderful, just great.
Q: What did you teach at Mills besides studio techniques and jazz?
Tyranny: Let’s see, I taught the classical harmony and counterpoint courses, three different levels: elementary, intermediate, and advanced. And for one year I taught a compositional-analysis course.
Q: Did you enjoy teaching?
Tyranny: Yes, I did. The classes were small, and the people were quite wonderful. When I started, we were all almost the same age, and that’s really good. I think it’s good to have people taught by other people their same age – which was Bob Ashley’s idea. By the end of the thing, it was sort of getting to be Mr. Sheff, and I felt awkward. I didn’t really want to support that atmosphere, that hierarchical authoritarian thing by any means, even if it was friendly. I don’t have that idea. Also, if you really want to learn something, you don’t necessarily have to go to college. Often you best learn the thing by contacting people who do it and just get right into it. Inspired autodidaction.
Q: How much of a learning experience was it for you to teach?
Tyranny: Pretty amazing. You really learn all the time, because you have to articulate ideas, you have to decide what is important, you have to really listen to what the students are saying in order to figure out what they’re interested in. In general, for me it was an experience of learning to articulate a whole lot of things that I hadn’t necessarily articulated, and to get rid of a lot of assumptions. It’s a very strong experience.
Q: Would you go back to teaching if similar parameters could be established?
Tyranny: At the moment, no. I had to make some decisions about teaching and about playing pop music; decisions about time and energy. It takes a lot of time to teach, and it takes a lot of time to play pop music. I took my so-called self aside and said, “I’ve gotta decide how to spend time.” I decided to really pay attention to the new-music thing because that seemed to be where I ought to be doing the most work. I wasn’t paying it the attention it really needed, and there was so much to be done.
Teachers are totally enslaved in the States, it’s a shame. Academia is a scam, one of the worst. It promises everything and delivers nothing. It really enslaves people. I think businesses are more honest and even less stressful in a certain way, because it’s all out front. And you’re certainly better paid and appreciated.
The freelance work I did for Xerox and Videograph, and still do for independent projects every once in a while (recording, producing, editing, composing soundtracks), is interesting to me partly because I’m also fascinated by video and I’m interested in the movies. I’d like to do the big sound score for each of the big, archetypal movies: a Western, a science fiction. It’s fun to me, it’s interesting to do. I learned things and can use the time for my own stuff too. Sounds I would find or solutions I would find to technical or dramatic things, within a commercial thing, often will solve something or encourage me to do some kind of idea in my own work.
Q: Do you find that freelance work is actually a greater source of raw material for your music than your own improvisations are?
Tyranny: When I improvise, I learn things, but as far as keeping the specific effects of what’s improvised, I rarely do that, I don’t really base another work on that. What you learn is how to get off, how to pay attention, how to arrange the technical aspects of several people improvising together and/or communicating together, and so on.
With the line of composers which I guess I belong to, each piece is different in the sense that there are certain ideas and dynamics that you’re pursuing for that particular piece. In retrospect, there may be an almost linear development of ideas, or a style may be established, but at least for the experience of creating it from ground zero, every piece seems to be a unique investigation, a unique experience. That’s what’s fascinating to me, that’s what keeps me going, to find something. That’s why I do it. I really want to find something new. That’s what’s beautiful. Other composers love establishing a certain style and doing all the variations of that style. I understand that also, I just don’t do that.
Where to put the structure in a piece is always the most difficult decision. American composers have found many, many solutions. But in academia, the idea is that there is order and there is chaos and there is no in between. So they’ll use John Cage’s ideas and reinterpret them a so-called aleatorism, which is used like special effects. It’s silly, it’s just silly, because they don’t respect the initial experience, they don’t take the idea seriously.
Q: Not only do they not respect it, they’re frightened by it.
Tyranny: Yeah, which is amazing, the fear that things will somehow break down or get worse, or fear of their own “animal.” In fact, my experience is just the opposite: The more you try to order things, the more things break down, the more it brings out bad things.
Q: When did you adopt your stage name and why and why that one?
Tyranny: Well, at the time I was living in Berkeley and working at Mills – this is ‘73 or ‘74, I just don’t remember – and Iggy Pop called me up from Los Angeles. He’s an old friend. We used to play in the Prime Movers Blues Band in Ann Arbor. They were thinking of having a piano player in the Stooges, so he called me up and said would I like to come down and play piano, initially for a tour that they were having. I said sure. So I went down and did this tour with them.
