(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Texan pianist Robert Sheff (a.k.a. Gene Tyranny), born in 1945, was a pupil of Robert Ashley since the time of Once in Ann Arbor, and also played in rock groups such as the Stooges and in jazz groups such as Carla Bleys. In 1971 he was hired by Mills College, where Ashley was already teaching, and helped him compose the opera Perfect Lives (19771983).
The composition that singled him out among San Franciscos most original funny rockers is Out Of The Blue (released in 1978), a twenty-five-minute piece that unfolds along a letter (read in a normal tone of voice), nonchalantly alternating, like a seasoned entertainer, a whole series of surreal ideas (the imitation of a locomotive, archaic little choirs, kitsch arrangements, and a cacophonous finale), while in the background there persists a tense and nervous string vibration that suggests a sense of anguish. The orchestra accompanying the author numbers about ten musicians.
Closer to the meta-rock of Peter Gordon (the saxophonist) are divertissement-pieces such as Next Time Might Be Your Time, a light fantasy ā la Tubular Bells opened by airy motifs for Mediterranean guitar and beach-synth and closed by circus music for saxophone in a Caribbean stride, or David Kopay, a violent funk with Zappa-like jazz bandisms, or again Leading A Double Life, a melancholy music-hall sketch with pianola, accordion, and a 1930s-style chorus. The atmosphere is that of a decadent remnant of a sort of electro-psychedelic underground cabaret.
Tyranny followed it up with The Intermediary for piano and computer, structured on the parallel sounds of a grand piano and a tape of electronic keyboards. While the former have a coherent and complete form, the latter are more or less freely improvised. All, however, explore harmonies and atmospheres of small romantic music, and from the contrast between defined and undefined sounds arises the lyricism of the piece.
A Letter From Home (1976) for voice and electronics instead has the ambition of redefining the form of the cantata. The work has evolved over the years from the pop minimalism of its beginnings to a glacial and abstract modernism. Reminiscent of Ashleys works, Tyranny composes his cantata as a sequence of disconnected and hermetic narratives, conveying a sharper sense of alienation. But Sheffs most ambitious work was unreleased at the time: Country Boy Country Dog was begun in 1967, at the time of ONCE, under Cages influence. The work is a summa of the experiments of the electronic school and includes pieces of chamber music and symphonic music. The declared objective is always that of capturing the everyday in the form of sound.
Tyranny moved to New York in 1983.
The five piano sonatas of Free Delivery (composed between 1983 and 1989) constitute a more mature and austere attempt to merge impressionism and minimalism, raga and jazz, especially in the long The Intermediary and Five Takes On The Nocturne With And Without Memory.
Tyranny composes music for a devolved cocktail lounge, combining Ashleys anemic opera with a peculiar form of muzak verite'.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Country Boy Country Dog (Lovely, 1994) contains excerpt from
How To Discover Music In The Sounds Of Your Daily Life (1967-92),
a 25-year project that blends environmental sounds, electronics and acoustic
instruments by processing the former with the second to produce the score for
the latter. Specifically, the found sounds used in
Country Boy Country Dog are used to create "transforms"
(A Dream Without Images, X Marks The Spot) that are then used
for orchestral pieces such as the CBCD Variations.
So the score is basically an algorithm that prescribes how to eventually create
orchestral music.
We are thus led from a delicate dance of timbres in
A Dream Without Images
to the thick collage of "found" sounds and voices of
Country Boy Country Dog
to the eerie alien soundtrack of
X Marks The Spot.
Like any true artist, however, Tyranny reaches for the heart, not only the mind, through the tender and solemn electronic hymn of
The CBCD Intro (1984) with its grand
recurring motif, and the delightful, dissonant, disorienting
CBCD Variations (1980)
for soloist and orchestra, one of the crowning achievements of his career.
Here the
schizophrenic babble of our lives becomes order and beauty; the acoustic
instruments and the electronic drones generate free-falling harmonic masses
that collapse into nothingness.
How To Discover Music In The Sounds Of Your Daily Life represents an
impressive merge of chamber, dissonant, concrete and tonal music.
Duets I+II; Decertified Highway of Dreams I-III; Isle of the Rose Apple Trees I+II (OO, 2001) collects a few assorted works.
Go Blue (O.O. Discs, 2001) collects several compositions of different
kinds.
Other compositions include several dance pieces,
Stars Over San Francisco (1972), that pioneered the technique of melodic transfers within a closed loop;
The CBCD Concerto for Soloists and Electronics (1980);
The Driver's Son (1989) for voices and orchestra;
The Forecaster (1989) for double orchestra, decoding chorus and time-transposing pianist;
Sleeping Beauty in Camouflage (1992);
etc.
Take Your Time (Lovely, 2003) is a collection of relaxing, ethereal
Erik Satie-seque compositions, only occasionally enhanced with the computer.
The Somewhere Songs (Mutable, 2008) compiles two works:
The three Somewhere Songs (2001)
for improvising baritone (Thomas Buckner) and vocals-derived electronic
accompaniment (that maintain a crystalline sound quality and an impeccable
tonal balance);
and
The Invention of Memory (2003) for baritone, string ensemble, guitar and
piano, a set of variations on a "reference song", Now Minus One that is subjected to
several different methods of processing (similar to the way a past memory is
recalled differently over time).
Detours (Unseen Worlds, 2012) collected four piano works,
notably 13 Detours (12:15),
George Fox Searches (19:26) and
She Wore Red Shoes (11:27).
Trust in Rock (2019) documents a live performance of 1976.
An ensemble with Gordon on sax and synthesizer, Tyranny on piano, Patrice Manget on vocals, Carl Young on sax, Paul Dresher on guitar, Steve Bartek of Oingo Boingo on bass, Gene Reffkin on drums, and Janet Cuniberti on electronic keyboards plays straightforward rock songs (sung by Patrice Mange) with lengthy jamming codas such as
Without Warning (20:33) and
On the Other Hand (20:36),
as well as the decisively poppy
Next Time Might Be Your Time (9:04).
The six-disc box-set Degrees of Freedom Found (2021)
is a career retrospective.
He died in 2020.
