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"Glimpses of Our Inner Lives" has grown out of musical ideas inspired by the writings of Kenneth Derus, especially those aspects of "The Qualities of Melodic Simples" (1990) and "Perigraph: To Remember Sorabji's Music" (in "Sorabji: A Critical Celebration", 1992) that deal with memory. As I read Derus I became intrigued by his suggestions of time warping or collapsing in memory, and by the kaleidoscopic rush of remembered images, their transformation and fusion in memory, and their consequent emotional weight: "objects of poignant and rather terrifying unity" ("Perigraph"). These notions found their way into "Glimpses" as musical gestures, textures, and sequences of events meant to create impressions that might poetically resemble our feelings about memory experiences.
The fluid opening section of "Glimpses", in the piano's middle register, returns several times during the course of the piece as a way of providing coherence as well as ground for a collage of musical events of contrasting tempi, levels of activity, and moods. In this collage time blurs, or freezes; fluidity gives way to hovering, still sonorities; desperately passionate passages melt into serene quietude; nightmarish moments succumb to gentle reflections; calm, floating elements collapse into angry confusion, all in a stream-of-consciousness manner that might suggest the discursiveness of memory events. The final portion of "Glimpses" returns to the original material as an extended meditation, now developed and explored, perhaps like a memory completed - a life lived.
I am pleased that the internationally esteemed pianist Carlo Grante pushed me to finally complete this work, which "waited in the wings" for several years while other projects demanded to be completed. The virtuoso and expressive demands of "Glimpses" fit well with Carlo Grante's admirable pianism, and I am delighted he has chosen to add my work to his repertory. [Program note by George Flynn]
George Flynn has chaired the composition department at DePaul University for a quarter of a century, so it's easy to forget that he collaborated with John Cage and Dick Higgins in New York in the 1960s - where he helped define what the Fluxus movement called danger music. In fact, his piano works of that period have nothing in common with the light-hearted conceits of Nam June Paik and Phillip Corner and are in one or two cases genuinely dangerous to play. One thinks in particular of "Wound", composed in 1968 in response to Vietnam and events on the campus of Columbia University. Just the other day the "Bangkok Post" called it "possibly the most violent piano piece ever written" - like "Herma" with a patina of ugliness, as though Ustvolskaya had written it, or like Ornstein's "Poems of 1917" as re-imagined by Xenakis. There's also an alarming Bruce Lee piece - a cluster prelude requiring body trills and related kinematic improbabilities.
Finnissy's "Songs 5-9" and other harbingers of New Complexity began appearing in England during the mid to late 1960s. Coincidently these works sound a little like "Wound"; but an unselfconscious preoccupation with large forms and a disinterest in notational complication links Flynn to Sorabji and Cecil Taylor instead of to his English contemporaries.
95 percent of Flynn's piano music finds its way into works lasting half an hour or more. In some cases short works can be extracted from the seamless fabric of long works. Wound stands to a 93-minute piece called "Trinity" the way "Bachsche Nachdichtungen" stands to "Kapitalistische Realisme". It's the middle 22 minutes of an unbroken expanse of music.
Each of Flynn's big works has to be swallowed whole, because each is propelled by gestures which are similar to their parts, for all possible time scales. (The gestures are cousins to kinaesthetically appreciated motions and postures: to proprioceptions of bone and muscle: to felt-choreography.) Gestural self-similarity makes some works appear to consist of nothing but middles - as though they had the ultrametric topology of a non-archimedean field.
In "Kanal" ["Sewer"], one kind of cogency is partly imagined - not heard. (There's no reason why hearing has to be entirely adequate for the enjoyment of music. Many of Sorabji's compositions evidently make sense only when they are remembered.) Imagination carries listeners across rests and other musical ends - by supplying "Kanal" with abiding tacit syllables. Imagined syllables and pre-existing music work together to create wholly new musical and syllabic accents. The work is literally eversible with respect to its ends and middles.
Very few large-scale piano works exhibit this sort of unfathomable, almost histological, coherence. (The "Passacaglia on DSCH" and "The People United" are big and coherent but hardly unfathomable.) One looks to Cherubini's "Capriccio", the Barraqué sonata, the Medtner E minor, and possibly a few other works; but none of this enjoyably ineffable music is on the same scale as "Trinity", for example.
(Understanding is no prerequisite for enjoyment. People enjoy driving cars and making babies without understanding, in detail, the processes involved. But understanding is no guarantee of anything either - which is the side of things emphasized by Sorabji in the passage quoted earlier.)
Flynn's recent piano works pose additional challenges. One must differentiate Sorabji-esque lines of chordal counterpoint, and pedal noiselessly at high speed in completely new ways. The gestures of Flynn's music are anchored to pitches and pitch classes, and the exigencies of his pedaling make wrong notes sound like wrong notes - not just to experts but to dogs and cats and children old enough to listen. [Program note by Kenneth Derus]
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