The “Blue” Gene Tyranny name was done then, and to accompany “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Genetic Transformations, a series of pieces done simultaneously with the band’s performances – unbeknownst to them! I was wearing punk, garbage and military mementos and torn clothes, while they were still doing glitter rock. I also wore colored lights under my hair (L.E.D.s with concealed batteries), which had not been seen at that time, as several times fans would rush up trying to put out the fire they thought was in my hair. And when it was wailing at the piano, sometimes the electricity would give me small shocks as the sweat poured on.
A lot of people were taking conceptual nicknames at the time, where the nickname would have some interest of theirs – like Phil Harmonic, who’s a good friend and a wonderful composer, very unique. The “Blue” Gene Tyranny name just sort of came to me. As I can trace it back, it’s sort of a mixture of things that happened.
Part of it was Shockley. He was lecturing in Berkeley on genetic inferiority, especially with black people: their so-called IQ powers and all this sort of junk. So that was stirring, and I thought about the idea of genetic tyranny. He was using a racist social measure, a social cliché, as a scientific thing. The IQ tests have long been long disproven; the genetic measures he was using were biased toward a certain social value. He was biasing his information, and his interpretations were wildly sociological. It was a form of Nazism, the typical thing of using apparent facts and attaching them to prejudices, Jerry Falwell-like.
So there was that idea, and I related it to another thing: a psychoanalytical book I had read – I can’t even remember what it was – in the early ‘60s, where they were trying to explain schizophrenia. One of the things they said was that you can always tell a schizophrenic because if you ask him or her the time of day, they will look up at the sun instead of looking at their watch. That was a sure sign that a person was schizophrenic. It was ridiculous. My immediate thought was, of course, what about every farmer in the world? And the more I read the book, the more I realized that the measures were, like IQ things, based on social group, on particular experience, on bias. And part of the schizophrenic thing was that they would describe blueness; blueness would have a lot to do with certain schizophrenic states. (Physically, the more distance increases, the more the quality of blueness is reported by a lot of so-called schizophrenics. Blueness seems to be a part of that experience, as a color perception, as a quality.) My experience of blueness at the time was fairly friendly, actually. There’s so much too blueness. Krishna is always pictured as blue. Blue has to do with peacefulness. It has to do with the sense of the non-moving Eternal. And with everyday living, and the blue-collar worker, and the sexiness of blue denims.
So all that mixed together: the psychoanalytical thing, the Shockley thing, the political thing. It all sounded like “Blue” Gene Tyranny. And then there’s the joke of blue jeans and the joke of surrounding Blue with quotes because of the nickname. And I like that. It has to have the quotes, people!
Q: Where does Gene Tierney fit into all this?
Tyranny: The actress? She didn’t initially, although I might have had her name in the back of my mind. I became aware of that Gene Tierney association when I went to Hollywood to play with Iggy, and everybody said, “Oh, Gene Tierney, of course.” That’s the thing they picked up on. I do like her acting.
Q: So the name arose as a protest not just against those specific theories, but against the whole sensibility that creates them.
Tyranny: Yes. It’s in the arts and the sciences. Social prejudice is in everything.
Q: And of course all these biases are attempts to cling to the notion of the self.
Tyranny: Yes, defense mechanisms that people often call themselves. The mistake is made that the self is substituted for character. Character is what people want to exhibit and explore, their feelings and their abilities and everything. That’s all character, and that’s our unique dynamics. People also motivate themselves by the images they have in their heads and by the circumstances they move among.
There’s a temptation to distinguish between what’s sometimes called “head” music and “gut feeling” in music, or to make inhibitions between intellectual work and sexual feeling, for instance. So you have to find many solutions. Like work out your relationship to the Puritan idea of work, and whether you even want to live with that idea. To try to find things you want to do and work at and are interested in. The important aspect is not the work per se, but that you’re good at it because you enjoy doing it. And then you can give them to the community, and you have all these other social contributions happen naturally because you’re doing something that’s good for you too. To try as much as possible to circumvent Puritanism in the United States and elsewhere is the task. To find many solutions in art of how people can play together, how ideas can come out.
There are social pressures not to lose so-called continuity of consciousness. A person who seeks circumstances that are always familiar. In fact, I used to do a column called “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Familiar Review,” and it really had to do with that idea, this bourgeois thing of a continuity of consciousness: These people are that, this circumstance is that, this is how I go from here to here. In other words, the way that you make connections between things reveals more about your character than any external system of continuity. I don’t work with people just because they’re nice.
