“This is music that almost nobody wants to hear,” says composer and DePaul music professor George Flynn of his solo piano work Trinity. Variously described as “raw and bloody,” “relentlessly dissonant,” and “possibly the most violent piano music ever written,” the 93-minute piece contains three sections: “Wound” (1968), “Kanal” (1976), and “Salvage” (1993). “Wound,” says Flynn, “might be how Osama bin Laden would express his attitude about this country, were he to write new music.”
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Raised in Montana and Washington State, Flynn joined the DePaul faculty in 1977, after getting a doctoral degree in music composition from Columbia University and teaching in New York for several years. In his 40-year career he’s written more than 100 solo, chamber, choral, and orchestral works, and he’s widely hailed as a master of ferociously difficult piano music. He says he’s always been drawn to dissonance–even in an early teenage composition, a jazzy, torchy piece, he couldn’t resist dipping into discordant territory. “Even then I always liked the dark stuff,” he says. “There is a sound that I like that includes two intervals. One of them is often referred to as the devil of music. The other is called the angelic. Of the two, the devil is certainly the one that you’ll be more likely to hear. That’s my music for sure–a combination of both.”
Understanding these “extramusical” aspects, says Flynn, may give listeners a point of entry into work they might otherwise find impenetrable. “Presumably, if they can listen beyond the poetic notion of war and all of the rest of that, into the music itself, they will find lots of other things that might interest them. It’s not really violent–it’s exciting for the people who are used to listening to this.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Newberry.