So this continuity of consciousness gets interpreted, at least in the States, as the idea that either a person struggles to stand out above the crowd, or the crowd is this teeming mass. (As Gore Vidal says, the approach is either this heroic thing or the great leveler.) It seems that people get stuck in those two choices, which are like the choices of either order or chaos. But in fact, so many other solutions have been worked out, solutions of communication, of individual character. So a lot of people sometimes see a person’s individual behavior as a breakdown of society, because of the urge of this continuity of consciousness. It’s a semi-fascist urge: People have to believe the same way – or, it’s OK if they believe the other way, as long as they’re nice to me. And this profoundly affects conceptual images and ideas.
Q: You’ve spoken before about the importance for you of John Cage and his work. Has his longstanding aversion to improvisation, as something that relies too much upon the tastes and memories of the performer, caused you to question yourself as an improviser?
Tyranny: Yeah, you have to consider that. It’s a very wonderful idea. I may be mistaken, but I think the improvisation he’s referring to is reactionary improvisation: You’re improvising, but in a certain style where the players establish very specific relationships. And I understand his urge to free up that situation. And certainly I have exactly the same feeling of overcoming habits and so on – very definitely.
There are a lot of things we call improvisation. One of them is – and I think Cage appreciates this too – what’s called spontaneity. And spontaneity happens in any style of music that you’re playing. There are certain sudden flashes, or suddenly you play something you never played before. There are certain very shocking events, where people have seemingly almost communicated by ESP: People do this on-the-spot arrangement, they all stop suddenly at a place they’ve never stopped before to do something. And it’s totally up for grabs whether they all calculated together, whether it is in fact the introduction of a totally unique, singular moment (for what all that means), or whether they’ve raised themselves to another type of communication. I’ve found that to exist in a lot of different kinds of musics. In Black classical music, there is great independence in and among them melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and articulation planes. So in serious jazz, there is in fact a lot of what Cage values in his music, I believe.
John’s urge to overcome habits is an absolutely wonderful thing. He does it through dynamic-structural means, the I Ching and ways of changing that way, and that’s wonderful. But I’m not interested in doing it that way. My way of doing it is both in trying to create situations in which these kinds of sparks can happen, and also by an attitude – it’s natural in my character – that each piece is a research into something.
Q: Do you have to sacrifice a certain amount of your own musical character in order to play in Robert Ashley’s operas Perfect Lives or Atalanta?
Tyranny: When I’m playing Perfect Lives, I’m trying to create the character of Buddy the piano player. A lot of the improvisation, the actual playing, is similar – I don’t feel inhibited by any means. It’s almost like from one piece of mine to the next. This is Bob’s piece, so the images, the emotional things, the time structure, are all part of the piece, so you play with that or on or away from that. To some extent, that determines what you play. You have to start from somewhere. In that way, yeah, it’s different from my pieces, from what I would do. But the nature of the piece is so open – independent layers of sound, freedom to act and react or not, and so on. And like in a jazz band, you hire a person because you like who they are and what they do naturally; That’s very much the case in Atalanta or Perfect Lives.
Q: Is that a real letter from home in Out of the Blue?
Tyranny: No, I wrote it. The whole idea of Out of the Blue is coordinating the Doppler effect in music with the idea of consciousness over different time zones. One time is from child to adult. Another is across thousands of years of civilized perception. (It’s a theory from Julian James’ book The Bicameral Mind: the idea of the split brain, that people were gradually able to come to terms with having two hemispheres. I don’t particularly believe it, but it’s a lovely theory!) The other time zone is the minutiae: an atomic event becoming a material one. These three time scales are given movement back and forth, which is coordinated with the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect is used in the music to generate the harmonic modulations. At the very beginning, you hear a train and you hear the Doppler shift, and all the instruments are playing their natural harmonics. It’s really all there, but it’s a little bit subtle on the record.
Q: You’ve worked on a series of collaborations with dancer-choreographer Tim Buckley. What is it about his dance that enables your music to meld with it so effectively?
Tyranny: Tim’s dance is based on the idea of momentum rather than the notions of position, which is like Merce Cunningham and a lot of other modern dance. It’s a different basis entirely, and it’s pretty rare these days to see that kind of momentum dancing. And yet Tim has the same freedom that ideas of indeterminacy gave us – it’s momentum dancing, but it’s not correlated to music at all. In fact, when they rehearse, it’s without music, or else Tim will just bring any kind of music along, anything he likes, and put it on. And change it at every rehearsal.
What happened in the music for Tim, both Out of the Blue and Barn Fever, is the same thing that happened in Perfect Lives: We had a mutual theme that we shared, but the way we chose to interpret that theme was totally left up to us. We had a mutual time structure that we used, enlarged phrases and pulses, but the coordination of parts between, let’s say, the voice and piano in Perfect Lives, or between my music and Tim’s dancing, is totally open. Every time they dance it, the steps they do are fixed, but when they start is not fixed, and neither is the basic tempo they use in this section. It’s made up at the moment by them, and there’s no deliberate correlation with the rhythm of the music, although they can choose because they like certain parts of the music to use its pulse.
I would time different sections of the dance and say, “What is the basic meter? How are you counting this?” And of course, dancers’ counts are completely different than musicians’ counts. So they would say, “Well, we count this in 7-1/2,” and then they’d count “One, two, t-h-r-e-e, fourfivesixseven, one.” They count according to the steps that are done, not according to an abstract, metronomical meter, which is how musicians count. Generally I would resolve it and say, “Well this is more or less in two” or “more or less in three” or “more or less in long phrases” (what I call “long twos” or “long threes,” which are higher orders of the same kind of thing – sort of the Richard Strauss idea that short melody can become a really long one, you just change the multiple).
They would change large sections at sort of general intervals, and I chose to change the music there too, because they would change the atmosphere, generally: change the humor, or become more or less slow, or just totally change like doing things on the floor instead of being up and dancing. But it was totally up to me to choose when I thought these things were happening. The music for Barn Fever is essentially a theme, 12 variations, and a recapitulation of the theme. It’s very classical in form. I structured the atmosphere changes, I just went through all of the things that I associated with the theme “barn fever.” It’s the same thing with Perfect Lives: the particular coordinations or coincidences that happen (and there are many that are just amazing in the final video mix of Perfect Lives), none of them are planned, absolutely none of them. The metric structure was similar for all of us, but it didn’t coordinate. It’s sort of the best of the ideas of music that has harmony, melody, and rhythm, and of music that is more oriented toward event occurrence, distribution of sound, freedom of the notes – what we generally consider “avant-garde” ideas. Because we’ve learned that those things work too. And we’ve learned the practical and emotional and aesthetic ramifications of those ideas. So it’s no problem to draw on something that at one time would seem to be a breaking down of the laws of something-or-other. There’s a tremendous amount of freedom, and you can get that freedom without at all giving up character. In fact, character is being released. The forward-looking aspect of most of the art that I like – dance, music, whatever – tremendously respects character and ways of expressing it.
Q: A more congenial way for you to work than if you had to deal with a specific program or strictly synchronized choreography.
Tyranny: Yeah, definitely. I wouldn’t be at all interested in that idea of coordinating one-to-one gestures. In fact, I think it’s very bad art.
Q: What about the film music you’ve done? Has that been more illustrative than expressive on your part?
Tyranny: It depends. With the short independent films, I have a tremendous amount of freedom of synchronization of music and the visual images. Usually, the musical time or the soundtrack is totally different from the visual time. In most of them, there is no deliberate, one-to-one correspondence. Sometimes there’s a very deliberate coordination for an effect of humor, say, or for a specific “stab” in the film. But that in itself becomes such a shocking thing that it stands out and has a particular quality to it. And like the short works, there’s also been a tremendous amount of freedom in a lot of my commercial things. I don’t have to violate the musical sense to coordinate with the visual thing, which generally interrupts the musical sense.
In the music I did for Phil Makanna’s demo slideshow of his film project The Crack of Dawn, I do both at the same time, which is very interesting. I did a deliberate timing of the slides and made music for what I conceived as the important visual moments, and I also made music which went through those at the same time. And instead of interrupting one with the other, I played them both at the same time. Having both layers added this tremendous dimensionality to the soundtrack, which made it very floating and very beautiful. I’m interested in exploring that further, when and if we get the money to do the movie. It’ll be a commercial movie, and the people it’s been played for – not musicians but the Confederate Air Force – liked it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Yet a lot of the music is quite avant-garde: It’s got dissonances and non-metric timings, all these things. But it’s also got the piano in it, among the synthesizer that generally imitates orchestra sounds and stuff. The piano is a humanizing element throughout it, and so as long as that sound is there, it really almost doesn’t matter what the other stuff is. It’s almost like a central character with lots of other characters and landscapes around it. As long as people can focus on the piano character, it’s psychologically satisfying. And then they allow tremendous amounts of freedom.
Q: What about the reverse: videotapes made on your music? It’s obvious with South of La Honda, Copacetic (Origin Still Unknown), a lot of the visuals are deliberately timed to musical events.
Tyranny: Yeah, it’s the reverse process. In that case, the visuals were cut to the music – not always, but especially in the more rhythmic, fast stuff. It’s an aspect of humor; that’s Kenn Beckman’s sense of humor. They’re cut to time structures, but you notice that the visuals he chooses to stick in there are really bizarro. The context of the music is matched with visuals that are unpredictable, so I really enjoy that. It doesn’t bother me. It would bother me if, say, the cutting is done only to match the basic drum beat, and the things that were cut to had the effect of being just one flat thing after another.
Q: So what happened is that Kenn found a ready-made form for the distribution of his imagery, a form that highlighted the intensity of that imagery.
Tyranny: Oh yeah definitely. He set out in all the pieces with a very specific set of images in mind, and he presents those images again and again in different combinations. It’s sort of surreal in that sense. In David Kopay there’s a catalog of four or five basic images, and what he does with them is exactly like the principle of the music.
Q: That’s a piece I wanted to discuss with you. In what sense is your David Kopay (Portrait) a David Kopay portrait?
Tyranny: I don’t know David Kopay, so in a way it’s sort of embarrassing! (I saw him, in passing, at the End Up, which is a gay bar in San Francisco.) He doesn’t even know about the piece, to the best of my knowledge. I first wrote the piece of music without thinking about David Kopay. It was a piece to contrast three seemingly distinct moods, and to present them at the same time. One mood would come to the fore and one would go to the back. That’s how Bob’s opera is written – the idea of foreground and background. I first had it made clear to me by reading Gestalt psychology; about illusions that you can’t say are distinctly physical or distinctly psychological. An illusion that leads to my fascination with the moment of the creation of the feeling of meaning. The piece called Harvey Milk (Portrait) is an attempt to both express and study that. The mixture of feeling and meaning is inherent in the music and forms an area for musical exploration. Meaning is bound up with the frequency of occurrence of a phenomenon, the relative placement of two or more phenomena in time and space, and whether we think they are causal or related at all – musically, metric modulation, expectation and periodicity, going apart from the idea of contrast to the sensation of layering, and so on.
So in David Kopay, there’s a rough thing, a sweet thing, and a sort of talking thing, and each of them alternates fairly regularly. The piece is essentially all the combinations of those things that can happen, as background and foreground. And I’m fascinated by guys who are trying to work that out in themselves, who have to work out the sweetness of their character with the roughness of their character – because I’ve been through that too, I’m still working it out. But especially in social situations where they’ve been encouraged to really be one or the other – again, it’s like this pathological idea – or hide one or the other. It’s the classic closet case, and I’m not referring just to gayness. I had been reading David Kopay’s book, which had just come out at the time, and it’s a classic and honest description of what to be in the closet is all about, no matter what kind of closet you’re in. That kind of social pathology still exists now, in many ways, not just sexually. How can we overcome that, with trying to be kind to each other. Not just saying, “You gotta tell the truth,” but trying to work out things that would make that easier; To overcome sexual, racial, ageist prejudices, among others.
Q: So there was a definite political choice in your selection of a title for that piece.
Tyranny: As far as the gay thing, yeah, sure. I feel strongly about the things I’ve been talking about. It’s not politics “out there” somewhere. It’s not the idea of manipulation. It’s sexual politics and also personal politics. Again, once we find a language to release these things that makes these useless distinctions, then we have released both feeling and the mind and conceptuality at the same time. That’s what’s fundamental. That’s what makes the political things and other kinds of music that don’t seem to be “political,” the same. That’s a compositional dynamic, a human thing that runs through both of them. The spiritual side of the political thing is that the reason that you say, let’s make these changes, is because of the human condition and because you hope that there will be a better human condition and a spiritual release of some kind, both when something is solved and when you realize that the situation will always recur.
The problem in doing a political piece is to avoid crudeness and to avoid sensationalism and saying, “These guys are always going to be this way, and those guys are always going to be that way, and let’s burn each other up.” It’s difficult to do political pieces. In the ‘60s, Phil Corner and I talked about doing a political piece about the Vietnam War. And he’d say, “You don’t want to just sit down at the piano and bang away and say, ‘End war, end war!’” Trying to figure out how to say how things led to it, what’s happening in factual information, and trying to present the feeling at the same time. It’s a very difficult thing.
The other two overtly political pieces that I’ve done are the Harvey milk piece and The White Night Riot, and they also have the same thing: I’m trying to bring out the dynamical situation, I’m trying to present information, and I’m also trying to free that situation.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: “Blue” Gene Tyranny Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on “Blue” Gene Tyranny, see:
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: Radio Show #6, Postmodernism, part 3: Three Contemporary Masters
More Cool Sites To Visit! – Music
And be sure to read David Bernabo’s book Just for the Record: Conversations with and about “Blue” Gene Tyranny
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